The Shower Held by the River

The shelter

The Green River runs wide and brown through our county, and the park sits on a bend where the bank slopes down to a gravel boat ramp. In summer, it’s families and fishing poles. In November, it’s empty.

It was forty-eight degrees. The sky was a hard clean blue, and the trees along the water had dropped everything they were going to drop. You could see all the way through them to the far bank.

The shelter is an open wooden thing with a plank roof and long picnic tables. When I pulled up, the gravel lot had cars in it, a dozen, and I thought for one confused moment that I had the wrong place.

Then I saw the crockpots. They stood in a row along the first table with their cords snaked off to an extension reel somebody had run from the pump house. Little red lights glowing. The whole shelter smelled like burgoo and hickory smoke and coffee.

Lucille saw me first. She came running across the grass, which I didn’t know she could do. “Don’t you cry,” she said. “We ain’t got time to fix your face.”

I cried anyway. There were fourteen women in that shelter, and a few husbands and some kids, and a maintenance man holding a folding chair like he’d been told to guard it. Somebody had tied white and yellow ribbon to the posts, and it snapped in the cold wind off the water.

And at the end, by the post, stood the crib. Earl was standing next to it with his arms folded and his chin up, like a man who has been told not to look proud and is failing. The oak had gone the warm honey brown of a good barn board. In the sun, it nearly glowed.

“Slats are two and three-eighths or under,” he said, before I said anything. “Rail’s fixed. Mattress is new.”

“Earl,” I said.

“Don’t go thanking me. Wendy made me do it.” Wendy, standing right behind him, said, “I did not.”

The party

Loretta made me sit in a lawn chair at the head of the table, with a blanket over my knees and a plate of food the size of a hubcap. Valerie stood behind me and told everyone how to hold their fork.

“Eat,” Loretta ordered. “You’re feeding two.” The burgoo was spicy and thick, the way it should be. The banana pudding came in a casserole dish with a spoon standing straight up in it. I had three helpings and nobody said a word.

Lucille’s came first, a tiny cream sweater she had knit herself, and I stood up to hold it to the light and laughed before I could stop myself. Then Tonya handed me a box the size of a shoebox, wrapped in newspaper comics, and stood back with her hands over her mouth.

I peeled off the tape. Inside, in a nest of tissue paper, sat a pair of tiny white rubber boots.

They were exactly like ours. The same knee-high white boots we wear on the line, only they were the size of my hand. Tonya had found them on a shelf at a farm supply store, in the section for toddlers who help with chores.

“So she can start at the bottom,” Tonya said.

I laughed. I had to grab the post to stay upright, because I was laughing so hard that the baby kicked, and then that made me laugh harder. Fourteen women laughed with me, and a man in a folding chair, and somebody’s child, and for one hour nobody in that county had ever canceled anything.

That is the moment I think about when I think about that day. Not the end of it. That one. Me with my hands full of tissue paper and little white boots, laughing out loud under a plank roof with the river behind me.