Loretta
Loretta did not give me a gift out loud. She waited until the food was winding down and the kids had gone to throw rocks in the river.
She sat down next to me in the second lawn chair. She held a small flat package in her lap. “I had this for her,” she said. “I started it in October of 1989.”
I did not understand at first. She unfolded the paper. Inside was a baby blanket in soft yellow yarn, with a border of tiny white stitches, never used. A little frayed at one corner from being handled over the years. It smelled faintly of cedar.
“I knit it for the girl I was going to have,” she said. “I kept it in a drawer. I took it out every few years to see if it still looked right.”
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“Loretta, I can’t.”
“You can.” She said it gently. “I’d rather it went on a baby than in a drawer. I’ve waited long enough to see it matter.”
She folded it into my hands. I did not say anything. I could not. I put my forehead against her shoulder, the way a girl might with her own mother, if she had one who’d done that sort of thing.
She patted my back, twice, and said, “There now. That’s enough.” But her hand stayed there for a minute longer.
Over her shoulder I could see the whole shelter. Valerie wrapping up leftovers. Earl fussing with his crib. Lucille and Wendy arguing about whether the cake knife was dull. I thought, these are the women who stand by me at six in the morning. These are the ones who showed up.
Loretta must have felt me looking, because she stood and clapped her hands once, the way she does on the line when the belt is about to start.
“Cake,” she announced. “Valerie, get the cake.”
The sheet cake came down the table in Valerie’s arms, plain white frosting from the Kroger, not one word on it. Wendy had told the bakery girl to leave it blank. Fourteen women had argued for two days over what it should say, and in the end nobody could agree.
“We decided you’d do it,” Wendy said. “You’re the one who can spell.”
Loretta pressed a tube of blue icing into my hand. “Fourteen of us paid for that cake, hon,” she said. “You decide what it says.”
I stood over it a long time, with the whole shelter gone quiet behind me. The baby rolled under my ribs. Then I leaned down and wrote, in my slow and crooked hand, Welcome Baby Girl, from the ones who showed up.
Tonya read it out loud and had to stop halfway. Lucille handed her a napkin, and then took one for herself.
That was when I heard the first engine.