The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

The first time my mother in law laid eyes on my daughter, she went the color of candle wax, set her purse down on the hospital chair like it had turned to lead in her hand, and walked out of the room without saying one word. She did not hold her. She did not touch the blanket. She did not say the baby was beautiful, which is the one thing every person is supposed to say, even when it is a lie, even when the baby is red and squalling and looks like a boiled potato in a knit cap. She looked at Nell for about four seconds, and then she looked like she might be sick, and then she was gone.

I was thirty-four years old, I had been in labor for nineteen hours, and I lay there in that bed and watched the door swing shut behind Loretta Hollis and I decided, right then, that I would never forgive her. I want to be honest about that, because of everything that came after. For a long time I was sure of exactly one thing: my husband’s mother could not stand the sight of my child, and there was no reason on this earth good enough to explain it.

I was wrong. It took me the better part of a year to find out how wrong. This is the whole of it, start to finish, and I am going to tell it the way it happened, because I have learned that the worst thing you can do to a person is decide you already know their story.

My name is Hannah. I grew up in Sawyer, which is a town in western Kentucky small enough that it does not so much have a main street as a single stoplight and an opinion about everybody who passes under it. We have a feed store, a Dollar General that went in about ten years ago and that the old women still talk about like it is a casino, a diner called the Blue Plate that has been the Blue Plate since before my mother was born, two churches on the same road that pretend the other one is not there, and a lot of county road that runs out past the last streetlight into tobacco ground and cattle and dark. I was raised on one of those roads. My daddy drove a propane truck and my mother, Sue, cut hair in a chair she set up in our back porch, and I grew up knowing every truck that drove past our place by the sound of its engine.

I met Wade Hollis at the Blue Plate the summer I was twenty-six, home again after a few years away that had not amounted to much. He was eating a patty melt at the counter and he had grease on his knuckles from the shop where he worked, and he had a way of listening that made me forget I was supposed to be careful. Wade is a good man. I need you to hold onto that, because his family is where this gets hard, and I do not want you thinking I married wrong. I married right. I just married into something I did not understand.