The Baby He Would Not Take Home

My brother would not take his baby girl home so I did and I called her mine

My brother stood in the hospital hallway with his hands in his jacket pockets and told me he was not taking the baby home. He said it the way a man tells you the forecast. No heat in it. No shame. Just a fact he had already decided, the way you decide you are done with a town and you are leaving it behind.

I am Nora. I was thirty-four that winter, and I had lived my whole life in Lindell, Iowa, a town so small the welcome sign and the thank-you-for-visiting sign are nailed to the same post. I want to tell you the whole thing, from the start, because for a long time I only told the parts that made me look better, and I am done doing that.

My brother is Cole. He is two years younger than me, and from the time he could walk he was the one our mother loved out loud. I was the one she relied on, which is a different thing, and a child feels the difference even if she cannot name it. Cole got the new coat. I got the responsibility. He got told he was special. I got told I was a big help. Our father left when I was nine and Cole was seven, and after that our mother held the two of us so differently that I grew up thinking love and work were the same word.

Our mother, Marlene, died the spring before any of this started. Lung cancer, fast, the kind that does not give you a year to make your peace. At the end it was me in the recliner by her bed and me learning to crush her pills into applesauce and me calling the hospice nurse at two in the morning. Cole came when he could, he said. He lived forty minutes away in Des Moines and forty minutes is a long way when you do not want to come. He made it to the funeral. He cried harder than anyone there, and people put their hands on his shoulders and told him what a good son he had been, and I stood off to the side and let them, because that is what I had always done.

So when Cole called me that summer and told me his girlfriend Brynn was pregnant, my first feeling, God forgive me, was tired. I knew. I already knew in my bones who was going to end up holding whatever broke.