The Story Hour In My Front Room

The gift card was yellow, with a little drawing of a coffee cup on the front, and Darla held it out to me across the folding table like she was handing me a bus ticket out of town.

“Forty dollars,” she said. “For your trouble. All those years. We do appreciate it, Bonnie.”

I had a stack of styrofoam cups in my hands. The fellowship hall smelled like percolator coffee and the lemon oil I had rubbed into those tables myself every Saturday for longer than Darla had been alive. Somewhere behind me the big urn was ticking as it heated.

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“The nursery,” she said. She smiled the way you smile at a child who has brought you a drawing. “I’m going to take it over. Fresh start. New ideas. I’ve got a whole system.”

I set the cups down so I would not drop them.

“Darla, I’ve kept that nursery twenty-two years.”

“I know,” she said. “And nobody’s saying you did it wrong. It’s just, well.” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “A woman who never had children of her own, it’s a different thing. You don’t really know, do you. Not the way a mother does.”

She was twenty-nine. She had been in Clarksville since June.

“Here,” she said again, and pressed the card into my hand because I had not taken it. “Go treat yourself.”

The drive home

I did not say anything cruel. I want that on the record first, because of what came after, because people have asked me a hundred times what I said back to her, and the truth is I said, “Well. Thank you for thinking of me,” and I gathered my sweater off the chair and I walked out to my truck.

It is a mile from the church to my house. County Road 9, gravel, one low-water bridge over the creek that you do not cross when it rains. I drove it slow with the windows down and the dust coming up behind me, and I did not cry, which surprised me.

What I felt was closer to the way a room feels when somebody has moved all the furniture while you were out. You come in and you reach for the chair that is always there and your hand closes on nothing.

Twenty-two years. I had rocked babies in that nursery whose mothers I had also rocked in that nursery. I knew which ones would only go down on the left shoulder and which ones you had to walk past the window so they could watch the cars. I knew that the Petrie boy screamed at the color red and nobody believed me until his mother painted his room and he would not sleep.

And Darla was right about one thing, which was the thing that sat on my chest the whole mile home.

I never did have children of my own.