I lost the baby seven weeks after my husband hauled his duffel bags over to my sister’s apartment.
The afternoon she married him, our youngest rang my cell. “Get in the car,” she said. “RIGHT AWAY.”
They had the reception at the Legion hall.
The SAME wood-paneled room my folks rented for me.
We are four girls, every one of us born in Seward County.
I was the first one married.
Travis could get my aunts laughing clear down a table.
He knew which ones took their coffee black.
Four years in, I’d have told you we were the dull kind of lucky.
Then on a Wednesday in my fifth month he walked in still wearing his co-op jacket.
He asked me to sit.
I figured it was the loan on the truck.
Or his hours getting cut.
He kept looking at the cupboard doors.
“Kayla’s expecting.”
“Kayla,” I said. “My sister Kayla.”
He said it to the linoleum. “It’s mine.”
It just happened, he said. He loved her. He was done lying about it.
“Blame me,” he said. “Put ALL of it on me. Don’t put it on her.”
I didn’t cry.
I had a damp dish towel in my hand, and I didn’t set it down.
The family cracked right down the center after that.
“Kayla’s being HONEST,” Mom said.
Amanda, the second of us, was on Kayla’s side by supper.
One aunt quit picking up the phone.
By the next weekend the WHOLE town had its own story about us.
Then, seven weeks later, I started bleeding behind the counter at the parts store.
My dad came to the duplex the morning after.
He didn’t knock.
He went down the hall to the little room with the crib in it.
He’d built it out of barn oak in his garage that spring.
I stood in the doorway and watched him take it apart, bolt by bolt.
He carried it out to his truck in four trips and never said ONE word.
He left the Allen wrench on the windowsill.
Right in the middle, lined up square with the sill.
I didn’t understand why it couldn’t sit there a while longer.
I didn’t ask.
He never brought it up.
The hall got booked for the first Saturday in November.
Mom and Dad were paying.
A hundred and fifty people, an open bar, Dad in a jacket from the rental place.
“That baby needs a father,” Mom said, like that settled whose room it was.
I stayed home.
I got the afghan over my knees and found a show where two guys were flipping a farmhouse.
I muted it.
The mute button on that remote sticks, so it took three tries.
Then my cell buzzed where I’d set it by my hip.
Molly was standing in the Legion lot, still in the lilac dress, and she could barely talk.
She was laughing, and then she wasn’t.
I could hear the DJ behind her, and then I couldn’t.
“Heather. Jeans, sweatshirt, whatever’s on the floor.”
“Just drive down here.”
“I don’t even know how to say it.”
“It’s Dad. You need to be HERE.”
The Microphone On The Head Table
I made the Legion in eleven minutes, in the jeans off the floor and a sweatshirt with a bleach spot on one cuff.
Molly was waiting at the side door by the kitchen, hugging her own elbows in that lilac dress.
She pulled me inside by the sleeve.
The DJ had quit the music.
A hundred and fifty people sat at the round tables with their plates pushed away, and the whole paneled room was down to coughs and chair legs.
My dad sat alone at the far end of the head table in his rented jacket.
He had the DJ’s microphone in both hands, resting on his knee.
He’d been holding it thirty-five minutes.
When the DJ called up the father of the bride, Molly said, Dad stood, tapped the mic one time, and said he’d give his toast when his oldest girl got there.
Then he sat back down and kept hold of it.
“Mom tried to get it off him twice,” Molly said, right at my ear. “He just held on.”
“What did he say to her?”
“Nothing. He looked at her till she quit.”
Mom stood behind Kayla’s chair with both hands on the back of it.
Kayla sat in the middle of the table in white, one hand flat on the front of her dress where the baby was. Her mascara had gone gray under both eyes.
Travis sat beside her, red to the ears, turning a bottle of beer on the tablecloth without drinking any of it.
Amanda was down at the other end in her lilac, texting under the table.
The DJ was a kid from Milford with a ponytail. Molly said he’d played “Brown Eyed Girl” twice to fill the quiet, and then he’d just stood there with his hands in his pockets.
Then a woman at the front table saw me and touched her husband’s arm.
The room turned, one table and then the next.
I’d have backed straight out that door if Molly hadn’t been standing in it.
Dad looked up.
He didn’t smile. He gave me one nod, the one he gives a truck that’s backed in straight.
Then he stood, reached inside the rented jacket, and took out a square of paper folded small. It had gone soft as a dollar that’s been through the wash.
He opened it on the tablecloth with two fingers and smoothed it flat.
I knew the color from across the room.
The Legion still writes up its hall rentals in a receipt book with pink carbons, and Dad keeps every carbon anybody ever hands him.
It was the receipt from my own reception.
Barn Oak
Dad drove a county plow for thirty-one years and retired the spring I got married.
He’s sixty-four. He says what a thing needs and then he stops.
At my reception, in that same paneled room, the DJ called for the father of the bride. Dad stood up, lifted his glass, and sat back down.
Mom took the microphone off the DJ and did eleven minutes on my 4-H steer.
By the trucks afterward I asked him why he hadn’t said anything.
“I don’t talk to rooms,” he said. “I talk to people.”
That was all I ever got out of him on it.
The spring I was pregnant, he called one Saturday in March and said to come by the garage.
He had the space heater going and a stack of rough boards across two sawhorses, gray and split on the outside. They were from the Hruska barn, the one that came down on the county line road in the ice storm.
He’d planed one board to show me. Under the gray it was the color of wheat toast.
“Crib,” he said, like he was telling me the forecast.
I went out there most Saturdays after that.
I sat on an upturned bucket with coffee in his thermos lid and watched him cut slats. He wouldn’t let me near the sander. He said to keep my hands clean for once, which was as close as he came to talking about the baby.
The Saturday I found out it was a girl, Travis was at a truck pull in York.
So Dad was the first person I told the name to.
“Abigail Rae,” I said.
Rae was his mother.
He didn’t say anything back. He went to the bench and got his wood-burning pen, the one he uses to brand the cutting boards he hands out at Christmas.
He burned two small letters on the inside face of the headboard, down low, where the mattress would cover them.
A.R.
“Mattress hides those,” he said. “Those are ours.”
Then he showed me the bolts. He’d bought barrel bolts and a little L-shaped Allen wrench to go with them, and he made me tighten one myself.
“You’ll be the one doing this at two in the morning,” he said.
Mom came out to the garage one time that spring. She looked at the crib and said it would be a lot to keep dusted.
I meant to tell her the name at supper in June.
Then it was the Wednesday, and there wasn’t a supper.
The night in the hospital in Lincoln, Dad sat in the chair by the bed until the nurses made him go home. Mom was at Kayla’s. Kayla had called her with cramps.
A nurse wrote the name on a little card and gave it to me, and Dad held it the whole time I couldn’t.
Mom never asked what we’d called her.
He had never once said my daughter’s name out loud.
The Rubbermaid Tote
Mom came by the duplex the last week of August with an empty tote under one arm.
She stood in my kitchen and said she’d been thinking, and then she said what she’d been thinking.
“Kayla’s going to need everything. You don’t need it sitting in there.”
In there meant the little room.
I let her.
She took the onesies I’d washed in the free-and-clear soap. She took the swaddles from my shower, the bouncer still in its box, and the bottles.
She talked the whole time about how hard it had been on everybody. How Kayla couldn’t sleep. How Travis was working doubles at the co-op to make the rent on the new place.
“She told the truth, Heather,” Mom said. “You’d rather she went on lying to you?”
I didn’t answer that.
I stood in the doorway while she worked. The dents were still in the carpet, four of them, square, where the legs had stood since May.
She stepped right over them.
When the closet was empty, she stood in the middle of the room and turned all the way around.
“What happened to the crib your father made?”
“Ask him.”
“I did. He says it’s gone.” She pressed her lips together. “Gone where, he won’t say. That’s good oak. It’s a sin to waste it.”
Earlier that week I’d taken the Allen wrench off the windowsill and put it in the zipper pocket of my purse.
I couldn’t have told you why.
It was right there on the kitchen chair while she stood in that room asking, about four feet from her hip.
She didn’t ask about the bolts. She didn’t ask about the dents.
Before she left she opened my refrigerator and told me I needed to eat something green.
She hugged me at the door with the tote between us.
“You’ll have another one,” she said. “When it’s time.”
Molly texted me a picture that night with nothing written under it. It was the tote on Kayla’s couch with the lid off.
I kept thinking about the afternoon, though, and what Mom did in my driveway.
She carried the tote out to her car and buckled the seatbelt around it.
The Envelope Addressed By Mom
The invitation came the third week of September.
Cream card stock, a sprig of something printed in the corner. The ceremony was at St. John’s at one, with the reception to follow at the Legion.
My name on the envelope was in Mom’s handwriting.
She called me on my lunch break a couple of days later.
I was in the parts store’s back lot eating crackers in my car with the engine running.
“I want you to hear me out before you say anything,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I think it would be better for everybody if you didn’t come.”
She let that sit, and then she kept going.
“Kayla’s seven months by then. She’s already not sleeping.”
“And people will be watching you the whole time, you know they will, and that isn’t fair to you either.”
“Your father and I talked about it. He agrees.”
I held the phone.
“He’s doing the toast,” she said. “Kayla asked him special. He said yes.”
“And he’s paying for the hall,” she said, like I’d asked. “Same as he did yours. He wouldn’t hear of anything else.”
I said I had to get back inside. She said she loved me, and I said it back.
After work I drove out to Dad’s place.
The garage door was up. The sawhorses were empty and stacked against the wall.
His truck sat in the drive with the topper on it. He never puts that topper on until deer season.
He was at the bench filing a chain for the saw.
I stood in the open door.
“Mom says you agree I should stay home.”
He finished the tooth he was on. Then he set the file down.
“I didn’t agree to anything.”
“She says you’re doing the toast.”
“Kayla asked me.” He wiped his hands on the rag from his back pocket.
I waited.
He picked the file back up.
“I said I’d stand up. I didn’t say what for.”
Abigail Rae
Back in the Legion, Dad put the microphone up to his mouth. It squealed once, and the kid from Milford jumped for his board.
“Kayla asked me to say something,” Dad said.
He didn’t look at a card. He didn’t have one.
“I stood up in this room four years ago for my oldest girl. I lifted my glass and I sat back down, because I don’t talk to rooms.”
A man at a back table laughed, one short one, and quit.
“Kayla, I love you. I hope that baby sleeps. I hope you do.”
Kayla put her face in her napkin.
He looked down the table at Travis for a long time.
He didn’t say anything to Travis at all.
Then he looked at me, standing in the side door in my bleach-spot sweatshirt. He said the rest of it to me, like there wasn’t another soul in the building.
“My first granddaughter would have been twelve days old today.”
“Her name was Abigail Rae. Her mother picked it.”
He lifted his glass. It was water. He doesn’t drink at these things.
“To Abby,” he said.
Up at the bar, Duane Siefken, who has run the Legion hall since before I was born, lifted his coffee cup.
Then two of the old men at the vets’ table stood up with their Pabst cans.
Then Molly, beside me, with nothing in her hand at all.
Mom said, “Abigail,” out loud, to nobody. Like a word she was trying out.
Dad set the microphone down beside the cake knife.
He slid the pink carbon down the tablecloth with two fingers until it stopped in front of Travis’s plate, square to the edge.
From where I stood I could see the block printing. Dad’s hand. Both our names, Travis’s and mine, the date, and Duane’s initials beside the total.
Travis looked at it and didn’t touch it.
Dad came down off the riser. He walked right past Mom.
He touched my shoulder once on the way by, two fingers, the same as the carbon.
He went out the side door, and he didn’t look back at any of them.
The Legion Kitchen
I went after him, but the side door opens off the kitchen, and Mom was faster than me in her heels.
She caught me between the steel sinks and the coffee urns. The auxiliary ladies had the ham rolls stacked there on sheet pans under plastic wrap.
“Are you happy?” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“One day. She gets one day, Heather, one, and you couldn’t give her that.”
“You put him up to that. Don’t you tell me you didn’t. That man hasn’t strung three sentences together since your grandpa’s funeral.”
“That was private. That was a private family thing, and he stood up and handed it out to a hundred and fifty people like a door prize.”
“They’ll be talking about this at the Cenex for a year. It’s on Kayla’s wedding video. Her kids are going to watch that.”
Travis came in through the swinging door with his tie pulled loose.
“This is a goddamn circus,” he said. “He’s humiliating her. One of you needs to go get him.”
“I’ll handle your father-in-law,” Mom said, without looking at him.
Then she turned back to me.
“What did he do with that crib? He took it out of your house. He’d do anything you asked him. He always would.”
“Kayla’s got a pack-and-play and a laundry basket. That’s what she’s got. And there’s good oak sitting somewhere going to waste because you want to stand around being sad in front of people.”
“I didn’t know he was going to,” I said.
“Oh, don’t. Don’t stand there with that face on.”
“Her name was Abby,” I said.
Mom stopped.
The urn behind her ticked the way they do when they’re cooling.
“I know what her name was,” she said.
I didn’t say anything to that either.
Kayla was in the swinging door with one hand on her belly and the other holding up her train. Her mascara was all the way down now.
“Mom,” she said. “Stop.”
Mom opened her mouth, and Kayla said it again, and Mom closed it.
Kayla looked at me. She didn’t say anything else. Neither did I.
Molly held the back door open with her hip, and I went through it.
The Allen Wrench
Dad’s truck was at the back of the lot by the propane tank, where nobody could block him in.
He was sitting on the tailgate with the rented jacket folded beside him and his shirtsleeves rolled.
I sat down next to him. The tailgate dipped.
The flag on the Legion pole was snapping in the wind. Across the road a kid was dribbling a basketball on the tennis court.
We sat a while.
Then he reached back, undid the latch on the topper, and swung the window up.
The crib was inside, in pieces, wrapped in moving blankets, with the bolts in a Folgers can.
He folded one blanket back.
He’d sanded every piece down and put oil on it. The oak had gone the color of wheat toast all the way through.
I found the headboard and turned it over.
The letters were still there, low on the inside face.
A.R.
I put my thumb on them.
“It’s yours,” he said. “Tell me where it goes.”
I sat with my thumb on the letters for a long time.
Then I opened my purse, unzipped the pocket, and took out the Allen wrench.
I put it in his hand.
“Kayla’s going to need one,” I said. “After the baby comes.”
He looked at the wrench. He looked at me.
“Sand those off first,” I said.
He didn’t argue.
He put the wrench in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over it.
Then he folded the blanket back over the headboard and tucked the corner under. He eased the topper window down until the latch caught.
“And don’t put a card on it,” I said.
“Wasn’t going to,” he said.
Inside, the kid from Milford found his nerve and put on something with a fiddle in it.
Dad picked up the rented jacket, shook it out, and laid it over his knee.
“This goes back to the mall by noon Monday,” he said. “I’m not paying a late fee on it.”
We sat on the tailgate till the fiddle song was over.
Send this one to somebody whose dad never said much and was always there anyway.
For more stories about family drama and unexpected turns, check out I Gave My Son His Key the Week We Buried His Father or My Mother-In-Law Painted Her Name On The Mailbox Every Spring. You might also enjoy She Added The Pet Line In Red While We Sat At Her Table for another tale of life’s little surprises.
