I lost the baby six weeks after my husband carried his boxes into my sister’s apartment, and on the Friday they got married my youngest sister called me and said, “Get in your car. NOW.”
Their reception was in MY hall, the same paneled room my parents rented when I got married.
There are four of us girls, all born in the same county.
I went first.
Dale could make a whole table of my aunts laugh, and he remembered which of them took cream.
For five years I thought we were the boring lucky ones.
Then he came home on a Tuesday in my sixth month with his work jacket still on and said we should sit down.
I thought it was the truck payment, or his hours getting cut, and he kept looking at the cabinet handles instead of at me.
“Charlene’s pregnant.”
I said it back to him like a question. “My sister?”
He nodded at the floor. “It’s mine.”
He told me it wasn’t planned, that he’d fallen for her and couldn’t keep lying about it, and that I should put every bit of this on him and NONE of it on her.
I didn’t cry. I stood there holding a wet dish towel.
After that the family split down the middle like a dropped plate.
My mother called Charlene BRAVE, and my aunt quit answering her phone.
By Sunday EVERY person in Fennimore had their own version of us.
And in the middle of all that noise, I started bleeding at work.
Seven months later they booked the hall.
My parents paid for it. A hundred and seventy people, an open bar, my father in a rented jacket.
“The child needs a father,” my mother said, like that settled who got the room.
I stayed home.
I pulled the afghan over my legs and put on a show about two brothers gutting a lake house.
I muted it.
Then my phone went off on the arm of the couch.
Paulette was out in the parking lot in her bridesmaid dress and she could hardly get the words out.
She was laughing and she wasn’t.
“Yvonne. Jeans, a sweatshirt, whatever’s on the chair. Get to the hall right now. YOU HAVE TO SEE this.” ⬇️
The fire door by the dumpsters
I drove there in a sweatshirt with paint on the cuff and I parked at the far end, past the church van, where the lot light is out.
Paulette was standing in the propped fire door with her shoes in one hand. She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me into the gap and pointed with her chin.
Charlene was on the floor in the middle of the room, dancing with our uncle Ray, in a white gown with beading down the front.
Flat.
Not a woman nine months along. Not a woman five months along. Flat as the paper cloth on the table beside her, and the gown hung off her hips the way a gown hangs off anybody.
“Where is it,” I said.
“That’s what I’m telling you.” Paulette had her thumbnail in her teeth. “Nobody has said one word about a baby all night. Not the toasts. Not Mom. Nothing.”
I stood in a doorway that smelled like fryer grease and cake and I counted the months on my fingers like a kid, twice, because the first time I didn’t trust myself.
Seven months. Plus the two before that.
So where was the child my mother said needed a father?
The picture on my mother’s refrigerator
I want to be honest about how it started, because I was not some woman watching from across a street. I was in that kitchen every Sunday.
The picture went up on my mother’s refrigerator the week after Dale left. Ultrasound, the gray fan of it, a white smudge in the middle, held on with a magnet shaped like a cherry pie. My mother put it at eye level, dead center, where the school pictures used to go. She moved my father’s fishing license to make room.
I saw it the first Sunday I made myself go back for dinner, and it took the wind out of me so fast I had to sit down on the step stool.
The corner of it was torn. A little triangle missing off the top right, like it had come off a fridge before it went on one.
I remember thinking Charlene must have carried it around in her purse.
Charlene is five years younger than me and she has never once been the one in trouble. She’s the one who brings a pan of bars to a funeral. She used to babysit for the Doyles and she’d wash their dishes without being asked, and Mrs. Doyle told that story at three different showers.
That’s the thing people didn’t understand about our family splitting. Nobody had to choose Charlene. Charlene was already chosen. She was the good one, and the good one had gotten herself into a mess with a man who wouldn’t leave her, and my mother built a whole church out of that in about nine days.
I asked her once, that fall, which doctor she’d gone to. She was rinsing a pan.
She said the clinic in town was full up and she’d found somebody over in Boscobel, and she went to those appointments alone, every one, because she said she didn’t want a scene.
My mother thought that was brave too.
There’s a thing about our family I should put in here. My mother keeps score out loud. When Bernadette moved to Rockford she called it abandoning her father. When I got engaged at twenty-six she told the whole card table I’d waited long enough. Everything any of us did got said back to us in a sentence with a verdict in it, and once she’d said the sentence it was the truth and there was no court above her.
The sentence for me was she’s taking it hard. That’s it. That’s what I got for the whole year. Yvonne’s taking it hard, so don’t ask her, don’t invite her, don’t put her at the table by the door.
And the sentence for Charlene was brave. You can’t argue with brave.
So I quit arguing. I ate Sunday dinner six feet from that picture for a year and passed the potatoes and asked my father about the furnace. Twice I got up and stood at the sink so the fridge was behind me.
The last Sunday before the wedding my mother caught me doing it. She had the gravy in her hand and she looked at me and then at the magnet.
She said, “You could try being happy for once.”
The shower in April
They had the shower in the church basement, and my mother called me about it four times.
I didn’t go. I sent a box. I don’t know why I sent a box, except that I had a box, and it had been sitting in the hall closet with the tape still on it since March, and every day I walked past it I lost a little more of my mind.
Paulette told me what happened at the shower. Charlene opened cards and thanked people and then said her back was killing her and she’d open the presents at home, and Aunt Donna said out loud, in the room, that she’d never in her life been to a shower where nobody opened a present.
My mother put a plate in front of her and that was the end of that.
Two weeks later my box came back to me. Not returned to sender. Hand-delivered, on my step, with a note in my mother’s handwriting that said We think this is too much, honey.
I opened it on the kitchen floor to be sure it was mine. It was. Sleepers, the yellow ones, and a wind-up thing that plays a song.
I sat there on the linoleum with a sleeper in my hand for long enough that the freezer kicked on.
I called my mother and I asked her what she meant, too much.
She said, “You know what I mean,” and then she said the thing I still hear when I can’t sleep. She said, “Nobody wants to look at your grief at a party, Yvonne.”
I didn’t go anywhere for eleven days after that except work.
I stock shelves at the grocery on Lincoln, six to two, and the whole town comes through there eventually. Women I’d known since confirmation would see me at the end of an aisle and turn their cart around. Not mean. Careful. Like I was a wet floor.
The one who didn’t was Mrs. Doyle, the one Charlene used to babysit for. She stopped her cart right in front of my ladder in the middle of May and asked me straight out when the baby was due, because she wanted to knit something and she needed to know how long she had.
I said August, because that’s what my mother had told people.
Mrs. Doyle said, “Huh.” Then she said Charlene had come through her line at the pharmacy in the spring and she’d have sworn there was nothing to it yet, and she’d figured she was just carrying small, and then she laughed at herself for gossiping and pushed her cart off toward the bread.
I went back to my boxes. I put a whole case of soup up facing the wrong way and had to do it again.
And then on a Tuesday in June, Dale’s truck was in my driveway at twenty past eleven at night.
Twenty past eleven
He didn’t come to the door. He sat out there with the engine off until I came out, because he knew I would, because in five years I always did.
He looked bad. Not sad. Tired in the face, like a man who’d been doing math.
I’d seen that truck in that spot every night for five years. There’s a dip in the gravel where the front tire always sat, and it’s still there, and the yard grew in around it.
He said, “You still have the folder? From the hospital?”
I said what folder.
“The papers. From when.” He couldn’t finish that sentence. He never could. “Do they put the date on there. And the name.”
I asked him why he wanted to know that at eleven o’clock at night, four weeks before his wedding.
He said it wasn’t like that. He said Charlene had been going through some stuff about it, that she got quiet about the hospital, that he was trying to understand something and he couldn’t ask anybody in this family without it turning into a war by morning.
Then he said, “Does the picture have your name on it. The one they give you.”
I said, “Ask her.”
He put both hands on top of the wheel and looked out the windshield at my garage.
“I did,” he said.
I asked him what she told him.
He said she told him he had no idea what it was like, being the one everybody’s watching. He said she told him to leave it alone until after. He said the word after four or five times that night and every time it meant something further away.
Then he said, “Your mother’s got it all set up already. The hall, the flowers, the whole thing’s paid.”
I said, “So?”
“So it’s paid,” he said.
He backed out without the headlights on until he hit the road. I stood in the driveway in my socks and I thought, whatever that is, it’s his now.
I was wrong about that. It was mine and he’d come to give it back.
The gift table
Paulette pulled me in through the fire door because she wanted me to see the room, and I went the long way around the edge of it, past the coats, with my hood half up like a shoplifter.
The gift table was by the windows. Cards in a birdcage. A tower of plates nobody would use.
And propped on an easel behind it, blown up, in a white wooden frame with a ribbon around it, was the ultrasound picture from my mother’s refrigerator.
Poster size. Somebody had it enlarged at the drugstore, I guess. That gray fan and the white smudge, three feet tall, with BABY in gold letters underneath and a date.
I want to tell you I felt something big. I didn’t. I walked up to it the way you walk up to a bulletin board.
Because the blowup had the corner in it.
Not the torn triangle. They’d printed the whole thing off a photo of it, and whoever took that photo took it before the corner came off, and up in that top right corner, in the little gray band the machine prints, was a last name.
Mine. My married one. The one I had for five years.
And a date in March, and a time, 8:41 AM, and a number I’d seen a hundred times on the top of a bill.
My picture. Off my refrigerator, in my kitchen, in the house he moved his boxes out of. On an easel with a ribbon on it, three feet tall, in the room where I got married.
There is a number at the top of every piece of paper that hospital ever gave me. It’s on the folder in my filing cabinet. It’s on the bill I’m still paying eleven dollars a month on.
I stood there long enough that a kid ran into the back of my legs. He said sorry and went around me.
The band was playing that song everybody’s aunt likes. Somebody was refilling the coffee urn behind me and the lid kept clattering.
Then I picked it up off the easel and turned around with it.
The coat rack
I didn’t make a speech. I got about six feet before my mother came off her chair, and Charlene saw the frame and stood straight up out of a folding chair in that gown.
She got to me first, by the coat rack, with the band still going.
“Put it down.” She had her hand on the top edge of the frame. “Yvonne. Put it down, this is my night, put it DOWN.”
I said, “Whose name is on this.”
And then she talked. God, she talked. She said I was jealous of her, that I had been jealous since we were kids, that I’d made the whole town feel sorry for me for a year. She said she never said the picture was hers, that Mom took it off the fridge, that Mom’s the one who blew it up, that she told Mom not to. She said she was going to tell everybody after the wedding, she had it planned, she had a whole thing planned. She said, “I lost it too, do you get that? I lost it too and nobody made a casserole for ME.”
I said, “When.”
She said, “In November,” and the band finished the song, and the room got quiet the way a room does when it hears the last four words of something.
She wasn’t done. She said the fridge was Mom’s fridge and the picture had been sitting on it since November like a shrine and what was she supposed to do, take it down, in front of everybody, and say what? She said the whole town had already decided the story and she was just standing in it. She said, “You think I wanted a poster? I said no. I said no twice. Ask her. Ask Mom what she said to me in the car.”
My mother said, “That’s enough, Charlene.” Which is the only time in my life I have heard her say that name like that.
Dale hadn’t moved. He was over by the head table with his hands in his pockets and he looked at the floor, and I understood he’d known since that Tuesday in June, and he had let a hundred and seventy people eat chicken about it.
Aunt Donna started clapping the coats off the rack looking for her purse and knocking hangers down.
It was my father who came and took the frame out of my hands. In the rented jacket, with the sleeves an inch too long. He didn’t say anything to Charlene and he didn’t say anything to my mother.
He said, “Come on, I’ll walk you out,” and he carried my picture out of that room under his arm like a man carrying a folding chair, and he put it in the back seat of my car face down, and he stood in the parking lot in a rented jacket while I got the seat belt on.
Through the windshield he said, “I paid for this room twice.”
Then he said, “I want the second one back.”
October, and the afghan
They’re still married. He’s still in that apartment. The hall got repainted in September, cream instead of the paneling, and Paulette sent me a picture of it because she thought it was funny that it took all that to get the walls done.
The frame is in my basement, turned to the wall, because I couldn’t make myself throw out a picture of her.
My father calls on Sundays now. He never called in his life before this. He asks about my furnace, and about whether I’ve had anybody look at the gutters, and one time he asked what I was having for supper and then didn’t say anything for a while.
My mother has called twice. The first time she said the word misunderstanding and I hung up while she was still in the middle of it. The second time she left a message that was mostly about a casserole dish of hers she thinks I have.
I don’t have it. Charlene has it.
Last week I had the afghan over my legs and the same show on, two brothers gutting a different lake house, and I had it muted because I still can’t stand the noise of people being cheerful about a kitchen.
Paulette let herself in with her own key and dropped her bag on the floor and got under the other end of the afghan without asking, the way she has since she was nine.
She looked at the screen for a while.
Then she said, “Unmute it. I like when they find the mold.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who has a sister like Paulette, the kind who drives across town before you’ve found your shoes.
For more stories about family drama and property disputes, check out My Condition Was Six Weeks In The House He Never Paid For, I Carried the Lumber Up That Stair Myself. Now He Locks It From the Inside., and A Deputy on My Porch Asked Me to Prove the House Was Mine.
