For five weeks my sister had a new reason every single visit why my hands were WRONG for her son.
I stopped counting the rounds at three. There was a surgery after that, and a folder of bills I have never opened since.
So when Roberta called me from the clinic parking lot laughing and crying at the same time, I put EVERYTHING I had left into that baby.
I paid for the crib.
I found the stroller at an estate sale outside Tullahoma and rebuilt both front wheels on the shop bench myself.
She put her forehead on my shoulder and said, “You are going to spoil him rotten.”
Then Wendell came, four days early, seven pounds even.
Everything went sideways.
At the hospital she said the ward was FULL of sick kids, and she held him turned away from me the whole time I sat there.
At the apartment she kept him up on her shoulder and talked over the top of my head.
“He just went down,” she said. “He just ate. Try us Sunday.”
I washed to the elbow every time and then sat across the room like a woman waiting for a bus.
Five weeks and NOT ONCE.
Then our cousin Marguerite posted a picture of herself with him asleep down the front of her jacket.
My mother commented underneath that he settles best on Marguerite, like she was reporting the weather.
The woman who runs the laundromat two doors down posted about dropping off a casserole and getting some BABY TIME out of it.
It was ONLY ME she was keeping him from, and I could not work out what I had done to earn that.
Tuesday I rode over without calling. Eleven of us were meeting at the shop at noon for the run out to the fairgrounds, and I had an hour and a bag of newborn socks.
Her car sat in the alley with the window down, and the door at the top of the stairs stood open about two inches.
Upstairs, a shower was running hard against the tub.
Then I heard it.
A newborn going at full volume, ALONE in the bassinet, his face gone red and shining.
I had him up against me before I decided anything.
That is when I saw the small bandage where the snaps of his sleeper came apart, one corner curled up soft from the steam.
What was under it was not a scratch, and my hands went stupid on me.
Footsteps came down the hall fast.
Roberta stopped in the doorway in a robe with the belt half done and no color left in her.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” she said. “It is not mine to explain. GO ASK YOUR OWN HUSBAND WHAT HE SIGNED.”
The two inches of open door
Under the bandage there was a puncture, a clean one, with a bead of dried blood at the center and the skin around it gone the color of a plum.
Not a scratch. A needle mark. Somebody had put a needle in my nephew’s thigh and taped it over.
I got the corner pressed back down with my thumb because I did not know what else to do with my hand. He was still going, hot through the sleeper, wet at the collar. I had him against my shoulder and I was walking him the way you walk a baby, four steps to the window, four steps back, and I could not make my mouth work.
Roberta had both hands on the doorframe.
“Give him here,” she said.
“He’s stopping,” I said. He wasn’t. He was winding down in that broken way where they keep catching.
She came across and took him and turned her back to me in the same motion, the way she had done in the hospital, the way she had done every Sunday, and I stood in the middle of her front room with a bag of socks still hanging off my wrist.
Downstairs, somebody kicked over an engine in the alley and let it settle to idle. Then a second one. It was ten minutes to noon.
“Roberta,” I said. “What did Neil sign?”
She had her cheek down on Wendell’s head and she was rocking, and she didn’t answer for so long I thought she was going to make me ask again.
“You should go on your ride,” she said.
Eleven years
Here is the part I have never said out loud in that apartment.
Neil and I did the eleven years. Three rounds, then the surgery, then a folder I put on the top shelf of the closet in the fall of 2019 and have not touched since. There is a bill in there for four thousand and something that I paid in pieces over two years, and I know it is on top because I remember putting it there. Under it is what came back from the surgery. I lost enough on the table that they hung two units of somebody else’s blood, and on the second one I spiked a fever hard enough that a doctor I never saw again sent off a long panel to find out why my body was arguing with a stranger’s cells. Nine pages of a woman broken down into numbers. The tissue typing is the last of them, page nine, and it came in the mail three weeks later with a bill of its own, and I filed it without reading a line of it, because by then I was done reading.
Roberta was in the room for most of it. She drove me home from the second round because Neil was on a job in Cookeville and I was not supposed to drive. She held the bowl in my lap in a Waffle House parking lot on Highway 55 and she did not say one single thing the whole time, which is the kindest my sister has ever been to me.
That was the fall she started coming around the shop.
The shop is mine and Neil’s and four other people’s on paper, a two-bay with a stairwell at the back and an apartment over it that had been empty since a guy named Roland moved to Sparta. When Roberta’s lease came apart in the spring, I gave her the keys and told her rent was whatever she felt like handing me. She handed me nothing for a year, and I never asked, and that was fine with me. That is my sister. She lives over my shop, and I have a key to her door in the same pocket as the key to the bay.
Neil kept his distance from all of it. He rides, he works, he does not talk. When the third round failed he went out to the bay at eleven at night and I heard the impact wrench going and I let him have it. He was thirty-nine then. He is forty-six now, and in seven years the only time he has said the word baby to me was when Roberta called from the clinic parking lot, and he said, “Well. Good for her,” and went and got his boots.
I bought the crib on a Wednesday and put it together on the shop floor because there was more room down there. Neil stood in the doorway of the bay watching me tighten the bolts with a hex key, and he had a rag in his hand he was not using.
“You want to do that upstairs?” he said.
“It’s easier here.”
He stood there a minute more. Then he went and got the impact wrench off the bench and carried it into the back, which is not where it lives.
I finished the crib and hauled it up the stairs one end at a time.
The bag of socks
I did not go on the ride.
I went down the stairs and out into the alley and the ten of them were sitting there with the engines going, and Merle had his kickstand down and a thermos on the tank. Ten bikes take up the whole alley behind the shop. They were straddling them in a row along the block wall with the sun coming down between the buildings.
Merle killed his engine when he saw my face, and then it went quiet in that domino way as everybody else did the same.
“Charlene,” he said.
“Y’all go on,” I said. “I’ll catch you at the fairgrounds.”
Nobody moved. That is the thing about those men and that one woman. Nobody moved, because they know the difference between a person saying go on and a person meaning it.
“Something upstairs?” Merle said.
“Family thing.”
He looked up the stairwell at the door, which was shut now, and then he looked at the bag of socks still hanging off my wrist, and he nodded once and put his kickstand up.
“We’ll be at the fairgrounds till four,” he said. “Then we’ll be here.”
They went out the alley one at a time and it took a long while, and I stood there with my hand on the rail until the last of it stopped bouncing off the buildings.
Then I went into the bay and opened the drawer under the bench where Neil keeps things he does not want on the pegboard.
There is a manila envelope in there. It has been in there since spring. I have seen it every time I have gone in that drawer for a chain breaker and I have never once picked it up, because it is a shop, and there is always paper in a shop.
I picked it up.
What was in Neil’s drawer
The address on the front was the fertility clinic in Murfreesboro. Roberta’s clinic. The one she called us from, laughing and crying in the parking lot. It was addressed to Neil, and it had been opened. There were three sheets in it.
The first one was a consent and financial responsibility form, dated in March, which was four months after that phone call. The patient line had my sister’s name typed into it. The line under that said COLLECTION AND CRYOPRESERVATION, UMBILICAL CORD BLOOD, one year prepaid. The line under that said responsible party, and that one had my husband’s signature on it, in the ballpoint he keeps in his shirt pocket.
So it was not what I had spent the walk down the stairs building in my head. It was not that at all. In March, while my sister was still telling people at the shop she was carrying low, my husband had gone to her clinic and paid to have something of her baby put in a freezer.
The second sheet had Wendell’s name on it, and a hospital in Nashville, and the word HLA.
The third one was a bill. Nine hundred and twelve dollars, paid, card ending in the four digits I know because it is our four digits.
I sat down on the creeper with the papers on my knee and read the second sheet four times before it got through. HLA typing. A donor match. They had drawn my nephew’s blood and they had drawn my husband’s blood and somebody had put them next to each other on a page, and the reason a person does that is that somebody needs marrow.
It was not Wendell who needed it. His numbers were on the top of the sheet under a heading that said DONOR.
I got up and went out into the alley and up the stairs and I did not knock, because I have never knocked at that door, because it is my door.
Roberta was on the couch with Wendell along her forearm and her hand flat on his back. She had gotten dressed. She looked at the papers in my hand and her face did something I had not seen since our father’s funeral.
“Which one of you is sick,” I said.
The blanket
She told me on the couch with the baby on her and she told it flat, the way she does everything.
Neil had a blood thing. He had had it since January. He had a hematologist in Nashville and an appointment calendar in the truck and a brother-in-law relationship with my sister that consisted, until March, of him nodding at her on the stairs. In March he had come up those stairs and asked her if she would let them save the cord when the baby came, and let him pay for it.
“He was honest with me about it,” she said. “He sat in that chair and told me straight out that Wendell is nothing to him. Not one drop. He said the registry had already been through and come back with nothing they could use on him, and his doctor told him a banked cord is the same lottery ticket as any stranger’s, no better odds, but it is a ticket you can hold in your hand and it is nine miles away. He said he’d rather buy a ticket than sit in that truck one more Tuesday.”
Neil has no brothers. His mother is dead. There was nobody in this world who owed him a match by blood, so he had gone and asked the one woman in the county who was making a brand-new person from scratch.
The cord blood was not enough for the typing, so in August they drew him again, in the thigh, and that is what the tape was over.
“He asked you,” I said. “He asked you, and not me.”
“He asked me to not tell you.” She got Wendell up higher on her shoulder. “He said he’d tell you himself when he had a number. He kept saying he wanted a number first.”
“Five weeks, Roberta.”
“I know.”
“You wouldn’t let me hold him.”
And here is where my sister looked at me, and she did not evade it, which she should have.
“If I put him in your arms,” she said, “you were going to ask me why he had a bandage on him. And I would have told you. I can’t lie to you with my hands full.”
I sat there.
Marguerite got to hold him. My mother got to report on it. The woman from the laundromat got BABY TIME for a casserole, and every one of them got him because not one of them was ever going to look at his leg and know something was wrong with it.
“You let a stranger hold him so I couldn’t,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“You let them all think I did something.”
“I know what I let them think.” Her chin was going. “Charlene, I have got a five-week-old and a sister who did eleven years of needles and a man downstairs who cries in the stairwell, and I did the only thing I could hold in two hands. I picked the one that kept for a few more weeks. I picked wrong. I know I picked wrong.”
Downstairs, the bay door went up on its chain.
She heard it too. We both sat there and listened to it go all the way up, and then the impact wrench started, on nothing, because there was no job on the lift.
The stairwell
I carried him down. Roberta came behind me with a blanket she did not need and did not say a word about the stairs.
Neil had the wrench in his hand and nothing under it. He turned around when the light changed in the doorway and he saw me, and then he saw what I had, and he put the wrench down on the bench very carefully, the way you do when you have decided not to have a reaction.
“March,” I said.
“Charlene.”
“You signed in March. It’s September.”
He wiped his hands on the rag. He was going to say something about not wanting to put it on me on top of everything, I could see it coming up his throat, and I did not want it.
“I paid that bill,” I said. “It came out of our account. I have looked at that account every Friday for eleven years, and I did not see nine hundred and twelve dollars, because I stopped reading the medical ones. That is what you counted on.”
He did not deny it. That is one thing about him.
“How bad,” I said.
“They think they can do it,” he said. “If there’s marrow. They want to start in November.”
“And if it’s his.”
“Then it’s his, and I owe him the rest of my life, and I don’t get to have that conversation with a baby.” He looked at Wendell and then away fast. “I couldn’t come home and tell you the only way out of this was your sister’s kid. Not you. Not after.”
There it was. He had spent months protecting me from a thing I would have signed in ten seconds, and my sister had spent five weeks holding the other end of it, and between the two of them they had made me stand in her front room like a woman waiting for a bus.
I hate both of them for it and I will hate them for a long time. That is the honest ledger.
But I had the baby on one shoulder and one hand free, so I used it. I took the papers off the bench and I held out the third sheet, the bill, the paid one.
“Then I’m on it,” I said. “The folder in the closet has my numbers in it. All of it, every round, and the surgery, and the fever afterward — I reacted to the second unit they hung and they sent off the long panel to find out why. They typed me in 2018. It is on page nine. It’s on the top shelf. It has been on the top shelf for seven years and I have not opened it, and you have not either, and one of us is going to open it tonight.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“You’re not blood to me,” he said.
“Neither is he.” I shifted the baby. “Neither is one single soul on that list up in Minneapolis, and they call somebody’s name off it every day of the week. Neil. I spent eleven years being a person they take blood out of. I am good at it. Let me be good at something.”
Roberta was on the bottom step with the blanket in her fists.
He came across the bay and put his hand on Wendell’s back, and then on mine, and he did not say anything at all, which for him is the whole speech.
Outside, the first engine came up the alley. It was four o’clock. Merle had said four.
The socks, in October
The folder came down off the shelf that night and it was worse than I remembered, and my numbers were on page nine, and they were close enough that a woman in Nashville called me on a Thursday and said the word candidate.
They took it out of my hip in October. I was under for two hours and sore for eleven days and I could not lift anything heavier than a coffee pot for three weeks, which meant I could not lift a baby, which is a joke I have not gotten around to finding funny yet. They did not use Wendell’s. They may still. Nobody says never in that building.
Roberta pays rent now. Two hundred a month, which is not what the place is worth, and she makes me take it in an envelope so I have to hold it.
The stroller sits at the bottom of the stairwell with the wheels I rebuilt, and it is in the way of the bay door, and nobody moves it. Roberta says it is mine to push when my hip lets me, and she says it like a debt she is not going to be argued out of, and I have not pushed it yet.
Sunday I came up with the bag of socks, which had been in my saddlebag since Tuesday of the first week and had a chain-lube thumbprint on it now. Roberta was at the sink. Wendell was on his back on a gray blanket on the floor with his knees turned out, bald as a knuckle, going at the ceiling with both fists.
I got down on the floor with my hip complaining about it and I put a sock on his foot, and he kicked it off, and I put it back on.
“He’s going to spoil rotten,” I said.
My sister put a hand on the top of my head on her way past, and left it there a second, and went and got the coffee.
If this one sat on your chest a while, send it to the person in your family you have not called since something went wrong between you.
For more stories about life’s unexpected turns and the things we hold onto, take a peek at I Kept My Mother’s Keys Taped to the Back of an Envelope in My Closet, or discover the mysteries behind The Second Watch Has Four Letters on the Back That Are Not Mine. And if you’re curious about waiting for calls that never come, check out I Kicked the Furnace Every Morning for Six Weeks Waiting for My Mother to Call.
