The folks at the hospital were wrong about Grace; her lungs were fine. But they scared me bad. I was a nervous wreck the whole time I stayed in Carolwood. Buck came by with Verna, soon as Willa Mae let them know what had happened.
“You give us a terrible fright, Adie,” Verna said. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“I’m real sorry—”
“I went down to the grocers myself when you didn’t come home. Elmer was working the cash register. Said he hadn’t seen you, but Miz Bailey was the one to ask since he just got there. By then, she was on her way to visit her sister in Chattanooga and—”
“Did you see the baby?” I burst out. I thought if I heard that whiny voice one second longer I was gonna kill her.
“They got her in that contraption,” Verna said. “Couldn’t see too good.”
“We looked through the glass,” Buck said. “Why they got her in that thing anyway?”
“She’s a bit small, is all. The doctor thinks her lungs need help—”
“We ain’t lost a Jenkins baby since—” Buck said.
“Be just like you to start something,” Verna said, glaring at me. I swallowed a hurtful lump in my throat and looked up at Buck.
“Ma, you got no business talking to her like that—”
“It’s the truth,” Verna said.
“You forgit you lost a ba—” Verna’s face went white again, and she grabbed hold of the edge of my bed. Buck took her by the arm and set her down in the chair next to it.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” he said. “I got a big mouth. But ever since Pa took off you been meaner than a dog with rabies, and you…you…well…you ain’t gonna take it out on Adie.” I think I loved Buck more at that moment than God loved us. Buck patted Verna’s shoulder.
“You heard Willa Mae. She ain’t seen a harder birthing since she delivered them twins ol’ lady Markus had herself.” Buck swung his arm around my shoulder and plumped up my pillow.
“You been through enough, puddin’,” he said. “Ain’t no one gonna pick on you. That right, Ma?”
Verna gave a slight nod. She wrapped her arms around her waist and rocked back and forth. Her cheeks were flushed. She was having trouble keeping her lips steady. She sat quietly, her face blank, her eyes glassy. She rubbed her oversized knuckles and continued to rock herself in the straight back chair. Whatever it was Buck had started to say, the mere mention of it had turned Verna to jelly. Maybe she couldn’t help it she was sour as vinegar. Mama said some folks were fine so long as the sailing was good, but give ’em a storm and they sunk like a sack of bones weighed down with concrete.
“You can’t direct the wind, Adie,” she said. “But you can always adjust your sails.” Maybe Verna didn’t know as much about sailing as Mama did, and she was lost on a sea of sorrow.
“Miz Jenkins, you are gonna love this baby,” I said. “She is so sweet. Just think. You’re a gramma now!” I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. She did something better. She stopped rocking and got out of the chair. She leaned over and smoothed the sheets and blankets around me and patted them into place. One of the nurses, the only nice one I’d met, peeked in the door and told them they had to leave.
“She needs her rest.” She was right. I was pretty tired. Verna and Buck headed for the door.
“We’ll be back, tonight, Adie,” Verna said. She grabbed her handbag to leave.
“Buck?” I said. He looked up, but didn’t say anything. Verna walked out into the hallway.
“Willa Mae said no one could find you…to tell you…about the baby…she said no one knew where you went—” Buck looked down at his boots. “Where were you, anyway?”
“I was…ahh…ahh—”
“And Mr. Fletcher told Willa Mae you and Imelda Jane never come back to work the store after lunch—”
“We had some…some supplies to pick up…is all…he…he probably forgot.” Buck’s eyes were looking at everything but me.
“We got a baby now, Buck.”
“I know that.”
“Did you tell Imelda Jane?”
“I ain’t said nothing yet, but I’m going over to get her…I mean her and me’s doing inventory tonight so…” Buck was chewing on his lower lip. He reached out his hand and touched my cheek.
“I gotta go—”
“Buck,” I whispered his name like a prayer. “You got a whole lot of responsibilities to pay attention to now.”
“I’m doing the best I can, Adie.” He twisted his lips and scrunched his brows together like he didn’t know what else he could say. When I blinked at my tears he was gone.
• • •
Me and Grace got to leave the hospital that next week and went home to our new cabin. Murphy and Buck had it all ready. The septic tank was connected, and the rotten boards on the front porch and the broken handrails had been replaced. Mama and Clarissa drove over from Cold Rock, and Rebecca came along and brought her boys. They scoured and cleaned the cabin and scrubbed all the windows. When they finished that, they cooked up enough food to last until Christmas. They brought along so many packages for me and Grace I thought it was.
Riley Jr., Clayton, and Girard, Rebecca’s boys, fought over who could hold Grace next. They took too many turns. Mama got nervous and put a stop to it.
“You want to play pass the potato, I’ll heat one up for y’all in the oven,” she said. “Now, go on outside and sweep that yard up.”
Pa was at work, so he didn’t come, but then I don’t know if he would have made the trip even if he could have. He hadn’t answered any of my letters that I’d written special just to him, and I hadn’t seen him since that day eight months ago when he told me to leave. But Mama was mostly back to being her old self. Leave it to a new baby to heal old wounds.
“I bought you some lemon curd, Adie!” Mama announced. How I loved lemon curd. She remembered! Mama only made it on special occasions since it was troublesome to make and didn’t keep long.
“Eat it up quick.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.” I gave her a hug. “Pass this on to Pa, okay?”
“I’ll try, but his head’s thick as concrete,” she said. “If he jumped in the river, he’d be a goner.”
I put Grace to bed when they left and climbed in myself. She’d gained a pound and a half already and was crying and carrying on when she was hungry and wet, just like a regular-size baby. But since she was so small for her age, I had to feed her every two to three hours. It was pretty much wearing me out. It wasn’t a problem in the daytime, but I was afraid I wouldn’t hear her in the night and she’d starve to death by morning. But her cries woke me just like Willa Mae said they would. I sat straight up in bed the first night the moment I heard her. It was sticky and hot. The bed linens, the only ones we had us so far, were twisted and pulled loose at the bottom. I reached around to fix them as best I could in the darkness. My side was damp with sour milk and sweat. Buck’s was empty and dry. My hands found his pillow. I leaned in and sniffed the hollow where his head should have been and inhaled what was left of him for the night. I loved Buck’s smell. There was something about his body odors. Even when he didn’t smell sweet, his scent made my knees quiver and my heart jump. Grace let out a tiny wail. My breasts, both of them, turned on like twin faucets. Milk came dribbling down the front of my nightshirt. I unbuttoned it and tried to recall which one I fed her from last. Willa Mae said to take turns with them. They were swollen and plenty sore. And I had big knots under my arms. They started forming before I even left the hospital.
“Oh honey, you’re engorged,” the nurse I liked said. “It’ll settle back down once your body figures out how much milk you’ll be needing to keep your baby happy.”
“How’s it do that?” I asked.
“Nature takes care of it,” she said. “It’s all based on how much your baby eats. Takes a while, is all.”
“How long is that?”
“Is what?”
“A while?”
“In your case, I’m not sure. I ain’t had no seventeen-year-old mama nursing a little baby before,” she said. “In the meantime, just make sure you alternate which breast you put her on. And put some warm packs under your arms.”
“Willa Mae already told me that,” I said. “But I’m having trouble keeping track.”
“Here.” She handed me an oversized safety pin. “Put this pin on your nightie on the side you feed her from. Then when you finish, transfer it to the other side and that’s the one you use next time.” I was sitting in an upright position in the hospital bed that made itself into an “S” shape if you wanted it to. Grace was laid out on a pillow cross my tummy. I took the pin from the nurse and hooked it to my nightshirt above where Grace was feeding.
“You need to get yourself one of them good nursing brassieres with extra support,” she said.
“Oh, I will, soon as we get some extra money,” I told her. Which meant by the time Grace was ready for grade school I’d get one, the ways things were going. For all the hours Buck spent at Fletcher’s store, his pay sure was small. Now that we had our own place, there was lots of extras to pay on I hadn’t thought about, like electricity and water. We needed to get a telephone, too, what with the baby.
I found the breast with the pin. Good thing it was there to remind me. I was still feeding Grace around the clock, and it had me plenty confused.
She fussed again. I switched on the one small light we had in the room. Grace’s mouth, shaped like a sweet, little heart, rooted around till she found skin and she started to suck. But it was her little fist that she’d stumbled upon. She wrinkled her face up and let out a good cry when it didn’t bring what she needed and wanted.
“Here, baby,” I said and picked her up. She smelled of Johnson’s baby oil and talcum powder. She curled her arms and legs into a ball, like she was still tucked inside me. I loved seeing her do that, like she was telling me she favored that soft warm spot she came from, where I grew her and kept her safe. Her head, still covered in dark fuzz, was shaped nice like Buck’s. She rested in the crook of my arm, her lips smacking and searching. I loved watching her do that, too.
“Sweet baby, sweet baby,” I crooned singsong to her and helped her latch onto the nipple. She clamped down hard and sucked like her life depended on it. When I realized it did, I laughed out loud, relieved by the fact that her will to survive was God-given and fierce and she knew it and took it serious. Ten days old our baby girl was, and she knew all that.
I rocked Grace and nursed her, looking at the bare walls of the shabby room that held us, knowing what was important was in my arms. It didn’t much matter what wasn’t on the walls. Of course, what wasn’t in the bed did. The thought of Buck curled up asleep next to Imelda Jane somewhere made me gasp. I drank in the air, my mouth open wide, swallowing hard like Grace. Traces of Buck, still hanging about, rammed themselves like a fist down my throat. He’d sneak back in the morning, thinking I was none the wiser. And I’d let him. I’d have to; I loved him. Besides, Grace and I didn’t have any other place to go to, even if I didn’t love him.
Come dawn, I heard his boots creaking across the floorboards. Grace was stirring again for a feeding, but I pretended not to hear till he was in bed making snoring sounds, which was a pretty dumb thing for him to do, because he didn’t snore to begin with. Buck had plenty of bad habits, but that wasn’t one of them. He rolled over and let out a snort. I would have laughed, it was so silly, but my body still hurt from the birthing cuts where my stitches hadn’t healed, my breasts were filling up tight again with milk, and now my heart ached, too. I crept out of bed, pretending like I was trying not to wake him. By then Grace was howling.
“Dang, she’s got herself a pair of lungs!” Buck sat up and called out. “How’m I supposed to sleep ’round here?” He pulled the covers back over his head and burrowed under them.
You might could try staying in your own bed at night, for starters.