“An old quilt. I cut it up and made a small lump, and sewed tie strings to it. I added little pieces to it as the months went by, making it bigger. Lordy, but it was hot that summer! I was careful, but Becky walked in on me one morning as I was getting dressed. I turned away, flustered, but she’d already seen.
“‘What’s that?’ she’d asked, pointing.
“I tried to stay calm. ‘It’s a bumper for the baby. To keep it from getting hurt. Because the doctor said it’s sickly.’
“Becky ran to greet Charlie with the news when he got home. ‘Guess what, Daddy! Mama’s wearin’ a pad over the baby to keep him safe.’
“Charlie grabbed her. ‘Who else have you told this to?’
“‘No one,’ Becky had said.
“‘Well, be sure you don’t.’
“‘Why not, Daddy?’
“‘Because we don’t talk about undergarments.’
“But I reckon he felt that it was unlikely she’d keep quiet, because he made me go over to my mama’s house that night and casually mention I was wearing a pad to protect the baby from electrical impulses. The next day, he went to Jackson to find a rental house. He moved us there at the end of the week, and there we stayed for the next three months.”
•••
That night, I dreamed of my mother. I’d been worrying about facing her in the afterlife. I didn’t know what she knew about the non-pregnancy.
“Oh, I knew something was wrong,” she said. In my dream, she was sitting on the back porch swing, pulling beans from a paper bag and snapping them into a red ceramic bowl. “You didn’t look a bit happy.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I couldn’t, dear; it wasn’t my place. That would have been meddling in your marriage, and folks just didn’t do that. But I knew you two were having problems.” Mother reached into the bag. “Truth is, I was afraid you’d been...” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “... raped.”
“Mother!”
“Well, you’d occasionally go off by yourself to places a woman shouldn’t go without an escort. There were a couple of times you asked me to watch the children, then Mildred Pilcher told me she’d seen you at the lakefront, taking photos of pelicans or geese.” She snapped a bean clean in half. “I was afraid the baby wasn’t Charlie’s.”
Truth be told, a similar worry had crossed my mind.
“How do you know the baby is even yours?” I’d asked Charliewhen we’d gotten back home from that fateful Easter dinner and the kids were down for a nap.
“I just do.”
“But if this woman slept with you, she might be sleeping with fifty other men, as well.”
“I could say the same thing about you.” Charlie had gone straight for the kitchen cabinet where I’d hidden the scotch, a thundercloud of a scowl darkening his face.
“You know me, Charlie. How well could you possibly know this woman?”
“How well did you know Joe? For all you know, he’s actually married.”
The words had shocked me. I’d stared at him for a moment. He was out of his head. When it came to Joe, he was crazy.
But in my dream, my mother calmly swung on the porch swing and pulled another bean from the bag. I reached in and took one, helping her. “It would have meant so much, Mother, if I could have talked to you about things.”
“I know, dear.” She carefully snapped the bean, her face a picture of peace and serenity. “But ladies didn’t talk about those things back then.”
I woke up covered in sweat. My mother’s beatific expression, her lack of remorse or regret, her apparent complete acceptance of whatever she’d done or not done... How could she feel that way about her mistakes, yet be so insistent I fix mine?
I guess it was because she was on the other side. I still had to struggle to get there.
I pushed down the covers and rolled over. It wouldn’t be much longer—a couple of months, a year maybe—certainly no more than two or three. Death was growing inside me like a baby waiting to be born. I could feel it, getting stronger. Sometimes the hairpins in my bun vibrated with the knowledge like tuning forks.
