I laughed. Then my eyes filled. Then I was crying into my ginger tea because everything made me cry now. A commercial on TV made me cry yesterday. A dog in the street made me cry the day before. She mentioned my mother and now I was sobbing over toast at six-thirty in the morning.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She reached across the table and took my hand.
“It’s not just the hormones,” I said, wiping my face with my sleeve.
“I know.” She squeezed my hand. “But the hormones aren’t helping.”
She let me cry. Didn’t shush me, didn’t tell me it would be okay. Just held my hand across the table while the eggs got cold on herplate and the tea got cold in my mug and the morning light came through the kitchen window turning everything gold. When I finally stopped, she handed me a napkin and said, “Now eat your toast.”
I ate the toast. The whole piece.
“Good girl.” She picked up her fork and started on the cold eggs like nothing had happened. “I was thinking we should start clearing out the spare room this weekend. For the baby.”
My heart did something complicated. The spare room was full of boxes, old clothes, photo albums, my parents’ things that Grandma had packed up years ago but never had the heart to get rid of. “Grandma, we don’t have to rush. I’m barely showing.”
“You won’t be barely showing forever. And I want to paint. Your mother’s room was yellow. I was thinking yellow again.”
“You hate yellow.”
“I do. But babies like it. I read that somewhere.” She pointed her fork at me. “Also, you’re coming to church with me on Sunday.”
“Grandma...”
“Not negotiable. Mrs. Patterson has been asking about you since you got here. If I have to lie to that woman one more time about why my granddaughter hasn’t shown her face, I’ll lose my spot in the choir, and I have been singing alto for thirty-seven years, Andrea. Thirty-seven years.”
I laughed. A real one, still damp from the crying, but real.
After breakfast I took my walk. Whitebrook was quiet in the mornings, the streets empty except for a few runners and the old man three doors down who walked his beagle at the same time every day and waved at me without speaking. I waved back without speaking. It was a good arrangement.
I walked the route my mother used to walk. Down the hill past the school, along the creek where the water ran clear over flat stones, up through the park with the wooden benches that had initials carved into them from decades of teenagers. Back home through the neighborhood where every third house had a garden. I put my hand on my stomach while I walked, still flat, nothing to show for it yet.
“See that creek?” I said, quiet enough that the runners passing wouldn’t hear. “Your great-grandma says fish used to be in there when she was little. I don’t believe her but she swears.”
I told the baby about my mother. How she used to walk this same route with me strapped to her chest, how she knew the name of every flower in every garden we passed, how she’d stop and talk to the neighbors for so long my father would come looking for us. I wanted my kid to know her even though she wasn’t here.
I didn’t talk about Finneas. Not yet. I wasn’t there yet.
The walks helped. Movement helped. When I was moving I could almost convince myself I was just a woman taking a morning walk in a small town, that the weight on my chest was just the hill, the slightly-too-fast pace I kept because slowing down meant thinking. But the walks ended. The hill flattened out. I’d come back to Grandma’s house, sit on the porch stepcatching my breath, and the grief would be right there waiting, patient, unhurried.
I spent the rest of my days reading, helping Grandma in the garden, going to the prenatal appointments at the small clinic in town where the doctor had a kind face and called me “mama” even though I didn’t feel like one yet. I cleaned things that didn’t need cleaning because the action of scrubbing gave my hands something to do when my brain wouldn’t shut up. I reorganized Grandma’s spice cabinet twice. She let me do it without comment, which was love in its purest form because that woman had her spice cabinet organized by cuisine type and I put everything in alphabetical order and she didn’t say a word.
Mary called every morning at eight. Without fail.
“Did you eat?”
“Yes.”
“Real food or toast?”
“Toast is real food.”
“Andrea.”
“I ate toast, Grandma made eggs, I threw up once. It’s progress.”
“Andrea, that is not eating.” A pause. “Buddy misses you, by the way. Peter says he sits by the kennel door every time someone comes in. Looks up, sees it’s not you, goes back to his corner.”
My chest ached. I could picture it perfectly, Buddy’s big brown eyes lifting toward the door, the hope, the quick assessment, theslow return to his spot when it was the wrong person. I knew exactly how that felt.
