She started her day making lists of avenues to pursue. Cam started his day running to the waterfall and back. Eleanor was getting frown lines in her forehead. Not Cam.
Often, now, lying in bed at night, Eleanor thought about money. She calculated the cost of installing a washing machine compared to visits to the laundromat and the hourly rate of day care they’d need once their baby was born and she was ready to get back to her writing and drawing—assuming someone would actually pay her again for the work she did there.
“I guess I got spoiled,” she told Cam. “For all these years, my work was in big demand. I never worried about earning a living.” What had seemed unattainable then had been the family part. And look, now she had that.
“You’ll figure things out,” Cam told her. His choice of pronoun did not go unnoticed. The summer he moved in they’d gotten a bank loan to build him a woodshop out behind the house and he was finishing the roof now, but they both knew—though did not discuss—that his income from the sale of his woodworking projects in no way offset the cost of its construction.
Still, much of what they had was good. Eleanor loved the hum of her husband’s tools out in the shop, and the sound of his whistle when he came back in the house at the end of the long day to wrap his arms around her where she sat in the rocking chair by the woodstove, reading her well-worn copy ofSpiritual Midwifery. But she could feel a very small knot forming in her, too—questions shedidn’t like to ask herself, but sometimes did. Who contributed what, and how much? Thoughts entered her mind now of a kind that had never arisen before. Why was it always Eleanor who had to figure out where the money came from?
Eleanor’s relationship with Cam was nothing like Darla and Bobby’s, of course. When she talked to Darla—who was still setting aside money to leave Bobby—she felt nothing but lucky that the man she had married was not just handsome and talented but supportive and loving. Nights in their bed, when her husband reached for her—or she for him—her skin still came alive. Just the sight of him stepping in the door at the end of the day, shaking the snow off his boots, still made her draw in her breath. What was a steady paycheck compared to the feeling she got when he put on Donna Summer and he took her in his arms—she with her eight-months-pregnant belly—and twirled her around the kitchen.
“With the baby coming, and me not having another book contract yet,” she said to him one night, in bed, “we might need you to get a real job.”
His expression, when he met her gaze, was not anything she’d seen before.
“I have a real job,” he told her. “I make bowls.”
Usually they made love every night, but that night they didn’t.
She knew he was trying to bring in more money. Saturdays, he set off for craft fairs to sell his work—driving greater distances than before, gone longer hours—and sometimes, though not always, he came home with some cash in his pocket.
Occasionally, Eleanor would go along. A woman in her early twenties, who was wearing earrings made from the feathers of some exotic bird and a pair of handmade sandals, had fallen in love with a burl jewelry box, one of the nicest pieces he’d ever made. When she told Cam she couldn’t afford the price—fifty dollars—he’d placed the box in the young woman’s hands. Her name was Fiona, she told him. She was an astrologer.
“Take it,” Cam said. He put up his hand and stroked the feather dangling from her right ear. “I’ll enjoy thinking about my box holding those beautiful earrings.”
“Let me guess,” Fiona said. “You’re a Scorpio.”
Even Eleanor, who didn’t believe in astrology, knew what that meant.
She watched Fiona float off, feeling the heaviness of her own body—her swollen ankles, her puffy face. Their baby kicked all day long now, and her back ached. As an economy measure, she had stopped buying the expensive cream she used to ask Cam to rub over her belly. When the ritual had ended, somewhere around her fifth month, he seemed not to have noticed. The skin of her belly was covered with striations now. Fiona had worn a midriff top, with a peasant skirt that hung low on her hips.
Another beautiful young woman approached Cam’s table. Didn’t anybody but gorgeous, penniless twenty-two-year-olds love burl bowls?
Eleanor told herself not to worry. The money part would work out. She was part of a family now.
13.
Here’s Your Daughter
They didn’t have health insurance. Even if they’d had the money for a hospital, she and Cam had decided after studyingSpiritual Midwiferythat their baby would be born at home. Eleanor had located a midwife who lived outside of Concord, a thirty-mile drive from Akersville. Valerie was in her early forties—a single mother of three girls, who sometimes came along with her to attend births. Once a month, Eleanor traveled to Concord for her checkup. In the fall, when she’d failed to get a new publishing contract, she had asked Valerie if they might pay the last installments for attending the birth with a large burl bowl. When Valerie agreed, Eleanor realized that saving the money accounted for only part of her happiness in the arrangement. It felt good to know that Cam was contributing to supporting their baby’s care. “If only we could pay the property taxes in bowls,” she said, the day they delivered Valerie’s.
Two weeks before her February due date, with Cam off in Vermont at another fair, she made the thirty-mile drive to the midwife by herself. It was already snowing lightly when she took off that morning, but by the time she set out for home—with the news that she was three centimeters dilated—the road was slick and the windshield kept icing up. A couple of miles from home, Eleanor hit a patch of ice and crashed into a tree. When she looked up the car had spun a full 180 degrees.
The instant before impact, her hand left the wheel to rest on her belly—the baby not yet born but already her instinct to protect it overtaking everything else, as it would continue to do a few thousand times in the years to come. Later, Eleanor would see the bruise from where her forehead hit the windshield and feel the throbbing in her neck. But at the time, all she felt was the quick, firm kick of thebaby—the now-familiar foot, or maybe it was a hand, pressing out just under her rib cage.
“You’re okay,” she said out loud. Nobody else in the car but her not-born baby.
The engine had stalled on impact, so she turned the key. Nothing. For a few minutes all Eleanor could do was sit in the driver’s seat of their undrivable car, her parka no longer zipping up over her belly, staring out through the shattered windshield at a tree branch resting across the glass. Sitting in the front seat, the little pine-scented cardboard tree still spinning—and outside, snow falling around her—Eleanor tried not to think about what came next. When she stepped out of the car, she took in the crumpled front end of the Toyota—the same vehicle their handful of friends had decorated with tin cans and brown-eyed Susans on their wedding day the summer before and painted with the words “Call Us Crazy, We Did It.”
Now that day felt like a hundred years ago.
Walt and Edith’s house was not that far. She knew once she got there, Walt would drive her home.
Later, when Cam got back, they had the car towed, but it was beyond salvaging. Nothing for it then but to wait for the insurance money to come through, and hard to say, when it did, what kind of vehicle they could find with the eight-hundred-dollar settlement. But Eleanor wasn’t hurt, and the baby was fine—all that really mattered.
“You shouldn’t have been driving by yourself like that,” Walt had said to her, as he stoked the woodstove after driving her home. “Where is your husband?”
Over the days that followed, as the snow kept falling and she crossed the days off the calendar, they made do with what they had in the freezer and a delivery of quiche brought in by their neighbors Simon and Tilda down the road, on snowshoes.
