My son’s wife walked out without one word to me after eleven years of Sunday dinners at my table. “She couldn’t stand you, Mama,” my son said. “That’s why she left.”
So I stopped setting her plate. Her name is Jolie. She came to her first Sunday dinner at my house when she was twenty-seven, and she was so nervous she knocked over the sweet tea.
I got a towel, she tried to help, and we both ended up laughing over the wet tablecloth. The next Sunday she came back. By the second year, she was calling me Mom.
Her own mother had died when she was nine, and she’d been raised in foster homes all over southern Missouri. She once told me she had never had anybody show her how to make biscuits. I taught her at my kitchen counter, with flour on both our hands and a pan of lumpy dough between us.
For eleven years, she came to dinner on Sundays. She’d bring something when she could, but mostly she brought herself and stayed to help me clear the table. My late husband used to sit back and listen to us talk.
He said I could end an argument with one word.
“Well.”
I worked thirty years setting type for the county paper here in Lebanon, before computers took that job. Even now, I read every church bulletin and every menu for mistakes. I notice a crooked line before I notice the picture beside it.
That’s just how my eyes work. Jolie wanted a baby. I knew it from the way she held every baby at First Baptist, like she wanted to remember exactly how it felt.
But whenever the subject came up at my table, Barrett gave the same answer.
“We’re fine the way we are, Mama.
Pass the potatoes.”
I didn’t push. I regret that now. I thought it was their business, and I didn’t want to make Jolie feel watched.
Years ago, I’d knitted a little pair of yellow booties for someday. They sat in a drawer, folded together, while someday kept getting farther away. Then, in March, I took them out and gave them to Jolie at Sunday dinner.
I couldn’t explain why I picked that day. I just had a feeling. She held them in both hands and started crying right there at my table.
Then she laughed at herself, and I took her picture with the booties held up between us. I thought she was crying because someday wasn’t going to come. I didn’t know what she knew, or didn’t know, then.
A month later, in April, Barrett came to Sunday dinner alone. I had set three places. When he walked in without Jolie, I looked past him toward the front door.
“Where’s Jolie?”
I asked.
He sat down and pushed his green beans around his plate. “She left, Mama. Packed her car and went.”
I waited for him to tell me more. He didn’t. I asked why, and he kept looking at his food.
“She couldn’t stand you,” he said.
“That’s why she left.
She said she was sick of Sundays.”
I set my fork down. My face felt hot, but my voice came out even.
“Well.”
That was all I said to him. I went into the bathroom afterward and ran the water so he wouldn’t hear me cry. I was furious with him for bringing me that sentence and even more hurt that some part of me believed it.
I didn’t call Jolie. I was too proud to go where I wasn’t wanted, and I won’t pretend that’s a pretty way to be. I told myself she would call if she wanted me.
In May, I tried her number once, in the middle of the night. It was disconnected. So I took that as my answer.
For a while I still set two places, one for Barrett and one for me. Then Barrett started skipping Sundays, too. I stopped waiting for him to come through the door.
By October, I was setting one place. One plate, one glass of tea, my reading glasses on their beaded chain, and the TV on so the house wouldn’t sound quite so empty. I thought maybe Barrett was right.
Maybe Jolie had only been sweet to me because she had nowhere else to go. Then, the first Tuesday night in November, my phone rang at eleven o’clock. Nobody calls me at eleven unless something has happened.
“Is this Frances Dugan?”
A woman asked.
I sat up in bed. “It is.”
“This is the labor and delivery floor at the hospital in Joplin.
You’re listed as her emergency contact.
She put you down as her mother.”
“Whose mother?”
The nurse said Jolie’s full married name. My last name.
“She’s asking for you,” she said.
“That’s all I can tell you, ma’am.”
After she hung up, I sat on the edge of my bed in my nightgown. Joplin was two hours west. I didn’t know Jolie was there.
I didn’t know she was pregnant. I didn’t even know whether that baby was Barrett’s. I called him.
He picked up on the sixth ring, sounding half asleep. I told him what the hospital had said. He went quiet long enough that I checked the phone to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.
“Stay out of it, Mama,” he said.
“That’s not my business anymore.
And it’s not yours.”
Then he hung up on me. My own son hung up on me, and I was hurt enough to want to call him right back and say something I couldn’t take back. Instead, I got dressed.
I put on my church shoes because I didn’t know what else to wear to something like this. At two in the morning, I was on the highway with the heater going and my hands tight on the wheel. The whole drive, my own head kept at it.
They’d say I picked some girl over my own boy. They’d say I was foolish for driving two hours for somebody who couldn’t stand me. I kept driving.
The hospital gave me a visitor sticker with FRANCES printed in big black letters. A nurse walked me down a long hall that smelled like floor cleaner and coffee. She stopped at a door and gave me a tired, kind smile.
“She’s been asking every hour,” she said.
I pushed the door open. Jolie was in the bed, her hair stuck to her forehead, her face red from crying or working or both. She held a baby wrapped in a striped hospital blanket.
On the baby’s feet were the little yellow booties. When Jolie looked up and saw me, her whole face crumpled.
“Mom,” she said.
“You came.
He told me you said good riddance.”
I couldn’t get a word out. Not even “well.” She shifted the baby in her arms and turned the little plastic bassinet beside her bed so I could read the card she’d taped beneath the hospital one.
In blue marker it said, “Grandma Frances, I want you to meet your grandbaby.” I looked at the card, then at the baby. Jolie’s eyes were still on me.
“Is this Barrett’s?”
I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“He’s the father.”
That answer reached me before anything else could. The baby was Barrett’s. My son had known there was a child coming, and he’d still told me this wasn’t his business.
I pulled the chair closer to her bed. “Why did you put me down as your mother?” Jolie looked down at the baby’s blanket and smoothed one corner.
“Because you were the only person I wanted there. I didn’t know if you’d come.”
“I came as soon as they called.”
“I know.”
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.
“I didn’t know if you still wanted me.”
I felt ashamed, and not in a vague way. I had let Barrett’s words stand in for Jolie’s for months. I had been so sure that calling again would make me look foolish that I didn’t think about what she might have been told.
“Jolie, I never said good riddance,” I told her.
“I never said you couldn’t stand me.
Barrett told me you were sick of Sundays.”
She looked at me as if I’d spoken a language she could almost understand. Then she shook her head.
“He told me you said good riddance after I left.”
The room felt very small. It wasn’t the same sentence, but it was the same cut. We looked at each other, and I could see her trying to decide whether to believe me.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
Jolie took a breath and shifted the baby carefully. She told me she hadn’t known she was pregnant when I gave her the booties. She’d found out after that Sunday dinner, in April.
When she told Barrett, he said he didn’t want a baby. He’d been saying they were fine as they were for years, and she had believed that meant he didn’t want children yet. This time, he told her he didn’t want them at all.
“Then why did you leave?”
I asked.
“I didn’t want to keep asking him to want a family.”
She looked tired, but she didn’t look away.
“I thought if I stayed, he’d blame me every day.”
She said Barrett told her I was angry she was pregnant and wanted her gone. He said I had called her a burden. She said she didn’t believe that at first, but then she remembered she had no way to reach me.
Her old phone number had been disconnected. She was scared of showing up at my house after being told I didn’t want her there. I had to look down at my hands.
“I never knew.”
“I know that now,” she said.
“I didn’t know it then.”
I asked if Barrett knew about the baby. Jolie nodded.
“He knew in April.
I told him before I left.”
My stomach tightened. I could hear his voice from the phone call telling me to stay out of it. For a long time, I had thought he was protecting himself from a woman who had rejected him.
Now I understood he was protecting the story he’d made up. Jolie watched me. “I don’t want you to have to choose between us.”
I told her she didn’t have to make that decision for me. Then I asked if she wanted me to call Barrett. She looked toward the bassinet.
“He should know the baby’s here,” she said.
“But I don’t want him coming in unless I say so.”
I stepped into the hall and called him. He answered quickly this time.
“The baby is here,” I said.
“Jolie says you’re the father.”
“I know,” he said.
The words came out flat, like he was still hoping the conversation would go away if he didn’t give it anything to hold on to.
“You knew she was pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“And you let me believe she left because she couldn’t stand me.”
He didn’t answer.
“She says you told her I said good riddance.”
“I didn’t say it like that.”
“What did you say?”
He let out a breath. “I told her you didn’t want her around.”
“I never told you that.”
“I know.”
It was plain now. I stood in the hall with the phone against my ear, hearing him admit it without ever saying the whole thing in one breath. He had told her I wanted her gone, then told me she wanted me gone.
He knew I was the person Jolie had listed as her mother. He knew where to find me. He had decided it was easier if we never spoke.
“Why, Barrett?”
I asked.
He was quiet again. Then he said, “I didn’t want a baby. I didn’t want everything to change.”
That explained why he had done it. It didn’t make it right. I was heartbroken and angry, and I said the next part too sharply.
“Well, you made sure everything changed anyway.”
He didn’t answer. I nearly hung up on him, but I stopped myself. I wanted the truth said where Jolie could hear it, not more of us talking around each other.
“Come to the hospital,” I said.
“Jolie will decide if you see the baby.”
He came later. I was in the room when he stopped at the doorway. Jolie had the baby against her, and the yellow booties showed beneath the blanket.
Barrett looked at the baby first, then at her.
“Can I come in?”
He asked.
Jolie didn’t answer right away. I felt my hands curl around the edge of the chair. I could have answered for her.
I didn’t.
“Come in,” she said at last.
“But don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
Barrett stepped closer. He looked tired. He also looked like the boy I had raised, which made it harder to keep my anger where it belonged.
“I knew,” he said.
Jolie looked at him. “You told me your mother said good riddance.”
“I was angry.”
“You told her I hated her.”
He turned toward me. “I didn’t know what else to say.” I thought about the photograph I’d taken in March.
I found it on my phone and showed it to him. Jolie was sitting at my table with the booties held up, laughing through her tears. The picture wasn’t proof of what he’d said to her, but he couldn’t look at it and call our Sunday dinners a burden.
“She didn’t look like somebody who couldn’t stand me,” I said.
He stared at the screen. “I know.” Jolie’s voice was quiet, but it didn’t shake.
“I was trying to have a family with you. You kept telling me you didn’t want one.”
“I thought I could handle it later.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
He looked down at the baby. “I was scared.”
“I was scared, too,” she said.
“I still told you the truth.”
Barrett put his hands at his sides. He had no quick answer. He’d made each of us believe the other had shut the door, and now there was nowhere to hide that choice.
Maybe they were both right about me, I thought. Maybe I had been foolish to come, and maybe I was making a painful room worse by insisting on the truth. Then I looked at Jolie, sitting there with the baby in the booties I had knitted, and I knew I wasn’t going to help him bury it again.
“She gets to decide what happens between you two,” I told him.
“You don’t get to use me to answer for her.”
Jolie’s eyes met mine. “I’m not going back with him,” she said. Barrett looked at her.
“Jolie, I, “.
“No,” she said.
“You knew about the baby.
You could have called me.
You could have come before tonight.”
He reached toward the bassinet, then stopped when she moved it nearer to herself. She didn’t ask him to leave. She didn’t promise him anything either.
He stood beside the bed for a while, then sat down in the chair near the wall. The choice was hers, and she let him stay only as the baby’s father, not as the husband who could still make things right by showing up once. I left them some quiet.
Before I went, Jolie asked for my number. I wrote it on the back of the visitor sticker and handed it to her. Her hand rested over mine for a second.
“Don’t let it get disconnected,” she said.
“I won’t,” I told her.
I drove home after the sun came up. I carried the visitor sticker in my coat pocket, with my name in black letters and Jolie’s number written on the back.