Chapter 13: The Ward

I didn't answer my father.

I had nothing in my mouth but the taste of a cold hospital corridor.

"Lucinda doesn't know I came," Luther said, and pressed the elevator button three times. "Please let it stay that way a little while."

The doors closed on his navy shoulders, and I went back to Maybelle's room and pretended to be someone who had heard nothing.

At nine the next morning I carried a red Christmas tin through the cardiac unit.

It was a Danish butter cookie tin, dented at one corner, with a faded snowman on the lid.

Maybelle sat up in bed with a cardigan over her gown and a breakfast tray she had not touched.

Raylan had the visitor's chair, a paper cup of tea, and a crossword he was losing.

"Seven letters, 'stubborn,'" he said.

"Married to me," Maybelle said, and held out both hands for the tin.

I put it in her lap.

She sat with her thumbs on the lid for a long moment.

"I never opened this in front of anyone," she said. "Not my sister, not the church ladies, not even this one here."

"Mama, you don't have to."

"I do. I've been meaning to since you were nine."

She pried up the lid with a thumbnail.

Inside lay a pink knitted cap no bigger than my fist, and under it a paper hospital band gone the color of weak tea.

Maybelle lifted it out by the edges.

The ink had faded, but I could read every word.

BABY GIRL CALHOUN. 03/14/2003. 5 LBS 6 OZ.

"She was born five weeks early, in St. Brennan's, three hours after the girl they gave me," Maybelle said.

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