Chapter 8: What Mom Kept

My mother opened her front door in Dayton before I could knock.

She was leaning on a cane with a quilted robe over her hospital pajamas.

"You're early," she said. "And you look terrible."

"Thanks, Mom."

"Come here."

She pulled me into her arms and held on.

I hadn't cried at the shop or the lounge or the stairwell.

I cried on her shoulder in the front hall for a full minute.

When I stopped, she took my face in both hands.

"Tell me."

I told her everything. The lobby, the crib, the divorce papers, Summer's text to Tom.

Then I took out the ultrasound and put it in her palm.

She looked at it for a long time.

"How far along?"

"Seven weeks. Eight on Monday."

"Does he know?"

"No."

"Good." She closed her fingers around the picture. "Don't tell him until he's earned it."

"Mom."

"I'm serious, Claire. You gave that man four years of doctor's appointments and he never once sat in that waiting room with you."

I looked at her.

"He read the reports at home," I said. "He said he trusted me to tell him what mattered."

"A man who wants a baby sits in the waiting room."

She said it plainly. She'd had thirty years of marriage and she knew what she was talking about.

"I never liked it," she said. "I didn't want to say anything. You looked so happy."

The nurse came in from the kitchen drying her hands.

She was a quiet woman with gray hair in a short braid. She had been with my mother for three weeks and the two of them already had their own jokes.

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