I wouldn’t know how to raise a boy; I would have to defer to Cade on everything I didn’t understand, and that encompassed so much that I wondered how the child would even feel like mine at all. Cade and I had already decided that I would choose the name for a girl and he for a boy; without any hesitation I chose Miranda, after my mother. It was a fair agreement, but secretly I wished to choose the boy’s name, too, so that no matter how much he emulated Cade, he would still turn his head at a name I loved.
I stepped down off the stool and pulled on my clothes—the jeans that still fit if I pushed the waistband down beneath my stomach, the radio station T-shirt that had once been relegated to the sleep-shirt drawer before its roominess gave it a new appeal. At least I had Leela now—not my own mother, no, but a woman who had raised sons as well as a daughter, who knew the pain I would be facing and might hold my hand through it. I had only a few months to build a relationship with her before the baby arrived, and since she was a farm woman I had a guess at how best to do that: to share her work. That would mean something to her.
I tied back my hair and tramped upstairs to Leela’s attic craft room. The large folding table was strewn with items Dodge had sold on eBay—oddly sized, often fragile knickknacks he’d collected from clean-outs of storage units the family owned. Once a year they seized the contents of any unit that was far enough behind on its rent and sold off the items one by one. In a larger community they would have held an auction for the entire lot, but here Dodge believed it more lucrative to sell things off one at a time. This year they had declared two of the twelve units abandoned, and so the craft room was cluttered with Hummel figurines, ceramic eagles, shot glasses and gaudy lamps. I’d offered to pack it all up for shipping, and I definitely had my work cut out for me.
But I didn’t mind. The craft room was a tall, vaulted space, with a ceiling fan to stir the air and open windows that looked out on the front and side yards; it felt like a refuge, and all the more so when I considered the smoky air and dark rooms downstairs. The walls were painted sky-blue, and all around the room, at the height I could reach on tiptoe, hung metal barn stars painted like American flags. These stars—large, sturdy and full of dimension—Leela painted, packaged and sent along with Dodge as he made his trips to the post office, mailing them off to customers around the country who bought them online. Most bore mottoes painted on strips of wood suspended between the stars’ two lowest rays—Glory Glory Hallelujah, or God Bless America, or Sweet Land of Liberty. If the customer requested, she attached a wired yellow ribbon, looped into a bow, no extra charge.
In the beginning Leela had seemed shy of me, giving me a wide berth and speaking to me only about what was necessary, but gradually she seemed to be warming to my company. After each morning of packing up eBay items, I began helping her with the craft orders by painting the mottoes across the stars she had otherwise completed. Candy sometimes doesn’t get them quite right, she told me in a conspiratorial tone, and I had to suppress a giggle; it was no big secret that her daughter wasn’t much of a speller. I was glad to have an easy way to make myself useful.
One warm afternoon I carried my box of stars downstairs and settled into the chair beside Elias, who didn’t acknowledge me. He was watching his usual fodder: a game show made up of contestants trying to cross a water-based obstacle course using small foam rafts, lengths of PVC pipe and giant rubber balls, narrated in crude double entendre. I had never once seen him crack a smile at it.
“You and Cade need to have a guy’s night out one day soon,” I said. “I think you both could use it.”
Elias gestured toward my chair as if it were a throne. “He could always come over here and watch Wipeout with me. Not like I’m a tough person to pin down.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing.