My Tom. My mother never called me her Mimi, or called my brother her Eddie. It was always her Tom. I couldn’t even argue with it. He was my Tom, too. Since he’d left, the house had seemed like a baby’s rattle with all the jingly things inside gone.
“He’s gotta marry her.”
“I hear what you’re saying, but he’s over in Asia someplace and we don’t even know when he’s coming back or whether the mail’s getting through to him.”
“You get him back here,” yelled Mr. Fenstermach. “I’ll go over there and drag him back here myself.”
Callie whispered something. “What’s that?” my mother said.
“I’m not marrying anyone,” she said.
“You’re not planning on giving this baby away to strangers, are you?” my mother said.
Callie shook her head. “I can handle it,” she said, and, quiet as it was, she said it in this kind of voice that made me believe her. The men argued some, but my mother kept quiet, and Callie wouldn’t budge. And then it was all over, or just beginning.
I got the impression that my mother had known long before that afternoon. She was discreet, my mother. She had to be. You can’t be a nurse in a small-town hospital, know who has a crooked spine and who has a killing cancer and whose hysterectomy is because she used a Lysol douche to try to keep from having an eighth child in ten years, and not be the kind of person who can keep a secret. My mother had two texts on the wall of her bedroom in gilded frames, the Lord’s Prayer and the Florence Nightingale oath. “Hold in confidence,” it says about a nurse’s obligation. It was never my mother who gave things away; it was the looks on other people’s faces when they saw her.
I had a fifth-grade teacher who I could tell my mother didn’t like, and who didn’t like her, and it wasn’t until the week my mother died, when I was telling her stories to take her mind off the pain in her gut, that she said to me, “That Mrs. Prentiss? She beat her boy. I was sure of it. She or her husband. But I couldn’t prove a thing.” I don’t think she would have told me even then if both Prentisses hadn’t been dead, and their son living somewhere out west. I remembered the wary look Mrs. Prentiss had had those few times my mother had come to school.
Callie gave my mother a look that day, but it was more an exchange of understanding, and that’s what they came to. Callie was going to need help, and my mother wanted a hand in the raising of her grandchild. I think my mother kind of admired Callie, admired her nerve, admired her determination to keep her kid at a time when a pregnant teenage girl either got married or gave her baby away. But it made her start watching me even more than she normally did. She needn’t have worried. Every time I thought of what Tommy and Callie had done, it gave me a funny feeling, and not a good one. I liked kissing and even then some, although I’d done very little of it, mostly in the hallway at mixers with a boy from my homeroom named John Gellhorn, who said “wow” each time we came up for air. But what came after just seemed strange to me. And Callie and Tommy were such a mismatch, him all fireworks and her so not.
But I got to admire her, too. She’d had to leave school before Clifton was born, and when he was three months old she’d gotten the job at the diner. My aunt Ruth said the baby was named after some movie actor I’d never heard of, but Callie said she’d just seen the name in a book and liked it. Her grandmother took care of him sometimes, and so did her mother. Her father told my father that he was washing his hands of the whole business, and it seemed like he was standing by that. “I’ve lost respect for Pete,” my father said, and that made me proud, that my father felt that way.
I asked Ruth if she’d help with Clifton, but she looked shaky and said, “Oh, good gracious, Mimi, I’m not up to all that.” So I worked eight to four at the diner that summer, and then Callie came in and handed Clifton over to