Читать книгу Not Tonight, Honey: Wait 'til I'm A Size 6 - Susan Reinhardt - Страница 15

It was a Sunday afternoon, October 12, and the sky shone so blue it looked as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint across heaven’s floor and told it not to dry.

Everyone said it was a beautiful day. But I saw no beauty.

Several days earlier doctors had told me I’d lost my baby, just two months into the pregnancy, and that any day now I would miscarry the one whom I’d wanted so much.

On that cloudless Sunday, I heard a knock at the door. It was noon and I was wearing mismatched pajamas, had dirty hair and eyes swollen with unmet dreams and heartbreak.

No one understood. To them, it wasn’t a baby. Just a chance, one of many we later would have, like something as expendable and plentiful as disposable diapers.

My mama stood at the door wearing her typical big smile and slim-fit Levi’s. She smelled of wind and White Linen laced with ribbons of wood smoke from neighboring chimneys. Her arms were loaded with three grocery bags packed with comfort foods like Pringles and Little Debbies and the canned salmon and Carnation Evaporated Milk she was never without.

Not being the kind of woman who calls and asks, “What can I do?” she stood there on the porch until I opened the door wide enough to let her inside where she would take charge only in the way of a mother who never thinks of herself.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, wondering how I would have made it without her.

“This is what mothers do,” she said, entering the house, her heavy bags rustling.