Chapter 11 - The Drawer in the Spare Room
Two weeks later, the snow turned to gray slush and the municipal salt trucks stopped running down our street every morning at four.
I had driven back to my parents’ house on a Tuesday afternoon because Lily had outgrown her first set of sleepers and my mother had called—not with a demand, but with a strange, hesitant question about whether I still had the box of baby clothes my grandmother had stored in the attic.
When I unlocked the front door, the house smelled of boiled potatoes and bleach.
My mother was standing in the upstairs hallway, the door to my old bedroom—the one that had become the "storage room" the week I left for college—wide open. The twin bed, which had been covered in stacks of old National Geographics and out-of-season linens for six years, was completely bare. The mattress was shoved against the wall, revealing the dark, polished pine floorboards underneath.
She was kneeling by the bottom dresser drawer, wiping the inside with a damp yellow sponge.
"Mom?" I called out, shifting Lily higher on my hip.
She didn't look up right away. She gave the wood one final swipe, wrung out the sponge into a bucket beside her knee, and then stood up, her hand pressing against her lower back with a slight wince.
"The blankets from the cedar chest had a musty smell," she said, her voice dry. "I washed them twice. They’re in the dryer now."
I walked into the room. It wasn't a storage room anymore. The boxes of old tax forms and broken lamps were gone. In the corner sat a white wooden crib—not a new one, but an old-fashioned drop-side crib made of heavy maple that had been sanded down and repainted in a soft, cream-colored enamel that didn't match anything else in the house.
"Where did you get this?" I asked, running my hand along the smooth railing.
"Your father found it in the basement of the Methodist church in town," she said, smoothing the front of her cardigan with both hands. "The Ladies’ Aid was going to throw it out because the latch was sticking. He spent three days in the garage with sandpaper and a tube of linseed oil."
She walked over to the dresser—the same white-painted dresser I had used when I was ten—and pulled open the top drawer. Inside, neatly folded in rows like loaves of bread at a bakery, were twelve cotton onesies, four pairs of tiny woolen socks, and the yellow bonnet my grandmother had knitted.
"You don't have to keep all this here," I said, though my chest felt tight in a way that wasn't unpleasant. "We have the apartment."
"The apartment has two rooms and a radiator that clanks like a freight train," my mother said sharply, her chin lifting with a familiar flash of her old authority. "And you don't have a dryer. You’re hanging your laundry over the bathtub like a college student."
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She reached down, picked up a small blue blanket, and laid it across the foot of the crib with mathematical precision.
"Bring her on Wednesdays," she added, her voice dropping an octave as she turned toward the door. "Your father has his woodworking club on Tuesday, and I’m not running errands then. But Wednesdays are open."
