Future Home of the Living God(72)

“How you feeling?” she says at last.

“Like I want to have this baby tomorrow.”

I stretch hard and then cradle you, sitting up. Sweetie doesn’t say anything, just helps me to my feet. I’m wearing a huge black T-shirt that says Anishinaabe Warrior, and a pair of shrunken sweatpants that tie underneath my vast belly. I look like crap, but I feel wonderful.

“I’m so big there’s nowhere to really hide me. But are they looking? Does the tribal militia protect pregnant women? I want to stay right here. I don’t want to go farther north. Right here is where I want to have my baby. Except . . . maybe not in this room.”

Sweetie just says, “We’ll talk to Eddy.”

In the kitchen, the all-purpose connecting room of the house, Mom mixes brown sugar into the raisin-dotted oatmeal and gets ready to spoon oatmeal into Grandma’s mouth. Grandma watches, her eyes sharp sparrow eyes, ready to peck. As Mom raises the spoon to feed a bite to her, Grandma snatches the spoon from her hand and begins to shovel in the oatmeal by herself.

“Okay!” says Mom.

She turns as I come in and her smile is subdued. She is worried about us being here, I can tell. Sweetie pulls up behind her.

“I’m gonna make you brown oatmeal cakes,” she says.

Sweetie opens the little firebox and adds another piece of wood to the old cookstove with green enamel trim. Last August it was a homey decorative piece of nostalgia set in a corner and covered with knickknacks. Now it is the center of the house. Sweetie spoons a clump of congealed oatmeal onto a cast-iron skillet. Then drips bacon grease into the skillet, runs it under the oatmeal cake, presses it with a spatula. A delicious smell comes off the pan and she delicately lifts the edge of the oatmeal cake, flips it. More brown oil slides underneath. She tips the cake onto my plate. It prickles with delicate crust and is so good that I ask for another before I’ve finished the first.

Sera looks at me ironically, and the look I give her back says, “Yeah, bacon grease.” I pat my belly. The black T-shirt is stretched tight.

“Only forty-two shopping days until Christmas,” I say, my mouth half full of crispy oatmeal. “I should wear a bow around my belly.”

It is like I’ve dropped a stone into a well. Mom’s silence in the kitchen magnifies the words so they seem to echo. I look up from my plate because the sensation in the room is so peculiar—I can tell Mom is trying to control her hyperalertness and fear. They all know my due date, but only Mom is frozen.

“Hey, it was a joke!” I try to lighten the atmosphere. But nobody says a word. I sense that each hopes the other will speak first, but none of them can think of what to say, I guess, because one by one they shut their mouths. At last, Grandma croaks, “My first baby ran me ragged. Get me the album, Sweetie.”

Sweetie goes into the other room to find it. I’m bewildered by my mom’s stricken face, her stiff back.

“Don’t worry, Mom.”

“Of course,” she says swiftly. “You’ll be fine.”

“I couldn’t find your book, Grandma,” says Sweetie, returning. “Now come on, Cedar. We’re gonna sit on the back porch before the air gets too cold. The sun’s out nice today. We’ll get some fresh air.”

Sweetie’s got a cigarette half hidden in her palm. She sees me notice it.

“My stash,” she says. “When things blew up, we quick threw the inventory in the basement. Mainly, we use ’em for—”

“Trade,” I say. “And nobody delivers on their due date. Don’t stress yourself.”

“Babies don’t stress me,” says Sweetie. She swivels her hips and strikes a match, poses to accept a light from herself. “I needed an excuse, though, to come out here and smoke. And talk to you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you . . . wanna talk?”

“What about?”

She looks down at her feet, in cute moosehide moccasins trimmed with rabbit fur. Sweetie makes them. She’s making a pair for me, and for you, baby. But she won’t show them to me until you are born. Old-time Ojibwe superstition. She shrugs, blows smoke, and mutters.

“What do moms and daughters talk about?”

“Beats me. I’m not doing so hot with Sera.”

I am stalling because this is so unexpected. Sweetie momming me when in truth I’ve almost begun to think of her like an older sister. Someone more like me than Sera, which makes me feel happy and disloyal all at the same time. But there is something that I want to ask Sweetie. And I want to ask her without getting hostile, or upset, because maybe I am starting to understand that her decision may have been more difficult than I could understand, before you.

“Did you actually see me, as a baby I mean, before you gave me away?”

I try to say this in a neutral voice but my throat quavers. And I can immediately tell that Sweetie was hoping to talk about something less fraught and emotional. But I don’t feel like letting up. So I wait. She lights another cigarette.

“Shit,” she says. “This is my last one. Okay. I had you, didn’t I? So yes, I did see you. And Glen was there.”

“Wait, not Sera? Just Glen?”

Sweetie eyes me carefully, then gives a little shake. “Glen was there first, I mean. It was, you know, this open adoption kind of thing. So we had a couple of days where I was in the hospital and I was . . . see, I was around Little Mary’s age and pretty much the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. She’s just like I was. Only I was punk.”