The Wednesday Sisters(88)

The winner ran the six-mile race in just over thirty-seven minutes, almost six-minute miles all that way. Linda finished less than two minutes behind her. It was the fastest she had ever run, but she was sure she could run faster.



TWELVE WEEKS AFTER Hope was born, her doctors finally gave Ally and Jim permission to start bringing her out into the world. They took her for a walk around the neighborhood that evening, stopping at each of our houses, leaving Maggie and Davy, who'd not yet been allowed to see her in person before, awake long past their bedtimes, still talking about little Hope. We all agreed to meet Ally and Hope at ten the next morning—a Wednesday, but Kath arranged to have the morning off so she could join us—to share Hope's first outing to the park. Ally had been imagining this moment ever since she first stood alone inside her house, watching us through her window, wishing she belonged. None of us was going to miss this.

Ally was already there, just sitting down on our old Wednesday bench, when Mags and Davy and I came out the front door. Three mothers sitting together on the next bench were talking to her as she gathered Hope from her buggy and began to unwind her blankets, to settle in. The moment we'd crossed the street and I let go of Maggie's hand, she took off like a shot for Ally and Hope, shouting, “Hope!” I hurried after her with Davy, and arrived to find Maggie dancing around Ally, begging, “Can I hold her, please?” In her excitement, she'd practically careened into Ally.

Ally had just finished extracting Hope from her wrappings, and there was just the briefest pause as the other mothers registered Hope's skin color before one of them said, “Isn't she a cutie?” and another said, “She's so tiny. How old is she?”

“She isn't yours, is she?” the third, a dumpy brunette, asked.

“She's my daughter,” Ally said. “Yes.”

“Can I hold her, please can I?” Mags repeated.

“She's your daughter?” the dumpy brunette said to Ally.

“Her name is Hope,” Maggie informed the woman in no uncertain terms. “Her birthday is March seventeenth, and we gave her her first teddy bear, Anna Page and Julie and Jamie and me did.”

“Me, too,” Davy said.

“And Lee-Lee and Lacy, too,” Maggie said.

“We named him Mr. Pajamas,” Davy said.

The woman frowned at them.

“Please can I hold her?” Maggie begged.

Ally looked so nervous that I said, “Not yet, Maggie. Hope is still awfully little.”

“But I can hold Davy and he's bigger,” Maggie said.

Ally patted the bench next to her and said of course Maggie could hold Hope, and Maggie hopped right up between Ally and the women on the other bench.

“You have to hold her really carefully, especially her head,” Ally said. “See how I'm holding her? With her head on the crook of my elbow?”

“That's the way Mommy taught me to hold Davy,” Mags said, and Ally said that's right, of course it was.

Jamie and Julie came running over at full speed as Maggie scooted right up next to Ally and Ally slid the baby over into Maggie's lap, quickly looping her arm around Maggie's waist to secure Hope herself even though the baby was now, as far as my daughter could tell, completely within her control. Maggie's round face was so full of delight that it made me wonder what she would look like when she held her own daughter someday, my granddaughter. It made me a little sorry for Ally's mother: despite Ally's sister Ruth's efforts to sway their parents, her mother had only hesitated a moment when Ally had called to tell them Hope was born, before she'd hung up on her.

“I get to hold her first,” Maggie crowed, “because I know how to hold babies.”

“I want a turn! I want a turn!” the twins insisted as Linda arrived with J.J.'s hand in her grasp.

“Easy, girls,” Linda said. “Hope is a baby, not a toy.”

The women on the bench watched this all, the first two smiling indulgently, but the dumpy one frowning. “Why did you adopt a colored baby?” she asked.

Ally stared at the woman for a moment, still with both hands on her daughter, then looked off to the empty spot where the mansion had been, where all that was left was a bare scrape of rocky earth run through with tractor-tire marks.

“She's half Caucasian and half Indian,” Ally said. “And she isn't adopted.”

“Couldn't you get a white baby?” the woman said.

Linda turned and gave the woman her most withering look.

“Linda, don't,” Ally said. And as Brett and Kath and their children, too, arrived at the bench, Ally said, “I'm taking Hope down the baby slide. Anyone want to come?”

The whole lot of us, without so much as a backward glance at the obnoxious woman on the bench, swarmed together onto the playground. I held Hope as Ally climbed the three little steps up the baby slide and sat at the top. I handed her daughter to her then, and we all cheered wildly together as Ally, with Hope firmly in her lap, slid down the little slide.