Mercies

The Long Saturday

Chapter 60: Mercies

By June, Clara has learned five useful facts.

Bananas can be thrown.

The dog three houses down exists to be answered.

Laundry is best unfolded after adults finish it.

My glasses are not part of my face by natural right.

And mornings begin long before arguments about them are worth making.

It is Saturday.

Warm already.

The kind of Ohio morning that arrives with birds too loud for piety and sunlight on the kitchen floor before coffee has earned it.

Clara wakes at 5:48 with the indignant squawk of a citizen filing grievance.

I go get her while Norah sleeps another forty minutes because whoever says marriage is fifty-fifty has never met a teething child.

The house is blue and quiet.

Clara stands in the crib gripping the rail in her ridiculous cloud pajamas, hair pointing in twelve theological directions.

"Good morning," I whisper.

She blinks at me.

Then smiles so suddenly I forgive her the hour.

In the kitchen I settle her on one hip and make coffee one-handed, which is the skill no ordination process bothered to test and the one I now use most.

The kettle starts.

Clara drums both palms on my shoulder and says something that may one day become language and is currently closer to jazz.

"Strong point," I tell her.

She tries for my glasses.

"No."

She laughs like this is the first excellent joke either of us has heard.

By seven Norah is up, barefoot and half-awake, wearing one of my T-shirts and the expression of a woman who has not been given enough hours but intends to proceed anyway.

"What time did she get up?"

"Illegal time."

"Fair."

Norah kisses Clara first, me second, which is the correct hierarchy under current conditions.

Breakfast happens in layers.

Coffee.

Toast.

One high-chair tray wiped three times and still morally sticky.

Strawberries cut into defensible shapes.

Clara squashing half a banana into her hair with visionary commitment.

"You know," Norah says, watching this, "I used to think artistry would look different."

"Less fruit-based."

"Considerably."

The kitchen window is open.

Somewhere down the block a mower starts too early.

The maple outside the sink is full and indifferent.

The room holds us the way rooms do after enough use: without surprise.

Daniel's photo still visible from the table if the light catches it.

Micah's route card still pinned by the back door.

Nothing hidden.

Nothing enthroned.

Just company.

Mom comes by at nine with strawberries and basil and an opinion about our curtains she has been saving up all week.

"They've given up," she says, looking toward the front room.

"They are curtains," Norah says.

"They are morale."

Clara bangs both palms on the high-chair tray until Mom picks her up, which was almost certainly the intended outcome.

"Manipulator," Mom says into Clara's neck, already doomed.

At eleven, while Norah is at the studio for a quick unload and Mom is in the garden attempting to reorganize nature by main force, I stay home with Clara.

We stack blocks.

She eats one of them.

We read the board book about farm animals.

She prefers the page with the tractor for reasons no literary critic will ever satisfy.

At noon I carry her into the yard.

The grass is warm.

The tomatoes are coming in green and arrogant.

Mom is kneeling in the dirt with the expression she once reserved for grief and now increasingly reserves for cucumbers.

"She needs a hat," she says without looking up.

"She has a hat."

"On her head, Caleb."

Fair.

I put the hat on.

Clara removes it immediately and laughs in my face.

Motherhood, grandmotherhood, and theology all agree on at least one point: free will arrives early.

By afternoon the house is full in the ordinary way it has learned to be full over the years.

Jude for lunch because he was "in the neighborhood" and also because he could smell tomatoes three blocks away.

Maria, home from college for the weekend and somehow even more authoritative with a baby on one hip than she was with folding chairs at sixteen.

Dylan and Stephanie stopping by to drop off a bag of peaches from her sister's farm.

Clara regarding everyone like a minor dignitary working a difficult room.

At 2:17, while Jude is explaining to Maria why church budgets are the last frontier of sanctification, the microwave clock glows the time in green numbers and Clara throws half a banana at the cabinet with such delighted force that it leaves a pale crescent near the spice rack.

The only thing it changes is the cabinet.

I wipe the cabinet with a dish towel while Clara laughs herself breathless in the high chair and Dylan says, "Honestly, strong throw."

Later, when the heat eases, Norah and I spread a blanket in the garden.

Clara crawls to the edge of it and studies grass like a new religion.

Mom snaps beans into a bowl.

Jude snores lightly in the shade because lunch defeated him.

Maria is telling Dylan he drives like a youth-pastor warning video.

Through the open back door I can see the kitchen sink, the dish rack, the bulletin strip with the route card, the small domestic evidence of a life no longer surprised by its own continuance.

Norah sits beside me and leans her shoulder into mine.

"You okay?" she says.

I look at Clara, who has succeeded in grabbing one fistful of grass and is trying to decide whether this constitutes victory, at the kitchen window, at the garden, at my wife laughing because Mom has just called Jude "structurally useless after sandwiches."

"Yeah," I say.

Clara turns at the sound of my voice and laughs.

The day keeps going.