Lefty Sopko had heard all of it. He sat in the corner booth looking at me over his cold coffee. Then he said, "That's a kid casing a joint, Dodie," and he meant it as a joke, and Brother didn't laugh, and neither did I.
That night after Pop went to bed I sat in the kitchen with a cup of Sanka and the lamp on and the radio low, WHOT playing the top forty, and I let myself think about Katie and Dougie for the first time in a long time, on purpose, all the way through, the way you make yourself walk past a house where something bad happened.
Katie first.
Len and I tried for six years. In 1972 it finally took. I knitted all through it. My mother taught me to knit when I was eight, at this kitchen table, and I'd never been much good, but I got better that year, because I knitted every night, sitting up in bed with Len asleep beside me and the yarn in my lap. I made a blanket. Yellow, because we didn't know which, in a basketweave stitch, with a green border, green like new leaves, because it was going to be a spring baby. In one corner I stitched a little K in the green, because if it was a girl she was going to be Katherine after my mother's mother, and if it was a boy, I told Len, I'd just pick out the K and do something else, and he said, Dodie, it's going to be a girl, I can feel it, the way men say things like that.
On a Thursday night in March 1973, eight months along, I was sitting up in bed doing the last of the border when I realized I hadn't felt her move since lunch. I knew it, I think, right then. I kept knitting. I don't know why. I kept knitting and counting stitches and waiting for a kick, and my hands were shaking so badly that I dropped stitches and pulled them up wrong, and the row I knitted that night came out crooked, a lumpy, puckered line all the way across the bottom of the green, like a seam badly sewn. In the morning we went to St. Elizabeth's and they listened with the cold thing and looked at each other and didn't say anything to us for a long time.
She was born that afternoon. She was perfect. She was very small and perfect and she did not breathe. They let me hold her for about twenty minutes, which was more than some hospitals let you then. Len held her too. Then a nurse took her, and that was all there was.
I was supposed to bury the blanket with her. That was the plan. I brought it to Hrabik's funeral home, which was Stosh's cousin's, folded up in a Strouss's box. And at the last minute I couldn't. I don't know how to explain that, except that the blanket was the only thing I had made that was going to keep living, and I could not put it in the ground. I took it home in the box and put it in the cedar chest at the foot of our bed and didn't open the chest for two years.
Len stopped talking about it. That's what Len did. He went to work and he came home and he went to the Slovak Club and he went to bed, and if I cried he left the room, not mean, just gone, like the room had a draft in it. And I got very quiet. I went to work. I married the ketchups. I didn't knit.
In the spring of 1975 Mrs. Ondrejka from church, who also worked for Mahoning County Children Services, sat down at my counter and told me there were babies sleeping in the county office in laundry baskets, and that she had thought of me. I said I'd talk to Len. Len said, if it makes you better, Dodie, and I heard what he really meant, which was if it makes you stop being so sad where I can see it, and I said yes anyway. I'm not proud of all my reasons. You don't always get to have clean ones.
They brought him to us on a Saturday in April. Three weeks old. His mother was sixteen and had left him alone in an apartment on the north side for most of a day and night while she was out somewhere, nobody said where, and a neighbor had heard him crying through the wall. When Mrs. Ondrejka put him in my arms he weighed less than a sack of sugar, and he had a diaper rash so bad it was bleeding, and he screamed. He screamed for two weeks. He didn't sleep more than forty minutes at a time. Len moved to the couch. I walked him up and down the upstairs hallway of our little rented house on Poland Avenue at three in the morning singing him every song I knew, which was mostly polkas and the Supremes.
On the fifteenth night, out of my mind, I went to the cedar chest and opened it for the first time in two years and took out the yellow blanket and wrapped him in it.