I let her come on a Saturday. Ben brought her.
She stood in the doorway of my parents’ living room in her good wool coat, and when she saw Evelyn sitting in her bouncy chair, now four months old, round-cheeked and gurgling, her copper hair sticking up like a little flame, Diane put her hand over her mouth.
She didn’t come in. She waited.
“Come on,” I said. “She won’t bite. She doesn’t have teeth yet.”
Diane walked in slowly and knelt down on the carpet in front of the bouncy chair. Her knees cracked. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Hello, Evelyn,” she whispered. “Hello, sweet girl. I’m your grandma.”
Evelyn looked at her. Then she shrieked with delight, for no reason at all, the way babies do. She kicked her legs and waved her arms and gave Diane a huge gummy smile.
Diane started crying so hard she had to sit down on the floor.
My mom brought her a box of tissues. The two grandmothers ended up sitting side by side on the carpet in front of the bouncy chair, and before I knew it they were arguing about whether Evelyn was going to be left-handed.
“She grabs with her left,” Diane said. “Look. Look at that.”
“She grabs with both,” my mom said. “She’s four months old. She grabs with her feet.”
Ben caught my eye from across the room. For the first time in months, I almost smiled at him.
Later, while Ben was changing Evelyn upstairs and my mom was making coffee, Diane came and found me in the kitchen.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “And then I’ll never bring it up again unless you want me to.”
I waited.
“When I said ‘what a disappointment’ in that hospital room,” she said, “I wasn’t talking about Evelyn. I need you to know that. I could never, ever be disappointed in her. I was talking about you. I thought you’d betrayed him. And I was so angry, and so scared, and I wanted to hurt you.” She swallowed. “It was the cruelest thing I’ve ever said in my life. To a woman who had just given birth. To my daughter-in-law, whom I love. And it wasn’t even true. Not one word of it.”
