The Name

I went back to Lacombe this morning.

I’d been thinking about that baby since the morning I brought the blanket. You do, with a new one. They get into your mind and they stay there, small and warm, like a coal you’re keeping. I’d catch myself at the sink wondering was she sleeping, was she eating. Wondering was Renée eating, which is the thing nobody thinks to ask the new mother, because everybody in the room is looking at the baby.

So I made a gumbo.

Not for the baby. The baby’s got all she needs and it’s attached to her mama. The gumbo was for Renée. New to a first child, a young woman forgets she’s got a body of her own that wants feeding. She’ll stand at the counter eating soda crackers over the sink and call that a meal. I know that woman. I was that woman, three times over.

I brought it in my own pot. On purpose. You carry a woman food in your own dish, and now she has to bring the dish back, and now there’s a next time built right in, whether she meant to give you one or not. Forty years I been doing that. Nobody’s caught me yet.

Renée came to the door different this time. Still tired. That tired lives behind the eyes and it don’t wash off for a good while. But she was holding that baby like she belonged to her now. That first morning she held her like a question. Today she held her like the answer.

“Mother Baptiste,” she said, and she stepped back to let me in, which she didn’t do the first time. The first time we talked on the porch. This time I was let inside. That’s a thing too, being let in. It means something has settled.

I set the pot down. I washed my hands at her sink. I asked could I hold her, and Renée handed her over easy this time, and I looked down at that little face, still working on us, still trying to figure out who all these people are.

“She got a name yet,” I said.

Renée told me.

Cora.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I knew a Cora. Renée’s grandmother, the one raised her mama, gone now going on four years. A Cora who sang second soprano and could not reach the high note and reached for it anyway, every Sunday, and meant it. I learned the half of what I know about a needle and thread from that woman, in her front room, of an evening, when I was young.

And here was her name. Brand new again. Wide awake in my arms, trying to figure us out.

I didn’t tell Renée any of that. Some things you don’t set down on a young mother who’s already carrying all she can hold. I just said, “That’s a good name.” And it is. It’s a name that knows how to be loved, because it already was, once, all the way through, by people who are gone on now.

I gave the baby back. I told Renée to eat that gumbo herself before she goes handing it out the door, because she will, she’ll feed the whole street and call it supper and forget her own plate.

Then I walked home down Lacombe, saying it to myself the whole way.

Cora.

A pot left on her counter, so there’s a next time. An old name, made new this week, and wide awake. That’s enough.

That’s a Sunday.