PART 3 — THE CRIB
Emily looked up and saw me in the doorway of the clinic office, holding a thick envelope of receipts, and said, Mom, why are you here.
Because I am the one who paid, I said. And I walked in and set my receipts on the table next to Dianes gift box with the gold bow.
Eighteen months earlier, after three rounds of IVF and all those nights Emily called me crying that they could not afford one more try, I had quietly paid for her final treatment. In cash. From my retirement. The anonymous donor, the mysterious grant, was a retired school cafeteria manager in a 2011 Camry.
The mother Emily said did not fit in with that side of the family was the reason there was a baby on that side of the family at all.
Diane, in her white Chanel jacket, had found out somehow that an anonymous donor paid, and she had come to the clinic to claim it, to tell Emily she was the one, to buy with a lie the place in the delivery room that should have been mine.
But the clinic keeps records, and I had every receipt, and the billing department knew exactly whose cash had cleared.
The woman from the clinic looked at Diane, and then at my stack of receipts, and the room went very quiet.
I did not say it to shame my daughter in front of her mother-in-law. I said it because I was done being erased. You do not have to put me in the delivery room, Emily, I told her. But you will not stand there and let someone else take the one thing I gave you in secret, so I would never have to hear you thank me.
Emily began to cry. She looked at Diane, and at the gift box, and at the receipts in my hand, and she understood everything at once.
She asked me to be in the delivery room after all. I was. I held my daughters hand when my grandson was born, and the first person to hold him after her was the grandmother in the Camry, not the one in the Chanel.
You just do not fit in with that side of the family, Emily had told me. It turned out that side of the family would not have existed without me.