Part 3 — Elodies Christening Gown
Paulette laid the long white gown across my arms, and I held it up to the porch light. The lace my mother had sewn in 1946 had been damp and wrinkled, but it was whole. Father Ouellette stood behind her on the step, rain on his vestments, the parish envelope in his hand. Nobody on the lawn said a word.
Paulette told me quietly what had happened that morning. Brianne and Dustin had decided to hold the christening without me. They did not want a long family argument and had told themselves that a quick ceremony with only the parents was kinder. They had taken the gown from my closet in April, with my permission, and they planned never to return it.
She knew because she had overheard them in the church parking lot. Dustin had said the gown looked old, that the baby should wear a new one from the boutique, and that his mother should keep the old one as a keepsake. Paulette, in tears, took it from the car and refused to let it go. She drove after them to tell me.
Father Ouellette opened the parish envelope and showed me the baptism certificate he had prepared. On the line for honorary godmother, Brianne had written my name in January, in her own hand, when she was still promising I would stand at the front. He said he had come to ask whether the family would like to postpone the baptism and do it properly.
A christening gown is only lace and thread, but it has carried four generations of babies into the same church.
Brianne got out of the car then. She was holding Elodie against her shoulder, and she was crying. She said she had let Dustin talk her out of it, that she had been tired and afraid of a quarrel, and she was ashamed. She said, Nana, I never meant to make you feel like a guest in your own family.
Dustin followed her to the steps and stood a few feet away with his hands in his pockets. He did not argue. He said he had been wrong about my smell, my manners, and the check that never mattered. He asked if he might apologize properly. I told him he had just done so, and that a second apology could be to his daughter, someday, in the form of a good example.
Father Ouellette suggested the baptism take place the following Sunday, with all four grandparents. The payments I had stopped stayed stopped, but I offered to buy the baby a small savings bond, to be held by the church until her eighteenth birthday. Dustin agreed to put his own paycheck toward the formula and the car seat, on a schedule that Brianne wrote down and posted on the refrigerator.
On Sunday, I sat in the front pew, wearing my mothers cameo. Paulette sat on my left with a handkerchief. Elodie was brought to the font in the 1946 gown, and the priest lifted her up, pink and furious about the water, and handed her to me. I held her against my cheek, and she smelled of milk and lavender.
Afterward, in the church hall, I took Lowells ivory rattle out of my purse and gave it to Elodie. She gripped it with both fists and put it in her mouth, where four generations had put it before. Brianne watched with wet eyes. Noah, in his good shoes, stood up straight beside me, and nobody asked me to leave early.