The Sock
At thirty-six weeks pregnant, I cried over a sock.
It was a Thursday night in October. Nine-forty. I’d been on my feet since six that morning. I’d taught four classes of second graders how to find a book in the library using the call numbers, and I’d done three loads of laundry after supper, and I was standing in our laundry room in Fort Collins, Colorado, folding the last one.
One sock fell. A gray athletic sock. One of Cole’s. It slipped off the top of the pile and dropped down into the gap between the dryer and the wall.
I looked at it. Down there in the dust and the lint. About eighteen inches down.
I couldn’t reach it.
That sounds ridiculous. I know it does. Eighteen inches. A grown woman can reach eighteen inches.
But I was thirty-six weeks pregnant. My belly was the size of a beach ball. My lower back felt like somebody had driven a railroad spike into it, right above my tailbone. Bending over meant folding myself in half around a seven-pound baby, and every time I did it, she kicked me in the ribs so hard I saw stars.
And my husband was standing right there.
Cole was leaning in the doorway of the laundry room. Scrolling on his phone. He’d come in to get a clean T-shirt out of the basket. He’d been standing there for two minutes.
He was close enough to reach it. One step and a bend. Three seconds.
“Could you get that?” I asked.
He glanced up from his phone.
He looked at the sock. Then at me. Then back at his phone.
“You’re pregnant, Maren,” he said. “You haven’t lost your arms.”
He said it lightly. Like a joke. The way he says most things.
Then he took a T-shirt off the top of the pile I’d just folded and walked out.
I stood there in the laundry room for a long time.
Then I started crying. Over a sock.
Not loud. I didn’t want him to hear. I stood there with my hands on the dryer and cried into the warm laundry. Big, stupid, silent tears. Because my back hurt. Because I was so tired I couldn’t think. Because there was a sock eighteen inches down and I couldn’t reach it, and the person who could didn’t think it mattered.
We both worked full-time.
I’m the librarian at Bauder Elementary. Seven-forty to three-thirty, plus after-school book club on Tuesdays. Cole is a sales rep for a beverage distributor. He drives a company truck all over northern Colorado, calling on bars and grocery stores and convenience stores. Eight to five.
We make about the same money. We split the mortgage. We split the bills. Down the middle. Fifty-fifty. Cole’s idea, when we got married four years ago.
“Partners,” he said. “Equal.”
Somehow, only his evenings belonged to him.
He’d come home at five-thirty and sit down on the couch with his phone and the TV. Or he’d go to the garage and work on his truck. Or he’d go to the gym. Or he’d play video games with his college buddies online, with a headset on, until eleven.
I’d come home at four and start dinner. Then clean up from dinner. Then laundry. Then lunches for tomorrow. Then the dishwasher. Then the bills, which I did because I’m better at spreadsheets. Then the nursery, which still wasn’t done. Then a shower. Then bed.
And now there was a baby coming. In four weeks. Maybe less.
I didn’t pick up the sock that night.
I left it. Down there behind the dryer. In the dust.
I finished folding the laundry and carried the basket upstairs on my hip, one step at a time, holding the railing, and put everything away, and got into bed.
Cole came to bed at eleven-twenty. He kissed my shoulder. He said goodnight.
He didn’t say anything about the sock.
Chapter Two: Saturday
When his mother, Della, visited Saturday, I was carrying a laundry basket against my hip.
She lives in Loveland, twenty minutes south. She drives up once a month to bring us food. A lasagna, usually. Or a pot of her green chile. She’s sixty-four, small and fast and sharp, with short gray hair she cuts herself and reading glasses she keeps on a beaded chain.
She’d been a nurse for thirty-one years. At the hospital in Loveland. Night shift, mostly. She retired two years ago.
She came in the front door with a casserole dish in her arms and a big bag from King Soopers on her elbow. She found me at the bottom of the stairs.
I was holding the laundry basket. Towels. The good bath towels, which we’d need for when the baby came, because the hospital said to have clean towels ready. I’d washed them that morning and folded them and now I had to get them upstairs to the linen closet.
Fourteen stairs. I’d counted them that week. Every single one.
Cole was on the couch. Watching college football. Colorado State versus somebody. He had his feet up on the coffee table and a bag of tortilla chips on his chest.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, without getting up.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Della said. She set the casserole on the kitchen counter. She looked at me at the bottom of the stairs with the basket. Then at Cole on the couch.
“Cole,” I said. “Could you take this up for me? Please?”
He didn’t look away from the TV.
“What exactly have you done all morning?” he asked from the couch.
I stood there with the laundry basket on my hip.
I started listing things. I don’t know why. I just did. Like I had to prove it.
“Breakfast,” I said. “For both of us. Dishes. I unloaded the dishwasher and loaded it again. Towels. I washed all the towels. Two loads. I put the crib sheets in the wash, because we have to wash everything before the baby comes. I wiped down the bathrooms. I called the hospital about pre-registration. I paid the electric bill. I…”
I stopped. My voice was shaking.
Della crossed the living room.
She didn’t say anything. She just walked over to the bottom of the stairs and took the basket from me. Out of my hands. Like it weighed nothing.
Then she turned around and looked at her son on the couch.
“Why are you making her prove she’s tired?” she asked.
Cole sat up. He set down the chips.
“I’m not making her prove anything,” he said. “I’m just asking. She acts like she’s been working in a coal mine.”
“She’s thirty-six weeks pregnant, Cole.”
“Lots of women are thirty-six weeks pregnant,” Cole said. He shrugged. “They still do stuff. They don’t fall apart over a sock.”
He looked at me. I didn’t know he’d heard me crying on Thursday night. I’d thought he was in the garage.
“Mom, come on,” Cole said. He leaned back on the couch. He was smiling. Easy. Teasing. “You raised three kids. You never acted this helpless.”
Her face changed.
I’d known Della for six years. Since Cole and I started dating. I’d seen her laugh and seen her annoyed and seen her cry at our wedding.
I’d never seen this.
Something went out of her face. Some light. And what was left behind looked old and tired and hurt in a way that went all the way down.
“You remember being taken care of,” she said quietly. “You don’t remember what it cost me.”
She set the laundry basket down on the bottom stair.
She picked up her purse from the kitchen counter.
She walked out the front door without saying goodbye. The screen door banged behind her.
Cole stared at the door.
“What was that?” he said.
I didn’t answer. I picked up the laundry basket. I started up the stairs. Slowly. One step at a time.
He didn’t get up to help.
Chapter Three: Fifteen Minutes
Fifteen minutes later, she returned with a watermelon and two small cantaloupes.
I heard her car in the driveway. Her old Subaru with the bad muffler. Then the front door opened without a knock.
Della came in carrying a watermelon in her arms. A big one. Round and dark green. The kind they sell at the end of the season, for two dollars, because nobody wants them anymore in October.
Two little cantaloupes were balanced on top of it. And a roll of Glad plastic wrap was tucked under her arm. The big one. The professional kind, from Costco.
Cole looked up from the TV.
“Mom,” he said. “What are you doing?”
Della set the watermelon down on the coffee table. On top of his tortilla chips. She set the two cantaloupes beside it.
“That watermelon weighs eighteen pounds,” she said. “I weighed it at the King Soopers. The cantaloupes are about three pounds each.”
She looked at him.
“That’s a little lighter than what Maren’s carrying,” she said. “Baby, placenta, amniotic fluid, extra blood volume. Usually twenty-five to thirty-five pounds at this stage. But it’s close enough.”
My husband laughed when she explained.
He laughed out loud. He threw his head back.
“You think I can’t handle a little extra weight?” he said. “Mom. I carry cases of beer all day. I lift a hundred pounds before lunch.”
“Then wear it,” Della said, “while you do everything you expected her to do today.”
He stood up.
He was still smiling. He looked at me, standing on the stairs halfway up with the laundry basket. He winked.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s settle this.”
She held the watermelon against his stomach.
Right against the front of his Colorado State T-shirt. At his belly. Where a pregnancy would be.
Then she took the plastic wrap and started wrapping. Around the watermelon. Around his back. Around the watermelon again. Around and around. Like she was wrapping a pallet at a warehouse.
She used half the roll.
When she was done, the watermelon was strapped to his stomach so tight it didn’t move. Eighteen pounds. Hanging out in front of him like a basketball under his shirt.
Then she did the same with the cantaloupes against his chest.
One on each side. Wrapped tight. Over his shirt.
She stepped back.
My husband stood in the middle of our living room. Thirty-two years old. Six foot one. With a watermelon belly and two cantaloupe breasts, wrapped in plastic.
He posed for me.
He put his hands on the bottom of the watermelon, the way pregnant women do in maternity photos. He turned sideways. He stuck out his chest with the cantaloupes. He made a kissy face.
“Still think you’re special?” he said to me.
He was laughing. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
I didn’t laugh.
Della handed him the laundry basket.
The one I’d just carried halfway up the stairs. She took it out of my hands, walked back down, and handed it to Cole.
“Upstairs,” she said. “Linen closet. Fold them the way Maren does. In thirds. Then come back down, because there’s more.”
He took the basket. He held it in front of the watermelon. Or tried to. The watermelon was in the way. He had to hold it off to the side, on his hip, the way I’d been holding it.
He started up the stairs.
On the fourth step, he stopped.
He put one hand on the railing. He shifted the basket. He kept going.
On the ninth step, he stopped again.
He was breathing harder. Not a lot. But I heard it.
He made it to the top. He went into the hall. I heard the linen closet door open. I heard him putting towels away.
It took him nine minutes. I know because Della timed it on her phone.
When he came back down, he wasn’t laughing anymore.
“Okay,” he said. “That was a little awkward. Now what?”
Chapter Four: The Bottom Rack
Della had a list.
She’d made it in the car, apparently, in the King Soopers parking lot, on the back of an envelope. She took it out of her purse. She put on her reading glasses on their beaded chain. She read it out loud.
“Unload the dishwasher,” she said. “Fold and put away the second load of towels. Change the sheets on your bed. Vacuum the nursery. Assemble the changing table that’s been sitting in a box in the nursery for three weeks. Go to the grocery store. Make lunch. Clean up lunch. Make dinner.”
She looked at him over her glasses.
“That’s what Maren had planned for today,” she said. “She told me on the phone Wednesday. She was going to do all of it while you watched the game.”
He didn’t say anything. He went to the kitchen.
He opened the dishwasher. He started unloading the top rack. Glasses. Mugs. Easy. He reached up and put them in the cupboard.
Then he got to the bottom rack.
At the dishwasher’s bottom rack, he wasn’t smiling.
The bottom rack is low. Eight inches off the floor. To reach a plate, you have to bend all the way down.
He tried to bend. The watermelon hit the open dishwasher door. He couldn’t get past it.
He tried to squat instead. He got about halfway down and the watermelon pushed against his thighs and he lost his balance and grabbed the counter.
He tried to bend sideways. Reaching around the watermelon with one arm. His face was red.
It took him eleven minutes to unload the bottom rack.
Plate by plate. Bowl by bowl. Bending sideways, then standing up to put each one away, then bending again. Huffing. Grunting.
Della sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. Watching. Not saying a word.
I sat on the couch. I’d been told to put my feet up. Della’s orders.
Then the sheets.
Changing the fitted sheet left him sitting on the bed.
I could hear him from downstairs. Through the ceiling. The mattress creaking. A thump. A bigger thump. Something that sounded like a curse.
Della went up to check on him. She came back down a few minutes later.
“He’s sitting on the edge of the bed,” she said. “He got three corners on. He can’t reach the fourth one. He said he needs a minute.”
The fitted sheet on our king bed has always been the worst job in the house. You have to lean all the way across the mattress to get the far corner. Then lift the mattress to tuck it under.
I’d done it alone every Saturday for four years. Including the last thirty-six weeks.
He’d never once offered to help.
Then he dropped a sock.
He’d come downstairs with the second basket. The towels from the dryer. He was trying to fold them on the kitchen table. With the watermelon pushing him back from the table, so he had to reach.
A sock fell out of the pile of towels. A little white baby sock. One of the newborn socks I’d washed that morning. It fell off the table onto the kitchen floor. Right by his foot.
He stared at it.
He looked down at it. Past the watermelon. Past the cantaloupes. At a tiny white sock on the kitchen tile.
He didn’t bend over.
He stood there looking at it for a long time.
I waited for the joke.
Cole always has a joke. That’s who he is. That’s who he’s been since the day I met him at a friend’s barbecue in college and he made me laugh so hard I snorted lemonade.
I waited for him to say something funny. Something like, I’ve lost my arms. Or, can somebody call the fire department.
None came.
He just stood there. Looking at that sock.
Then he looked up. At me. On the couch, with my feet up and my hands on my belly.
He didn’t say anything. His face was very still.
Then he got down on his knees. Slowly. Holding the edge of the table. The watermelon pressing against his thighs. He got all the way down on the kitchen floor, on his knees, and picked up the baby sock.
He knelt there for a moment. Holding it.
Then he pulled himself back up by the table, breathing hard, and put it on the pile.
Chapter Five: Lunch
At noon, he made lunch.
Grilled cheese and tomato soup. From a can. That’s all I’d had planned. Nothing fancy.
He had to stand sideways at the stove because the watermelon was in the way. He burned the first grilled cheese. He dropped the spatula and had to get down on his knees again to pick it up.
When it was done, he set three bowls of soup on the table. Three grilled cheese sandwiches. One burned.
He gave himself the burned one.
He sat down at the table. Or tried to. He had to scoot his chair way back because the watermelon wouldn’t fit under the table. He sat there with his arms stretched out to reach his bowl.
He took three spoonfuls of soup.
Then he set down his spoon.
At lunch, he reached for the plastic wrap.
At the edge of it. Where it was wrapped around his side. His fingers found the edge of the plastic and started picking at it.
“I need a break,” he said.
“So did she,” Della said.
She didn’t look up from her soup. She just said it. Quiet. Calm. Three words.
His fingers stopped.
He looked at me.
I looked down at my bowl.
I couldn’t look at him. I don’t know why. I think I was afraid of what I’d see. Anger, maybe. Or that easy smile, and a joke, and then everything would go back the way it was.
Or something worse. Something I didn’t have a name for yet.
He let go of the plastic wrap.
He picked his spoon back up.
He finished his soup.
In the afternoon, he assembled the changing table.
It took him three hours. Sitting on the nursery floor, with the watermelon in his lap like a beach ball, with the instruction booklet and an Allen wrench and forty-one screws. He couldn’t bend over far enough to see the screws on the floor. He had to pick each one up by feel.
He didn’t complain. Not once. He didn’t say anything at all.
Della went home at four. She hugged me at the door. She didn’t hug Cole. She looked at him, standing in the kitchen with the watermelon strapped to his belly, and she said one thing.
“Until bedtime,” she said. “Don’t you dare take it off before then.”
He nodded.
He made dinner. Spaghetti. He cleaned up after dinner. He started a load of laundry. He took the trash out to the curb, which meant going down the front steps and the driveway with a trash bag in each hand and a watermelon on his stomach.
I watched him from the front window. He stopped halfway down the driveway and stood there for a minute. Breathing.
Then he kept going.
Chapter Six: Night
At ten o’clock, he went upstairs.
I heard him in the bathroom. I heard scissors. The kitchen scissors, which he’d taken up with him. I heard plastic tearing. Ripping. A thump, which was the watermelon hitting the bathroom floor.
Then nothing for a long time.
That night, after the fruit came off, he barely spoke.
He came out of the bathroom in his boxers. The skin across his stomach was red and lined from where the plastic had been. He had a mark on each side of his chest from the cantaloupes.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at me.
He got into bed and turned his back before I could say good night.
I lay awake.
On my side, because I can’t sleep on my back anymore. With a pregnancy pillow between my knees and another one behind me. My back aching. The baby kicking.
I lay there in the dark and stared at the back of my husband’s head and wondered how angry he was.
Here’s what I was afraid of.
I was afraid we’d embarrassed him. His mother and me. That we’d ganged up on him. That we’d made him look stupid, wearing fruit and plastic wrap all day.
I was afraid he’d wake up in the morning angry. That he’d say his mother was crazy. That I’d put her up to it. That he’d go play video games for the whole of Sunday and not speak to me.
I was afraid that nothing would change.
And I was afraid of something else. Something I’d been afraid of for a long time. Since before I was pregnant.
That Cole was turning into his father.
Wayne Bishop. Cole’s dad. He’s sixty-six. A retired lineman for Poudre Valley REA. He lives in the same house in Loveland that he and Della bought in 1988.
He’s a nice man. Funny, like Cole. He tells good stories at Thanksgiving.
And in the six years I’ve known him, I’ve never once seen him clear a plate. Never once seen him cook. Never once seen him do a load of laundry. He sits in his recliner after dinner while Della cleans up. He calls for a beer from the living room and she brings it.
When Cole was little, Della worked night shift at the hospital. Eleven p.m. to seven a.m. Three, sometimes four nights a week. And then came home and got three kids up and fed and to school. And slept from nine to two. And got the kids from school and made dinner and did homework. And went back to the hospital at eleven.
For eighteen years.
Cole told me once that his dad used to say his mom was the strongest woman in Larimer County. He said it like a compliment.
I fell asleep around two.
The baby woke me at four, kicking my bladder. I got up and went to the bathroom. When I came back, Cole was still lying with his back to me. Still asleep. Or pretending.
The watermelon was sitting on the bathroom counter, where he’d left it. Uncut. I looked at it in the dim light from the hallway nightlight.
Eighteen pounds. He’d carried it for twelve hours.
I’d been carrying mine for eight months.
Chapter Seven: The Zipper
The next morning, a zipper woke me.
Loud. Long. The sound of a big zipper going all the way around a suitcase. Out in the hallway.
I opened my eyes. Gray light coming in around the curtains. Seven-ten on a Sunday morning. Cole’s side of the bed was empty. The covers thrown back.
Another zipper.
I got up. Slowly. The way I get up now. Rolling to the side, pushing up with my arms, swinging my legs over the edge. My back screamed.
I went to the bedroom door in my nightgown.
I found him in the hallway, kneeling beside two open suitcases.
Our suitcases. The big gray hard-sided one we took to Hawaii on our honeymoon. And the smaller navy one he uses for work trips. Both open on the hallway carpet, outside the nursery door.
He was kneeling between them. In a T-shirt and sweatpants. His hair sticking up. Holding something in his hand.
My stomach dropped.
I stood in the bedroom doorway and couldn’t breathe. All I could see were the two open suitcases. The zippers. My husband on his knees, packing.
All the fear from the night before came back at once. He’s angry. He’s embarrassed. We pushed him too far. He’s going to his parents’ house. He’s going to his buddy Travis’s. He’s leaving.
At thirty-six weeks.
“You’re leaving?” I said. My voice came out small and broken. “Because of yesterday?”
He stopped packing and looked up.
His eyes were red. He’d been crying. A lot. For a while.
He looked at me in the bedroom doorway. In my nightgown, with my hand on my belly.
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
Only then did I realize he wasn’t packing clothes.
Not his clothes, anyway.
I stepped closer.
The big gray suitcase was full of my things.
My robe. My good one, the soft blue one, folded on top. Two nursing bras with the tags still on. A pair of thick wool socks. My slippers. My phone charger, the extra-long one. A bag of the peppermint candies I like. A tube of lip balm. A hair tie. A toothbrush and toothpaste in a Ziploc bag. A pillow, our good one, in a clean pillowcase. A water bottle with a straw. A box of granola bars. Snacks. Magazines. My Kindle. Dry shampoo.
And on top of everything, a piece of paper. Folded in half.
The navy suitcase was the baby’s.
Three newborn sleepers. Folded. Three tiny hats. Six pairs of tiny socks. Including the white one he’d knelt down on the kitchen floor to pick up. A swaddle blanket. The car seat cover. A pacifier, still in the package. A pack of newborn diapers. A tiny going-home outfit, the yellow one with the ducks that Della bought us at the baby shower.
Folded. All of it. In thirds. The way I fold things.
I knew what it was. I’d been trying to do it for two weeks. Every night. After the dishes and the laundry and the bills. And every night I was too tired.
The hospital bags.
The piece of paper on top of my suitcase was my list.
The list I’d printed out from the hospital’s website three weeks ago and stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a pineapple. WHAT TO PACK FOR LABOR AND DELIVERY. Two columns. For Mom. For Baby.
Every single item had a check mark next to it.
In Cole’s handwriting.
What I saw inside made me cover my mouth.
Tears filled my eyes.
I looked at my husband, kneeling between the two suitcases on the hallway carpet, with a pair of tiny socks in his hand.
He looked up at me.
And then he said what he said next.
Chapter Eight: What Cole Said
“I was up at four,” he said.
His voice was rough. Like he hadn’t used it in a while.
“I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about that sock.” He looked down at the tiny pair of socks in his hand. “The one behind the dryer. Thursday night.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“I went down and got it,” he said. “It’s in the hamper.” He almost laughed. “It took me two seconds, Maren. Two seconds. I didn’t even have to bend that far.”
He set the tiny socks down in the navy suitcase. Carefully. Next to the others.
“And then I went in the kitchen,” he said. “And I saw the list. On the fridge. The hospital list.” He looked up at me. “It’s been up there for three weeks. I walk past it every single morning to get the milk. I never once read it.”
“I read it this morning,” he said. “At four-thirty. Standing in the kitchen in the dark. And I realized you hadn’t packed anything. Not one thing. Because you were too tired. Because you were doing everything else.” His voice cracked. “Because I wasn’t doing anything.”
He picked up my blue robe off the top of the gray suitcase. He held it.
“So I packed,” he said. “Everything on the list. I didn’t know where half of it was. I had to look in every drawer in the house. I didn’t know where you keep the nursing bras. I didn’t know you keep extra toothbrushes under the bathroom sink.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know anything. Four years. I don’t know where anything in my own house is.”
I sat down on the hallway floor. Slowly. Against the wall. Across from him.
I couldn’t stand anymore.
“Cole,” I said.
“Let me finish,” he said. “Please. I’ve been practicing this since five o’clock.”
He took a breath.
“I carried that watermelon for twelve hours,” he said. “Twelve hours. And it was eighteen pounds. And I almost cried on the stairs. Did you know that? On the ninth stair. With the laundry basket. I stood there and I thought, I can’t do this. I physically can’t do this.”
“I know,” I said.
“And then I thought, she’s been doing this for eight months,” he said. “Eight months. With more weight than that. With a person in there kicking her. And working full-time. And doing everything in this house. And I sat on that couch and asked what exactly you’d done all morning.”
He put my robe down. He put his hands over his face.
“I’m sorry, Mare,” he said through his fingers. “I’m so sorry.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
I sat there on the hallway carpet with my back against the wall and my belly in my lap, looking at my husband crying between two suitcases full of things for our baby.
“Why didn’t you ever help?” I asked finally. Not angry. Just tired. “Before? Why didn’t you ever see it?”
He took his hands away from his face.
“Because I never saw my dad do it,” he said. “Not once. Not my whole life. And I never saw my mom ask.” He looked at me. “She just did it. All of it. And I thought that’s how it worked. I thought that’s what moms do.”
He looked down at the navy suitcase.
“You remember being taken care of,” he said. Quietly. Quoting his mother. “You don’t remember what it cost me.”
He looked up.
“I don’t know what it cost her,” he said. “I don’t. I was a kid. I just remember she was always there. Making breakfast. Packing lunches. She was always tired, but she was always there.” He swallowed. “I need to know, Maren. What it cost her. I need to ask her.”
Then he reached into the pocket of his sweatpants. He took out his phone.
He held it out to me. The screen was open to an email.
From: Cole Bishop. To: Rick Hammond, his boss. Sent: 5:47 a.m., Sunday.
Rick, I’m writing to request leave starting the week Maren goes into labor. I’ve looked into it. I’m eligible for twelve weeks under FMLA, and I’ve applied for paid leave through the state’s FAMLI program, which covers ninety percent of my pay up to the cap. I submitted the application this morning. I’m taking all twelve weeks. I know it’s a lot. I know we’re short-handed. I’m sorry. But I’m going to be home with my wife and my daughter. Cole.
I read it twice.
“You’re taking twelve weeks?” I said.
“All of them,” Cole said. “Colorado pays it. I didn’t even know until this morning. I looked it up on my phone at five. It’s insurance. We’ve been paying into it out of every paycheck since 2023. Both of us.” He shook his head. “I never even looked. I just assumed I’d take a few days.”
“Rick’s going to be mad.”
“Probably,” Cole said. “He took three days when his kids were born. He’s told me that story a hundred times. Like it was something to brag about.” He looked at the suitcases. “I’m not going to be that guy.”
Chapter Nine: Della’s Story
We drove to Loveland that afternoon.
Cole called his mother first. At ten in the morning. He asked if we could come over. Just us. Without his dad.
Della was quiet on the phone for a long time. Then she said, “Your father’s golfing until four. Come at one.”
Della’s house is a brick split-level on the west side of Loveland, on a street with big cottonwood trees. She was sitting on the front porch when we pulled in. In a lawn chair. With two cups of coffee on the little table beside her.
She watched Cole come up the walk. She looked at his face. At his red eyes.
She didn’t say anything. She just handed him a cup of coffee.
We sat on the porch. Della in her lawn chair. Cole on the top step. Me in the other lawn chair, with my feet up on an overturned flowerpot, because Della made me.
Cole didn’t know how to start. I could see him trying.
“Mom,” he said finally. “Yesterday. When you said I don’t remember what it cost you.” He looked at his coffee. “What did it cost you?”
Della was quiet for a long time.
She looked out at the street. At the cottonwood trees, dropping yellow leaves. A kid riding a bike down the sidewalk.
“I’ve never told you this,” she said. “Any of you. Not you or Brandon or Kayla. Your father never told you either. We agreed. A long time ago.”
Cole didn’t say anything. He waited.
“When Kayla was born,” Della said, “you were four. Brandon was two. And I went back to work at the hospital six weeks after she was born. Night shift. Because we needed the money. Your father’s job at the REA didn’t pay enough for three kids.”
She took a sip of coffee.
“I’d work eleven to seven,” she said. “Then I’d come home and get you up and dressed and fed. Get Brandon to the babysitter’s. Nurse Kayla. Then I’d sleep from nine to one, if Kayla slept. Usually she didn’t.”
She set down her cup.
“Your father went to work at six-thirty in the morning,” she said. “He came home at five. And he’d sit in his chair. And he’d say, What’s for dinner, Del?”
“I didn’t sleep more than three hours in a row for almost a year,” she said. “And I didn’t tell anybody. Not my mother. Not my friends at the hospital. Not your father. Because I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do. You just do it.”
She looked at Cole.
“In January,” she said, “when Kayla was eight months old, I stopped being able to get out of bed.”
Cole didn’t move.
“Postpartum depression,” Della said. “That’s what they call it now. Back then, nobody called it anything. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t eat. I’d lie in bed and listen to Kayla crying in the next room and I couldn’t move.”
She stopped.
“I won’t tell you all of it,” she said. “Some of it’s mine. But it got bad, Cole. It got very bad. One of the nurses I worked with, Judy, came by the house one morning because I hadn’t shown up for my shift. And she found me. And she drove me to the hospital herself.”
“I was in the hospital for two weeks,” Della said. “In the psychiatric unit. At Poudre Valley.”
Cole put his coffee cup down on the step. His hands were shaking.
“Your father told you I was visiting Aunt Pat in Denver,” Della said. “He told everybody that. The neighbors. Church. My own mother.” She looked at the cottonwood trees. “Your grandmother Bishop came and took care of you three for two weeks. And when I came home, she sat me down at the kitchen table and said, Della, you need to pull yourself together. Wayne can’t do everything.”
Her voice broke.
“Wayne can’t do everything,” she repeated. “He’d never done anything. Not one diaper. Not one bottle. Not one load of laundry.”
Nobody said anything for a long time.
I was crying. Silently. With my hand on my belly.
Cole was sitting on the top step of his mother’s porch with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
“Mom,” he said. His voice was barely there. “I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t,” Della said. “That was the point. We didn’t want you to know. Your father said it would scare you kids. That it’d be embarrassing. That people would think I was crazy.”
She reached down. She put her hand on top of her son’s head.
“So I went back to work,” she said. “Eleven to seven. Three nights a week. And I came home and made breakfast. For eighteen more years.”
“And yesterday,” she said, “I walked into your house and saw Maren at the bottom of those stairs with a laundry basket. Thirty-six weeks. White as a sheet. And you on the couch asking what she’d done all morning.”
She took her hand off his head.
“And I saw myself,” she said. “And I saw your father. And I thought, not again. Not my son. Not in my lifetime.”
Chapter Ten: Wayne
Wayne got home from golf at four-fifteen.
He pulled his Buick into the driveway and saw Cole’s truck. He came up the front walk with his golf bag over his shoulder, whistling.
He saw the three of us on the porch. He stopped whistling.
“Well, hey,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”
Cole stood up.
He walked down the porch steps. He stood in front of his father on the front walk.
Wayne is sixty-six. Big and broad-shouldered, from thirty-five years of climbing poles. He has Cole’s smile. Cole’s easy laugh.
“Dad,” Cole said. “Mom told me. About Kayla. About the hospital.”
Wayne’s face changed.
He looked past Cole at Della on the porch. A long look.
“Del,” he said. “We agreed.”
“You agreed,” Della said. “I just didn’t argue.”
Wayne set his golf bag down on the walk. He stood there for a long time.
“It was a different time, Cole,” he said finally. “Men didn’t. You didn’t. Nobody did. My dad never changed a diaper. His dad never changed a diaper.”
“I know,” Cole said. “And I was about to be the fourth.”
Wayne looked at him.
“Yesterday,” Cole said, “Mom strapped a watermelon to my stomach. And I carried it for twelve hours. And I couldn’t unload the dishwasher. I couldn’t reach the bottom rack. I couldn’t change the sheets. I couldn’t pick up a sock.”
Wayne didn’t say anything.
“And I’m going to be a father in four weeks, Dad,” Cole said. “And I don’t know how to do any of it. Because nobody ever showed me.”
“So I’m asking you,” Cole said. “Did you ever think about it? What she was doing? While you were in your chair?”
Wayne looked at the front walk. At his golf bag. At the cottonwood leaves on the grass.
Then he looked up at the porch. At Della.
“Every day,” he said quietly. “For thirty-six years.”
Nobody said anything.
“When she came home from the hospital,” Wayne said. “In ‘96. I knew. I knew it was me. My mother kept saying, Wayne can’t do everything. And I knew I hadn’t done anything.” His voice was rough. “And I was so ashamed I couldn’t look at it. So I told everybody she was in Denver. And I went back to work. And I never said one word about it.”
He looked at Della.
“I’m sorry, Del,” he said. “I should’ve said it thirty years ago.”
Della didn’t answer right away.
Then she stood up from her lawn chair. She came down the porch steps. She stopped in front of her husband.
“You could start now,” she said. “There’s a sink full of dishes from lunch.”
Wayne looked at her. Then he almost laughed. A short, surprised sound.
“All right,” he said.
He picked up his golf bag and went inside. A minute later, I heard the water running in the kitchen.
Cole stood on the front walk and stared at the house.
“I’ve never heard my dad do dishes,” he said. “Not once in my life.”
“Neither have I,” Della said.
Chapter Eleven: Born
Our daughter was born nineteen days later.
On a Wednesday in November. At UCHealth Poudre Valley Hospital. The same hospital where Della was a nurse for thirty-one years. The same hospital where she spent two weeks in 1996.
I went into labor at two in the morning. My water broke in bed.
Cole was up before I finished saying his name.
The suitcases were by the front door. Where they’d been sitting since that Sunday morning. Packed. Every item checked off.
He’d added things over the nineteen days. A phone tripod, for pictures. A bluetooth speaker, with a playlist he made of songs from our wedding. A bag of my favorite gummy bears. A card, sealed, with my name on it, that he told me not to open until after.
He carried both suitcases out to the car. And the car seat, already installed, checked by a firefighter at the station on Drake Road. And the diaper bag. And me.
I was in labor for fourteen hours.
Cole didn’t leave once. Not to get coffee. Not to make phone calls. Not to sit in the waiting room. He stood by my bed for fourteen hours, holding my hand, rubbing my back where the railroad spike was.
When the nurse said I should try walking, he walked the halls with me. Pushing the IV pole. Stopping when the contractions came and holding me up while I leaned on him.
When I threw up, he held the basin. When I cried, he didn’t make a joke. He just held on.
Della came at eight in the morning.
She didn’t come in. Not at first. She stood in the doorway of my room in her coat. She looked at Cole, standing by the bed, rubbing my back.
Then she looked at me.
She didn’t say anything. She just nodded once. And went to sit in the waiting room.
Wren Della Bishop was born at 4:18 p.m.
Seven pounds, two ounces. Twenty inches long. With a full head of dark hair, like Cole’s. And a very loud voice, like Della’s.
Cole cut the cord. His hands were shaking so hard the nurse had to help him.
Then they put her on my chest. And Cole leaned over us both. And put his face against my hair. And cried.
That night, after everybody left, after my mom and Della and Wayne and Cole’s brother and sister all came and went, I opened the card.
The one he packed in the gray suitcase. That I wasn’t supposed to open until after.
It was a plain white card. He’d written it the morning of the watermelon. In pencil.
Mare,
I don’t know when you’ll read this. I hope after the baby comes. I hope I was there for all of it. I hope I held your hand. I hope I didn’t make any stupid jokes.
I’m not going to be my dad. I’m not going to be the guy in the chair. I’m going to pick up the sock before you ask. I’m going to know where the nursing bras are. I’m going to learn how to do everything you do, and then I’m going to do half of it.
Not because my mom made me wear a watermelon. But because I finally looked at you.
I love you. I’m sorry it took eighteen pounds of fruit.
Cole
I read it three times. Then I folded it back up and put it under my pillow.
Across the room, my husband was asleep in the hospital recliner. With our daughter on his chest. Skin to skin, like the nurses showed him. His hand on her back. Both of them breathing.
He’d changed her first diaper. And her second. And her third.
He hadn’t made a single joke.
Chapter Twelve: The Sock
Cole took all twelve weeks.
His FAMLI benefits started on November nineteenth. Ninety percent of his pay. The state paid it. Rick, his boss, called twice the first week to ask when he was coming back. Cole told him February. Rick called once more. Then he stopped calling.
In January, Rick’s wife had their third baby. Cole heard about it from a buddy at work. He called Rick and told him about FAMLI. Walked him through the application on the phone.
Rick took eight weeks.
I took my twelve weeks too. Through the school district’s leave and FMLA.
For the first time in four years, I wasn’t doing everything.
Cole did the night feedings every other night, with bottles of pumped milk. He did the laundry. He learned to fold the fitted sheets. He learned where the nursing bras were. He learned that Wren hates her left sock and kicks it off every single time.
He made dinner four nights a week. Mostly spaghetti. Sometimes tacos. Once, on Christmas Eve, Della’s green chile, from her recipe card. He called her four times to ask questions.
Wayne came over on Thursdays.
He didn’t say much. He’d hold Wren on the couch for an hour while Cole and I took a nap. He changed her diaper once, very badly, with Della standing over him giving directions.
When he finished, he held the baby up and looked at her.
“First one I ever did,” he said. “Sixty-six years old.”
Della patted him on the shoulder.
“Better late than never, Wayne,” she said.
Della comes over on Saturdays still.
She brings lasagna. She holds Wren. She sits at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and watches her son do the laundry.
She hasn’t brought any fruit.
But last week, I found a watermelon in our refrigerator. A little one. A personal-sized one, the kind they sell in February at the King Soopers for four dollars.
There was a sticky note on it in Della’s handwriting.
Just in case.
Wren is four months old now.
She smiles. She laughs. She kicks off her left sock every single time.
Last night, I was in the laundry room. Folding. Wren was in her bouncy seat on top of the dryer, watching me, kicking her feet.
Her left sock came off. Of course it did. It fell off the dryer. Down into the gap between the dryer and the wall.
Eighteen inches down.
I looked at it. Down there in the dust.
I didn’t ask.
I didn’t have to.
Cole was walking past the laundry room doorway. Carrying a basket of clean towels on his hip. On his way upstairs to the linen closet.
He stopped. He looked at the gap behind the dryer.
He set the laundry basket down. He knelt on the laundry room floor. He reached down behind the dryer. Eighteen inches.
He came up with a tiny white sock.
He held it up. He looked at Wren in her bouncy seat. She looked back at him. She kicked her bare left foot. She laughed.
“You did that on purpose,” he told her. Very seriously.
She laughed harder.
He put the sock back on her foot. Then he stood up. He picked up the laundry basket. He put it on his hip.
He looked at me.
“What exactly have you done all morning?” he asked.
I stared at him.
Then I saw his face. The corner of his mouth. Twitching.
“Breakfast,” I said. “Dishes. Towels.”
“Wrong,” he said. “I did breakfast. I did dishes. I’m doing towels.” He nodded at the laundry room. “You’ve been folding baby clothes for twenty minutes. Go sit down. Put your feet up. That’s an order.”
He went up the stairs with the basket on his hip. All fourteen of them. Without stopping.
I stood in the laundry room and listened to him go. Then I heard the linen closet door open. And close.
Then I heard him coming back down. Fast. Taking the stairs two at a time.
He stopped in the laundry room doorway.
“Mare,” he said. “Can you come here a second? I need to show you something.”
I followed him to the kitchen.
On the refrigerator, held up by the pineapple magnet, was a piece of paper. A new list. In Cole’s handwriting.
At the top, it said: WHO DOES WHAT.
Two columns. MAREN. COLE.
Every chore in our house. Every single one. Dishes. Laundry. Bills. Groceries. Vacuuming. Bathrooms. Fitted sheets. Night feedings. Daycare drop-off. Pediatrician appointments. Trash. The bottom rack.
Split down the middle. Fifty-fifty.
And at the very bottom, in its own line, written across both columns:
PICKING UP THE SOCK: WHOEVER SEES IT FIRST.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I looked at my husband. Standing in our kitchen in his sweatpants. With a burp cloth over his shoulder and a little smear of spit-up on his T-shirt.
“Partners,” he said. “Equal. For real this time.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
I just reached up and took the pen off the counter. And under his line, in my own handwriting, I added one more:
WATERMELON: STAYS IN THE FRIDGE. JUST IN CASE.
He laughed. That easy laugh I fell in love with at a barbecue in college. The one I hadn’t heard in a long time.
Then he picked up our daughter out of her bouncy seat, and kissed the top of her head, and went to start dinner.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.