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help.”

C HAPTER 8
    I n the fall of 1952, Daddy announced that the house he’d built for us on Queens Road West was ready. The day we moved in, Mary got Mama settled in Daddy’s platform rocker in the den. “Too bad,” Mary said, “a new house and a new baby at the same time.”
    â€œA lousy coincidence,” Mama said. She sat by the breezeway door, smoking and drinking coffee from a thermos, telling the movers where to put things. She took the cowbell from her cloth carryall of last-minute stuff—toilet paper, bar soap, the magnets she’d taken from the refrigerator—and gave it to Mary to hang on the kitchen door.
    Mary hung the bell, and the familiar jangle echoed through the empty rooms.
    â€œNow it’s home,” Mama said.
    The house was so big we didn’t have enough stuff to fill it—five bedrooms, three bathrooms—four floors including a full attic, a basement, and a two-car garage with an efficiency apartment above it. Mama said she’d have a good time shopping for new furniture after the baby was born. Her belly was huge and I thought she’d fall over every time she stood. She wore nothing but tennis shoes or bedroom slippers on her swollen feet.
    I commented on being way taller than Mama, so Mary measured me, making a pencil mark on the bathroom doorjamb. “Five foot seven,” she said, “and you not yet twelve. I s’pect you got even more growing to do.” That was fine with me. I liked looking down on Mama and Stell Ann. I wasn’t crazy about having big feet, but Daddy pointed to his own size fourteens and said that came with the territory.
    In the new house, I had a room to myself for the first time in my life, with a double bed I felt lost in. The walls were painted in what Mama called mauve rose, with a white quilted spread, floral print curtains, and a matching dust ruffle. Mama sold our beds with the apple headboards to a woman with triplet daughters.
    â€œAren’t they just the cutest things!” the woman said.
    â€œMy husband designed them and his brother cut and painted them,” Mama told her.
    â€œOh, no,” the woman said, “I mean your daughters. They’re just adorable.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œSo why are you selling the beds?”
    â€œThe oldest’s fourteen.”
    â€œBut you might have another girl.” The woman looked at Mama’s stomach.
    â€œI certainly hope not. Check or cash?”
    Sometimes I didn’t want to hear what Mama said.

    A week after we moved in, Mama began having labor pains while she and Mary were putting shelf paper in the pantry. Mama said the pains didn’t amount to anything, but Mary convinced her to lie down, and they spent the afternoon in Mama’s room. Stell and I could hear the mumble of their voices, their laughter, Mama’s occasional moans.
    Daddy woke Stell and me at three o’clock in the morning. “I’m taking your mother to the hospital. Change the sheets on our bed. Her water broke.” He said that as if we knew what it meant. “This one won’t take long.” Daddy sounded excited. He wrapped Mama in a quilt and carried her to the car, the way fathers do in the movies.
    Before noon we had a brother. The only thing Daddy told us when he called was that it was a boy, that his name was David William, he weighed over eight pounds, and he had a big head.
    Immediately I went to the den and took the King James Bible off the bookshelf. Several years ago Stell had started recording our family history, beginning with our great-grandparents—as many names and dates as she could piece together, including the death of Mama’s sister, Hanna Eudora Bentley, in 1932. Then Mama and Daddy, their birth and wedding dates, and the birthdays of their children. I added David William Watts, born September 27, 1952 . Stell would frown when she saw my handwriting, but she didn’t own the Bible.
    Mama