Chapter Forty
Denali naps on her belly, butt in the air, chubby fists and thighs tucked underneath her. Her rosy lips, pushed into a lopsided
heart shape by the mattress, and impossibly long lashes make me want to swoop her up and push my nose into her soft neck,
to smell all the babiness that none of us can get enough of. The fact that my niece can sleep with all the activity around
her, the piped music, the bell ringing each time the door opens, the customers cooing over her crib, and Marigold, her nanny,
snoring at her feet, still surprises me, although Ali’s been doing it all her short little life.
In fact, Denali has become the perfect spokesperson for our new line of bespoke cribs, cradles, and playpens—cooked up by
me (my first major initiative since becoming a full partner in Sweet Dreams) and crafted by Tim, who has found that his post-retirement
passion is still building things. The store’s original concept, that people will pay anything for a good night’s sleep, clearly
extends to their children. Our new line, Like a Baby, has been a hit. My husband can hardly keep up with the demand.
If it takes a village to raise a child, then our shop has become a whole metropolis. Lily might be a single mom, but she and
Denali never feel alone. Sweet Dreams is always filled with eager customers, Lily fans—of whom there are many—and family members
who turned the back storage room into a nursery where they can cuddle and snuggle and otherwise adore our newest addition.
And although my sister refused the offer to move in with us after the baby was born, she and Denali are with us most days
we aren’t working. Our family room is now a playroom, filled with blocks and art supplies and stuffed animals (her favorites
are the moose and the polar bear from the airport gift shop) and play mats and educational toys, and two grown cousins vying
for Ali’s attention. It’s a lot for a three-month-old, but so is this family. Talking of a lot, the biggest surprise in a
world full of surprises since we were in the emergency room in Palmer has been my mother, who, after delegating her parenting
duties to me for those many years, is making up for lost time. Almost to a fault.
“Mom.” I hear Lily from across the store. She’s holding two candles, our bestsellers, Lullaby and Dreamland, for a woman with
dark circles under her eyes to smell. “Leave her be, please.”
Right on cue, my mother is hovering over the crib, her fingers open wide like a claw machine, ready to snatch Ali out of a
much-needed nap. She can’t help herself. We all want to do it—the child is irresistible—but we know the saying, let sleeping
dogs and babies lie. Unsurprisingly, Ruth has no impulse control. My mother picks up the baby, who opens her eyes and stretches
her little arms out to her sides. In unison, we all—and probably half the customers watching her—coo, “Big stretch,” as is
the law in these parts.
“Oh, I could just bite you,” says my mother.
“No, Mom. No biting,” demands Lily from her spot near the aromatherapy candles.
“Come on, just a nibble,” Grandma says to Denali. “I nibbled your cousins Annie and Cam when they were babies, and look how
wonderful they turned out.”
I don’t remember Ruth nibbling anyone, but now is not the time. She’s been so happy since Denali arrived. And that makes me
happy.
“Ah.” I laugh. “This is why I had to pay for all those years of therapy.”
“Very funny, Bridget. I’m a Jewish grandmother. Jewish grandmothers nibble. You’ll see.” She punctuates her warning with a wet raspberry on the baby’s tummy.
“Okay, give her to me.” Lily hands the candles to her customer and sweeps her baby out of my mother’s clutches. She tucks
Denali into a lavender papoose slung around her torso. She never takes it off, even when the baby is sleeping in her crib,
in case she needs to juggle motherhood with selling a white noise machine.
She’s a great mother. I knew she would be. After all those years of wanting but acting like she was thrilled with living footloose
and fancy-free, something clicked in her the day she found out about Denali. She became a textbook pregnant woman, eating
right, exercising, following doctor’s orders to a T—probably making up for those crazy first weeks the baby had to endure—but
she wasn’t a mom-to-be-zilla about it. Despite saying I had to be her cravings gofer, once we got home, she asked so little
of anyone. She took care of herself. After Denali was born, Lily and Ali fell into their own groove. Lily did the nights on
her own and managed to get them both out of the house the next morning, fully dressed, diaper bag full, stroller packed. It
was more than I could manage back in the day.
As we all suspected, Eric showed little interest in helping with an infant, claiming he wouldn’t have the slightest idea what
to do, and besides, Lily was breastfeeding, so what was he supposed to do about that? He’s seen his daughter a few times,
always in the presence of Lily, who tolerates him so that her child can have some kind of relationship with her biological
father. It’s more than he deserves, if you ask me. But I keep my opinions on things like that to myself these days. My sister
can make her own decisions.
Denali falls back to sleep quickly, and Lily answers a woman’s question about thread count.
I put my mom to work straightening a shelf of sleep supplements—melatonin, magnesium, vitamin C—and go to help a customer running her hand over the weighted blankets.
I recognize her from last week, when she was in asking about earplugs, and the week before when she bought a satin sleep mask.
I have to wonder what’s going on in her life to prevent her from getting a decent night’s sleep.
“I simply love it in this store,” says the woman with the lack of sleep. “I could curl up and take a nap right here.”
“You’ve given me an idea for expansion,” I say to her. “We could break through to the space next door and open a napping center.”
I laugh.
“Don’t laugh,” she says. “You’d have a line around the block. I’m so glad the store is run by two women. You understand. Women.
Sleep. Lack of sleep. And everything that goes with it. It’s such a women’s issue, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong. It’s always
been a nice place. Great products. Inviting atmosphere, for the most part. But you are so much more—what’s the word—empathetic
than the other guy who was here.”
Eric, of course, had put up more of a fight about leaving the business than he did about his daughter. But Ian introduced
us to a commercial lawyer friend of his who practiced in the area, and who did a great job of convincing Lily’s ex that a
small payout was an easier route than going to court. He pointed out that Tim and I owned over fifty percent of the store
as sole investors and cosigners of the lease, so technically we had a say in “hiring and firing.”
I’m explaining to our most loyal customer the difference between the weighted blankets, how a snug fit is important and that
it’s crucial that a blanket isn’t more than five to ten percent of her body weight for it to be effective, when I hear the
soft ding of the door opening behind me and see Lily’s face light up. I hand the woman our bestseller and spin around.
“I love what you’ve done with the place.” Luna and Mimi step inside, as the door seals us off from the noise of the street. Lily runs to them, hugging them both, making a Denali sandwich. They step back before the baby wakes and start cooing and ahhing.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. “I thought you weren’t coming until dinnertime.” I throw my arms around my two dear friends.
“You both look great, by the way.” I’ve never seen so much color in Mimi’s face. Treatment only lasted a few months this time
around, and while she still has the silver crew cut, her cheeks are rosy and her eyes bright. It might be the full all-clear
from the oncologist. Or it might be the presence of her goddaughter.
“Well, we wanted to arrive before the store closes. Take another peek at how the sausage gets made. We have our grand opening
in August, and we need all the help we can get,” says Luna.
Ruth comes over and gives the women tight hugs. Since they decided to partner with us and open a Sweet Dreams in Boston, Luna and Mimi have been making regular trips down to New Jersey, and Mimi and my mother have become close. She
has a way of chilling out Ruth that no one has been able to accomplish, and she loves water aerobics, which makes her top-notch
in Ruth’s book.
“What do you think of this little angel?” my mother asks them, poking a finger at the baby.
“Mom, I swear to God, if you wake her up again.”
“Okay, okay.” I step in. “We’ll all have plenty of time to poke and prod—I mean snuggle and cuddle. We’re babysitting tonight.
Lily has a date.”
“Stop calling it that,” fusses my sister, but she is smiling like a goofball.
“What? What would you call dinner and a show?” I ask, raising my eyebrows.
“I don’t think a slice of Famous Ray’s across the street from a tiny theater in the East Village is exactly—”
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Mimi puts her fists on her tiny hips. “What is going on here, you two? Let us in on it.”
“Lily is seeing Dane,” answers my mother, who is pleased to be in the know.
Luna and Mimi smile and nod their heads. Lily continues to protest. “Whatever. Dane is in New York. He’s doing Shakespeare
off-Broadway, Twelfth Night.”
“Dane? Shakespeare?” asks Luna.
“Now, now. You guys underestimated him,” Lily says, coming to her not-a-date’s defense.
“Ah, yes. We underestimated him. I remember that well.” I laugh at my sister’s act. She and Dane have been in touch since we got home
from our trip. They saw each other when he came out east for auditions. And then rehearsals. Tonight will be her third performance.
Though I make a joke, she is right. We all did underestimate Dane the actor who was putting on a performance as a shallow,
LA type on the trip. But then again, Lily was performing as someone she wasn’t as well. Fortunately, they both seem to have
shed those characters. The real Dane and Lily seem pretty good together.
The baby starts to cry—I wouldn’t be surprised if Lily pinched her, just a little, to end the conversation. “Feeding time
for this one,” she says. “I’m going to go in the back for a while. Big, you got the floor?”
“I’m coming with you,” says my mother. “My feet are killing me from all this forced labor. Mimi, you come too. I want to hear
all about the last doctor’s appointment.”
“Sure, let’s all go watch me breastfeed,” says Lily. “It will be a party.”
The three of them wander into the back as Ali’s cries get louder. Luna and I are left in charge.
“I want to talk to you about adding a flannel pajama line, Boston winters are so cold, and I think it will be a bestseller.”
“Luna, you guys are going to do Sweet Dreams proud up there. You have so many amazing ideas. I love your pitch for the glamping collection. I’m working on that now, to introduce in the fall.
I’m thinking of calling it Fox Songs Sleep Gear.
Oh, wait, oh my God, I forgot to show you this.
” I pull my left pant leg up to my shin and twist my ankle toward my friend.
“You got it!”
“I wanted one ever since I saw yours.” After the break healed, I got my first tattoo at fifty. A small orange fox, with a
white chest and gold eyes, jumping over my ankle bone. “It reminds me I can heal and grow. And of the place where I learned
that.”
We went into our adventure for all the wrong reasons, my sister and I; with anger, with guilt, and misplaced emotions. We
packed our bags with long-held fears, and resentment, and assumptions. But we learned to accept Alaska’s gifts, the good and
the bad. It took getting lost in the wildest of all places to find ourselves. And the right path home.