I loaded the car at seven o clock on the morning after I called the hospital, twelve boxed car seats in the back and a dozen strollers folded flat on top of them, and I drove across Knoxville to the maternity wing, with the clipboard of my mother on the seat beside me. I am Beverly Tanner, fifty eight years old, a bookkeeper, and I had never carried anything so heavy in my life. My mother Mavis had passed in the spring at ninety. She had been housebound for six years. And she had done this the whole time.
The social worker, a quiet woman named Mrs. Reyes, met me in the loading bay with a cart. She counted the boxes with a pencil, one by one, her lips moving, and when she reached the last she let out a long breath. “Mavis never missed a quarter,” she said. “Every February, May, August and November a delivery arrived, always in the same old station wagon, always with nothing on the note except the number of the room. We always wondered who she was.” I told her that the station wagon belonged to a neighbor boy.
The neighbor boy, I learned that morning, was named Terrence, nineteen years old, who mowed her yard and who had been driving the deliveries for two years for ten dollars a trip, at her insistence, without ever being told what the boxes were for. Mrs. Reyes led me through the double doors to a small room on the second floor, where a young woman in a hospital gown was sitting on the edge of a bed holding a newborn wrapped in a paper towel blanket. She had no car seat, and no ride home.
A garage full of car seats and strollers gave one daughter the morning to bring the gift of her mother to the mothers of Knoxville.
I gave my terms to Mrs. Reyes at the nurses station, in a voice that did not sound like mine. “I will take every box up to the rooms myself, today, and I will keep doing it. I would like to meet the mothers, if they are willing, and to say only that the gift comes from a friend. My mother asked that her name not be used, and I will honor that. But I would like to tell the mothers one thing, which is that no baby leaves this building unsafe. Not while I am here.” Mrs. Reyes pressed a tissue into my hand.
I went room to room that morning with the cart, setting a car seat and a stroller beside the bed of each mother who needed one. The young woman with the paper towel blanket stared at the box as if it were a gift from the sky. “Why?” she whispered. I did not know how to answer, but a nurse standing in the doorway told me what Mrs. Reyes had once told her. My mother had left that same hospital in 1967 with me in a laundry basket on the back seat of a borrowed truck. She had never forgotten the ride.
As I came out of the last room, a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt was backing out of the loading bay with a car seat box under each arm, glancing toward the parking lot where an engine was running. He was a reseller, I learned afterward, who had made a habit of waiting by hospital docks. He saw me, and instead of putting the boxes down, he bolted across the bay toward the van. He did not see the volunteer fathers of the hospital, five men in orange vests who were there for the weekly safety class. They stepped into a line in front of the van, with their arms folded. The man stopped, looked at the five fathers, and set the boxes down on the pavement one at a time. A security guard walked over. Nobody raised a voice. The tallest father brought the boxes back to me, and said, “I believe these belong to the babies.”
My brother Wayne arrived at noon, having heard from Terrence. We had not spoken in two years, not since the day of the reading of the will, when he had said that our mother should have spent her money on herself. He stood in the lobby with his cap in his hands, and I saw that his eyes were red. “Bev,” he said, “I did not know. I thought she was wasting it.” I put down the cart and walked into his arms, and the young woman at the window of the second floor raised her hand to us, with the baby against her shoulder.
The money consequences were small and large. The estate of my mother came to seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars, from the sale of forty acres she had bought with a widow pension and a laundry job, and she had left it in equal parts to Wayne and me. We pooled our shares and put them in the hands of a trust for the maternity wing. The reseller was charged and fined. Terrence, offered a scholarship by the hospital board, enrolled at Pellissippi State that fall to study to be a nurse.
In the name of my mother, who passed in the spring, I started the Mavis Tanner Fund, and the hospital still calls it the community gift. It pays for car seats, strollers and a ride home for new mothers, in Knox, Blount and Sevier counties. In the first year we sent three hundred and forty mothers home safely, and not one baby left unbuckled. One was a girl of seventeen from Maryville who wrote us a card in purple ink, which said only, “You are the reason I made it home.”
Every February, May, August and November, Wayne and I pack the old station wagon ourselves, and Terrence drives, in his nursing scrubs. We still leave the note with nothing on it except the number of the room. Last quarter, as we pulled out of the driveway of the house of my mother, Wayne glanced at the empty garage and laughed softly. “She would hate the fuss,” he said. I told him she would be sitting at the window with her clipboard, counting the boxes, making sure we did not forget.
