Jones sliced Braunschweiger leaped out of the cold cut case into my cart as if a Jack in the Box had sprung to life. Cold cuts, processed meat, have disturbed my exhausted old innards for years. I never wander into that part of the grocery store. 

My mother, Agnes, loved Braunschweiger, a sort of evolved liverwurst. Whenever it lay in our refrigerator waiting for her rye bread and mustard, there was danger for curious young epicureans. Agnes’ nonverbal eyeball warning, “I’ll kill you if you touch this,” reminded us that children eat their bologna, not her Braunschweiger. 

I was thinking of Agnes because her youngest daughter’s daughter had her own daughter and I wanted to tell her about  another of her great grandchildren. At home, I quietly celebrated with Agnes’ forty-year old ghost over the just-purchased Jones’ Braunschweiger and Coca-Cola, whispering sentimentals about her girl’s girls. An interloper may have mistaken this for a seance.

Agnes loved babies. As an alcoholic, she had to choose scotch and beer over mothering her four children. I can’t speak for my siblings, but she gave me a love for babies too. The youngest of Agnes’ grandchildren, her three year-old granddaughter visited me with her mother, my sister, in Chicago thirty-seven years ago, I wanted to sweep up the cutie in soft hugs and protect her from the world, like Agnes would have done if she’d been able.

But even as a three-year-old, she did not need protection. My sister and I took her to a fancy toy store atop a new vertical mall at 900 North Michigan Avenue. Her mother hadn’t spoiled her with a house full of toys. They lived in rural Vermont with real, not stuffed, animals. There was no reason to think she’d be one to grab at the display toys. No, we went for fun, to watch a little girl we loved explore new things. 

As her mother and I walked around, exchanging family gossip, we kept watch over the blonde-haired blue-eyed self-possessed three year old. All of a sudden she disappeared. My sister called her, escalating her pitch each time — over and over. No answer. I ran out to the concourse to demand the security officers lock down the building. Everyone in the toy store erupted with their own anxiety. We could not utter our worst fear—that she’d been taken. My sister, unable to express a word, turned more shades of red than exist in the color wheel. Older and presumably wiser, I tried so hard to reassure her. She couldn’t hear a word I said and honestly I’m not sure any real words came out of me.

Then, a tidy shopper looked over her glasses from the children’s books and pointed, “I think she’s over here.”

We rushed to the corner of the store where every kind of doll imaginable stared at us from floor to ceiling shelves. Tucked away under the bottom shelf gurgled my niece, Agnes’ granddaughter, my sister’s little girl, hugging a baby doll. She wouldn’t come out. Her eyes filled up. Through her gulps and watery lips she blubbered, “Don’t take my baby.”

That’s a girl who was born to mother. 

And so she is. 

Thirty-seven years later.