The Baby He Would Not Take Home

Brynn was twenty-three. She was not a bad girl. I want to be fair to her, even now, because she was young and scared and in over her head with a man who was charming right up until the second he had what he wanted. She had grown up rough, foster homes and a mother who was a ghost, and she looked at Cole like he was the first warm room she had ever stood in. He was not. He was a man who could make you feel like the only person alive and then forget your birthday, and he did both to her inside of one year.

I drove to Des Moines a lot that fall. Somebody had to. Brynn did not have a car that ran, and Cole worked odd hours at a parts warehouse, or said he did, and the prenatal appointments were on Tuesdays. So I took my Tuesdays. I would leave the co-op office at lunch, drive the forty minutes, sit in the waiting room with the fish tank and the old magazines, and then I would sit in the little exam room and hold Brynn’s hand while they ran the wand over her belly and the room filled with that fast wet gallop of a heartbeat.

That is how I came to love the baby before she was born. Not on purpose. I was only there to be useful, the way I was always only there to be useful. But you cannot hear a heartbeat eleven Tuesdays in a row and not have something grow in you too.

Brynn and I got close on those drives. We did not mean to. Forty minutes each way is a lot of road, and after a while the talk stops being polite and starts being real. She told me things she had never told Cole, about the homes she had bounced through, about a social worker who was the only person who had ever remembered her birthday, about how she used to pray as a little girl for a family that would keep her and had decided somewhere around twelve that God had lost her file. I told her she could keep this one. I told her she could be the family she never got. I believed it when I said it. I wanted it to be true so badly for her, because I knew what it was to be the child nobody chose first, and I thought if Brynn could do it, if Brynn could keep and love a daughter, then maybe the whole sorry pattern of our two broken families could finally stop with June. I was wrong about Brynn being able to do it alone. I was not wrong about June being the place it would stop.

We stopped at the same gas station every Tuesday on the way back, the Casey’s off the highway, and I would buy her a fountain soda and a bag of the kettle corn she liked, and she would eat it with her feet up on my dash, one hand on her belly, and for an hour she looked like what she was, which was a kid who should have had somebody taking care of her a long time before I came along. I think about those drives more than almost anything. I did not know I was learning to be June’s mother on that highway. I thought I was just giving a scared girl a ride.