The Baby He Would Not Take Home

Cole came to exactly one appointment. He spent it on his phone in the parking lot and came in for the last four minutes and asked the nurse if the baby was going to be big, because he did not want Brynn getting huge. The nurse looked at him. I looked at the floor. Brynn laughed like it was a joke so that it would be one.

The baby was a girl. We found out in October. Brynn wanted to name her June, after no one, just because she liked it, because June was the one month of her childhood she remembered being happy, a summer at a lake with a foster family who had been kind. I thought it was a beautiful reason to name a child. Cole said June sounded like an old lady. He wanted something with more punch. They did not settle it. That should have told me everything, that they could not even agree on who this child would be.

June came in January, in the worst week of the winter, when the county roads were sheeted with ice and the radio told everyone to stay home. Brynn called me at four in the morning. Her water had broken and Cole was not answering his phone. I put on my mother’s old parka, the one I still could not give away, and I drove to Des Moines in the dark with my hazards on the whole way, forty minutes that took me an hour and ten.

I will not dwell on the hospital part. It was long and it was frightening and it was holy, the way those rooms are. Brynn did not have anyone. So I was the one. I was the one who counted her breaths with her and wiped her face and told her she was strong when she was sure she was not. I was the one who was there when June came into the world, red and furious and perfect, at two minutes to noon. I was the first one to hold her while they worked on Brynn, this seven-pound stranger I already knew, screaming her lungs clear, and I stood there in a paper gown and I wept like something in me had come loose.

Cole showed up at three that afternoon. He smelled like cold air and something underneath it. He looked at the baby the way you look at a car you are not sure you want to buy. He held her for the picture and gave her back.