The Name in the Thursday Paper

The phone call Josh made

Josh did not take his coat off. He stood in the kitchen and called the Courier office from his cell phone, and Gail picked up on the second ring because Gail always picks up on the second ring.

Gail has run the Courier for nineteen years. She sells the ads, writes the obituaries and answers the phone. I have cleaned her teeth twice a year since I started at Dr. Moeller’s office.

I could hear her through the phone. She sounded sick about it.

“Josh, honey, it printed last night,” she said. “It went to the post office at six this morning. It’s in every box in the county by now.”

“How does somebody put in a name that isn’t his name?” Josh asked. He did not raise his voice. Josh does not raise his voice at people. He raises it at sows who will not load.

Gail told him the truth. Anybody can send in a birth announcement. Grandmothers do it all the time, and aunts, and once in a while a proud great-uncle. She charges $38 with a photo, $20 without. Nobody calls the parents to check the name, because in nineteen years nobody ever needed to.

“She had his weight and his time and the hospital,” Gail said. “She paid with a check. I had no reason on earth to think anything was wrong.”

“I know you didn’t,” Josh said. “I’m not mad at you, Gail.”

She offered to run a correction the next week, free. Josh said he would talk to me. When he hung up he stood there with his phone in his hand and looked at the floor.

“I’m going to call Mom,” he said.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I want to hear what she says.”

What Sharon said

Sharon picked up on the fourth ring. Josh put it on speaker and set the phone on the table between the paper and my coffee.

“Did you see it?” she said, before he said hello. Her voice was bright. “Gail did such a nice job. I bought six copies.”

“Mom, his name is Wyatt.”

There was a little pause, the kind you could fit a whole decision into.

“His name is Harold Wyatt,” she said. “The first Brandt boy is always Harold. Your dad was Harold. His dad was Harold. You carry it. Now he does too. It’s only right that it goes first.”

“We named him Wyatt James,” Josh said. “You were there. It’s on the birth certificate.”

“Birth certificates are paperwork,” Sharon said. “This is family.”

I want to be fair to her, because I was not fair to her in my head that morning. She did not sound mean. She sounded like a woman who had made up her mind a long time ago and was surprised anyone had a different one.

Josh looked at me. I shook my head a little. Not now. Not on speaker, with the baby starting to fuss and my milk letting down and my eyes stinging.

“We’ll talk about it, Mom,” he said, and she said she had to get to the post office before it closed, and they hung up.

I did not cry until he left for the barn. Then I cried into the top of Wyatt’s head, which smelled like nothing else in this world, and he did not care one bit what the paper called him.