The Name in the Thursday Paper

Thirty-eight dollars

Monday morning I called Gail myself. Josh offered, but I wanted to do it.

“Kelsey, I am so sorry,” she said, before I could get two words out. “I’ll run the correction Thursday, no charge. I already wrote it.”

She read it to me. It was two lines. It said that in last week’s issue the name of the son of Josh and Kelsey Brandt was printed incorrectly, and that the child’s name is Wyatt James Brandt. It would run on page nine, under the sheriff’s report, where corrections always run.

“That’s kind of you,” I said. “But I don’t want a correction.”

“You don’t?”

“A correction says somebody made a mistake,” I said. “I don’t want him corrected. I want him announced. Same size as the first one, with his picture. I’ll pay for it.”

Gail was quiet a second. Then I heard her pen.

“Thirty-eight dollars,” she said. “Photo by Monday noon. Do you want me to send you a proof?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

I wrote the words out on the back of an envelope at the kitchen table while Wyatt slept in the bassinet by the stove. I wrote them four times. I took out every word that sounded like a jab, every “real” and “actual” and “correct.” I wanted it plain. I wanted it to look like any other birth announcement in any other week.

Wyatt James Brandt, born March 7 at Winneshiek Medical Center, 7 pounds 9 ounces, 20 inches. Son of Josh and Kelsey Brandt. Named for his great-grandfather, James Kessler. Grandparents are Sharon Brandt and the late Harold Brandt, and Lloyd and Diane Kessler.

I put Harold in. I thought about it for a long time and I put him in, because he was Wyatt’s grandpa, and because I liked him. Harold was the one who walked me around the machine shed the first time Josh brought me home, showing me every tool like it was a member of the family.

The gown

My grandma Ruth drove over Tuesday morning. She is 84 and she still drives herself anywhere in the county in daylight, in a Buick that is older than me, with a seat cushion so she can see over the wheel.

She came in the back door with a long flat garment box on her hip and her purse on her arm and snow on her shoulders. She had heard about the paper. Everybody had heard about the paper.

“Where is he,” she said, which is how she says hello.

I gave her the baby and she sat down at the end of the kitchen table with him, and I poured her coffee, black, in the brown mug she likes. She looked at him for a long time without saying a word. Then she nodded at the box.

“Open it,” she said. “Careful. The tissue’s as old as your father.”

Inside, folded in yellowed tissue paper, was the christening gown.

I had seen it in pictures. I had been baptized in it myself, in 1997, but I had never held it. It was long, longer than a baby, white cotton batiste so fine you could almost read through it, with a lace panel down the front and three rows of tiny tucks at the hem.