The Wedding Suit I Wore to the Hospital

Forty Miles Back

I have driven Highway 83 more times than I could count. I know every curve and every cattle guard and every place where the deer like to cross. But I never drove it like that, in the dark, in a brown suit, with my hands clean and my heart going like I was twenty-one again.

I kept thinking about Ashley. I want to say that plainly, because some people who hear this story want her to be the villain, and I did not see her that way, even then.

Ashley is a nurse. She works at a clinic in town and she is good at it. She is careful and smart and does not suffer foolishness, and I always liked that about her.

She grew up in Kearney, in town, in a house with a lawn. Her dad sells insurance. She is not a ranch girl and has never pretended to be one. The first time she came out to the place, she wore white tennis shoes, and Joanne laughed about it for a week, and then quietly bought her a pair of muck boots for Christmas.

They got along, Joanne and Ashley. They were different women, but they got along. When Joanne died, Ashley sat with me at the kitchen table the night after the funeral and did not say a word, and I have never forgotten that.

So I did not think Ashley was cruel. I thought she was tired, and scared, and that I had walked in smelling like a feedlot at the wrong time. That was all I thought.

I was wrong about one part of that. It was a great deal more than tired.

Nine O’Clock

I parked the Buick under the lights at five minutes to nine. I checked my tie in the rearview mirror. It was crooked. I left it.

Pat was at the desk on the maternity floor. She looked up when the elevator opened, and for a second she did not know me. Then she did.

She stood up. She took her glasses off the chain and put them on, and she looked at me for a long moment from my combed hair down to my shined boots.

“Oh, Mr. Kessler,” she said quietly. “Oh, my.”

“Too late?” I said.

“Not even a little bit.” She came around the desk. “Wash at the sink in the room. That’s the rule for everybody, even grandpas in suits.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s a good rule.”

She walked me down the hall herself. At the door she knocked twice, soft, and pushed it open, and stepped aside to let me go first.

The room was dim. There was one lamp on by the bed, warm and yellow. The baby was in the plastic bassinet beside her, wrapped in a striped hospital blanket with a little knit cap on, and Ashley was sitting up against the pillows. Ben was in the chair by the window with his head back, half asleep.

Ashley looked up at me.

She looked at the suit. She looked at the narrow brown tie. She looked at the coat hanging off my shoulders.

She had seen that suit before. It is in the wedding picture that hangs over the piano at the ranch, the one of Joanne and me on the church steps in Tryon, squinting into the sun. Ashley had stood in front of that picture a dozen times and said what a pretty bride Joanne was.

She put her hand over her mouth.