The Wedding Suit I Wore to the Hospital

What Ashley Said

For a minute she could not say anything. Then she took her hand away, and what she said was, “Walt. Oh, Walt. You went home.”

“I did.”

“You drove all the way home. And back.” Her voice broke right in the middle of it. “That’s eighty miles.”

“It’s a good road,” I said. “I didn’t mind.”

And then she started to cry. Not a little. The kind of crying where your shoulders shake and you cannot get your breath. Ben woke up in the chair and was on his feet in a second.

“Ash,” he said. “Ash, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” she said. “It’s not. I was awful to him. I was awful, Ben, and you just stood there, and I just…” She pressed both hands over her face.

I did not know what to do. I am not good with crying. Joanne was the one who knew what to do. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was go to the sink and start washing my hands.

I washed them for a long time. Right up past my wrists, the way the sign on the wall showed, with the soap that smelled like nothing. It gave her a minute, and it gave me something to do with myself.

When I turned around and dried them on the paper towel, she had stopped crying enough to talk.

“Walt, I need to tell you something,” she said. “Will you sit down? Please?”

I sat in the plastic chair by the bed. The suit pants bunched up around my knees.

“He came five weeks early,” she said. “You know that. But you don’t know the rest. They took him to the special care nursery right away, and the doctor came in to talk to me while they were stitching me up.”

She took a breath.

“He told me late preemies are more fragile than people think. He told me it’s the worst part of the season for that breathing virus, the one that fills up the babies’ lungs. He said keep visitors to a minimum and make everybody wash and nobody who’s been sick. He said all the things I say to mothers at work, Walt. I’ve said them a hundred times.”

“That’s good sense,” I said.

“But I’ve never heard them about my own baby.” She was crying again, but quieter. “I was so scared of everything. I was scared of the air. I made Ben wash his hands three times in an hour. I made him take his jacket off in the hall.”

Ben nodded behind her. “She did.”

“And then you walked in, and you had that coat on, and I could smell the barn, and I just…” She shook her head. “I didn’t think. I didn’t even see you. All I saw was something that might make him sick, and it came out of my mouth before I could stop it.”

“Ashley,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it about you,” she said. “I need you to know that. I never meant it about you. I love the ranch. I love that Joanne was out there teaching me to bottle feed calves. I’m proud my son is going to grow up around cattle. I just was so scared.”