The Wedding Suit I Wore to the Hospital

First

Then Ashley said, “Walt. My dad is driving out from Kearney in the morning. He’s been texting me all day about holding him.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s fine.”

“No. Listen.” She reached over to the bassinet and lifted the baby out, careful, with one hand under his head. “I want you to be first. Before my dad. Before anybody.”

“You don’t have to do that, Ashley.”

“I know I don’t,” she said. “I want to. You drove eighty miles in your wedding suit. You get to be first.”

Pat had been standing in the doorway this whole time, and I had forgotten she was there. She came in and squirted a little sanitizer in my palms anyway, and winked at me.

“Belt and suspenders,” she said.

“I’m a belt man,” I said, and she laughed.

Ashley showed me how to sit in the recliner and hold my arm. I told her I had held a baby before, but it had been thirty-four years, and the truth was I had forgotten everything.

And then she put him in my arms.

He weighed nothing. I have lifted newborn calves that weighed eighty pounds, and I have lifted the ends of round bales, and I have never in my life held anything as heavy as those five pounds and two ounces.

He had a little red face and a tuft of dark hair sticking out of the knit cap. He was frowning, like he was thinking about something important. His fingers were so small they did not look real.

“Hello there,” I said. “Hello, partner.”

He opened his eyes. They were that dark slate color new babies have, the color they have before they decide what they are going to be. He looked up at me, or near me, and the frown went away.

“What did you name him?” I said. I realized nobody had told me. With the early birth and everything, they had not posted it anywhere yet.

Ben and Ashley looked at each other.

“We named him Walter,” Ben said. “Walter Joseph. After you. And Joseph for Mom’s dad.”

I could not say anything for a while after that. The room was very quiet. The lamp was warm. Somewhere down the hall another baby was crying, a thin new cry, and a nurse was laughing about something at the desk.

“Walter,” I finally said. “Well. You poor kid.”

Ashley laughed and cried at the same time and reached for a tissue.

The Inside Pocket

I held him for a long time. Nobody tried to take him back. Ben sat on the edge of the bed with his arm around Ashley, and they watched me hold their son, and nobody said much.

After a while, the baby started to root and fuss a little. I shifted him up higher on my chest, and as I did, I felt something crinkle against my ribs, on the inside of the suit coat.

“Ben,” I said. “There’s something in my pocket. Get it for me. I’m not letting go of this boy.”

Ben reached into the inside breast pocket of the coat and came out with a small envelope. It was yellowed and soft as cloth, and the flap had been tucked in instead of sealed.

On the front, in blue ink, in handwriting I would have known anywhere in the world, it said: Walt.

I could not have read it myself. My eyes were not doing what I told them. Ben took out the little card inside and looked at me.

“Read it, son,” I said.

He read it out loud, slow. His voice cracked twice.

“For when we’re grandparents. If you’re reading this, you finally wore this suit again, and I bet it’s because there’s a baby. Hold that baby the way you held my hand today. Don’t let go first. Love, Jo. June 16, 1979.”

The room was so still I could hear the clock on the wall.

She had put that note in my pocket on our wedding day. Forty-seven years ago. Some time between the church and the dance at the Legion hall, when I had taken the coat off and hung it on a chair, she had slipped it in there and never said a word.

And I had never worn that suit again. Not once. Not to a wedding, not to a funeral, not to anything. It went in the cedar closet that July, and it waited.

“She knew,” Ashley whispered. “How did she know?”

“She didn’t know,” I said. “She just figured. That’s how she was. She figured on things.”

I looked down at the baby. He had fallen asleep against the brown wool, against the place where the note had been, with his mouth a little open.

“Your grandma says hello,” I told him. “She says not to let go first. So I won’t.”