The Buick We Brought Our Boy Home In

The Parking Lot

They discharged us two days later, late in the morning.

It was one of those flat gray late-winter days where the light comes from nowhere and everywhere at once. Salt crusted white on the curbs and the car hoods.

I had picked Grandpa up on the way in that morning. Feed cap, his good coat, ready at the end of his lane before I even turned in.

He had refused to wait in the hospital lobby. He wanted to be in the car when the baby came out the doors. He had earned the right to be.

I brought the Buick around, then parked it in the lot because Jen wanted to do the walk herself. The nurse wheeled the chair but Jen stood up out of it at the doors.

I carried Mason in his seat across the lot. Jen walked slow beside me, one hand on my arm.

The maroon Buick sat there under that bare-tree sky. Salt on the asphalt, Grandpa Roy’s face in the back window, watching us come across the lot.

I will see that picture in my head until the day I die.

I leaned into the open back door and worked the car seat down onto the base. Clicked it in. Pulled it twice to be sure, the way I had practiced.

Right beside it, my grandpa already had his old hand out. Reaching.

Mason’s little fist came loose from the blanket, and four fingers wrapped around one of Roy’s, and held on.

“Well, look at you,” Grandpa said, soft, down to the baby. “Look at you now. You know whose car this is?”

He had worn his good coat and shaved for it. His eyes were running and he did not wipe them.

“This here’s the car that brought your grandma and your daddy and half this family home,” he told the baby. “Been waiting on you.”

Jen got in the front and turned all the way around in her seat to watch them. Her boy and the old man.

One just arrived in the world and one getting near the far side of it. Holding hands in the back of a thirty-year-old Buick in a hospital parking lot.

A nurse was passing by with somebody else’s wheelchair. She stopped and put a hand to her chest.

“Oh,” she said. “You have to let me. Give me that phone.”

She backed up a few steps and got all of it in one frame.

The open door. The Carhartt and the feed cap. Jen turned around smiling with her eyes wet. Grandpa Roy’s hand and Mason’s hand. The maroon fender and the gray trees behind.

That photo is the single best thing I own.