“Not until after my wedding,” Kirk said, and he set the ultrasound picture face down on his kitchen island like it was a bill he did not want to open yet.
I was still holding my coat. Grady had not even unzipped his work jacket. We had driven twenty minutes from Mount Vernon to Marion on a gray January Sunday to tell his big brother first.
“Kirk,” Grady said. “We just told you we’re having a baby.”
“I heard you.” Kirk rubbed the back of his neck the way he did when a customer at the implement dealership asked for a price he could not give. “And I’m happy for you. I am. I’m just asking you to sit on it.”
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“Sit on it,” I said. The words felt strange in my mouth, like he had asked us to sit on a casserole until it cooled.
“Five months,” Kirk said. “June thirteenth. That’s all I’m asking. You know what we’ve got into this thing? Twenty-eight thousand dollars. The barn, the caterer, the band out of Dubuque. Deposits on everything.”
Mallory was at the sink behind him, rinsing a coffee cup that was already clean. She did not turn around. I remember that, because Mallory always turned around. She was the friendliest person in that whole family.
“What does the wedding have to do with our baby?” Grady asked. He said it quietly. Grady says everything quietly. He fixes furnaces for a living, and he talks to people the way he talks to a pilot light.
“You know how this family is,” Kirk said. “You put a baby in that group chat and that’s all anybody talks about for six months. Showers. Names. Who’s knitting what. Nobody’s going to care about a wedding.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“It is true, Tess, and you know it.” He finally looked at me. His eyes were red at the edges, and I thought at the time he was just tired. “I’m asking for one thing. One. Let us have June. Then post whatever you want.”
There was a long quiet in that kitchen. The furnace kicked on somewhere below us, and Grady tilted his head at the sound the way he always does, listening to whether it was running right.
Then he picked the ultrasound picture back up off the island, turned it right side up, and handed it to me.
“Congratulations on the wedding, Kirk,” he said. “We’ll see you.”
And we walked out.
The heater in Grady’s truck took six miles to blow anything but cold air, and that day neither of us noticed.
I held the ultrasound picture in my lap the whole way down the drive. It was a little black-and-white print from our twelve-week appointment on Thursday, in a cheap black frame I bought on the way home. The tech had printed us three. My mom already had one.
You have to understand what that picture was to us. We had been trying for two years. Two years of calendars and thermometers and charts on the refrigerator that I would take down when company came over.
We had driven to Iowa City four times to see a specialist. I took pills that made me cry at commercials. Grady sat in waiting rooms with his work boots still on, because he came straight from jobs, and never once complained.
So when the nurse called and said the number looked good, and then the next number looked better, and then we heard the heartbeat at eight weeks, we did not tell a soul. We held our breath.