The Glass I Stood At for My Son

Showing Up

We took Wade home three days later in the car seat that had been waiting in my truck.

It did not all heal up neat. Lynette and I are not close, and I do not know that we ever will be.

But she comes on Sundays now, and she holds him. The first Sunday she came she stood in the little green room I had painted.

She ran her hand along the crib rail I put together wrong the first time. “You did this room nice,” she said, quiet, not quite to me.

From Lynette that was a speech. I took it and I did not say anything smart back.

She is good with him. I will not lie about that. She knows how to get him to burp and she sings him something low in German that her own mother sang, and Wade goes quiet for her.

The first time I handed him to her on purpose, instead of her just taking him, she looked at me a second too long. Like she was waiting for the catch.

There was no catch. He is her grandson and I am not the kind of man who keeps a baby from his people out of spite. She spent nine months being that kind of person. I decided I would not be.

I still drive the propane route. Winter is the busy season and I am gone early and home late and worn out.

Some nights I come in smelling like the cold and Brianna hands me the baby before I even get my coat off.

I hold him in the kitchen in that same work coat, the one I wore at the window. It does not feel like the same coat anymore.

Rosa sent a card when he was a month old. Somebody at the front desk must have given her our address.

It said, Dear Cole and Brianna, congratulations on Wade. Then underneath, in different ink, like she went back and added it later, it said, I have three boys. I knew.

She signed it just Rosa. I kept it in the drawer by the crib, and I will keep it there until Wade is old enough to read it.

I want him to know a stranger looked at his father for three seconds and decided to open a door. I want him to know what one person paying attention can undo.

People think the story is that a nurse let me in. That is the part everybody holds onto, the door opening, the walk down the hall.

I understand why. It is a good part. But that is not the part I think about when I am up at two in the morning feeding him.

The part I think about is the forty minutes before it.

Standing at cold glass with my hand flat on it, counting a clock, watching another person hold my son.

And not leaving. Not walking down to the parking garage where the car seat sat. Not going home the way she said I already had.

Just standing there, nobody on any list, being his father anyway.

Because that is the whole of it. My grandfather was right. A man is just somebody who shows up and keeps showing up until showing up is the whole of what he is.

I showed up. I am still here.

His name is Wade Earl Mercer, the Mercer is mine, and I was never once going anywhere.