The Glass I Stood At for My Son

Forty Minutes

I counted the minutes on the clock over the nurses station, because counting was better than thinking.

A nurse came out of the delivery wing pushing an empty wheelchair and did not look at me. A man in scrubs went in with a clipboard under his arm.

Lynette moved around inside the nursery the way she moved around every place she stood. Like she owned the floor and was deciding whether to keep it.

At one point she picked the baby up.

She lifted him out of the bassinet, held him up near her shoulder, and swayed. She was smiling down at him.

I watched my son meet his grandmother before he met me, through two panes of glass, and I did not make a sound.

I put my forehead against the window next to my hand. The glass squeaked.

I thought about every stupid thing. I thought about the green paint drying in that back room.

I thought about the three hundred and some dollars I had saved in a coffee can for a car seat. I had already bought it, the good kind, the convertible one the lady at the store said was worth the extra.

It was buckled into the back seat of my truck in the parking garage like it was waiting. I thought my chest was going to come apart.

Forty minutes. I know, because the desk clock read 10:21 when I walked up.

It read 11:01 when the door down the hall opened and a different nurse came out.

She was short, older than me, in scrubs with little coffee cups printed all over them. She looked like she had been rubbing her eyes at the end of a long shift.

She stopped when she saw me. She did not walk past.

She looked at my hand on the glass. Then she looked at my face, and she looked at it for a long second, like she was reading something written small.

Her badge said Rosa.

Rosa

“How long have you been standing here,” Rosa said.

“Since about ten,” I said. “I am not making trouble. They told me I am not on the list.”

“Whose baby is that,” she said. She nodded at the bassinet, at the blue card, at the little swaddled shape Lynette had just set back down.

“Mine,” I said. My voice did something and I had to stop and start again. “He is mine.”

I made myself say the rest of it. “That is Brianna’s mom in there. She put herself on the list and left me off it. I have been out here the whole time.”

Rosa looked back through the glass at Lynette. Then she looked at me again, longer.

I will not forget it. She looked at me the way my grandmother used to look at a man she had already decided about.

“I have got three boys,” she said. “Grown now.”

“I have stood in that delivery room with a lot of fathers,” she said. “I have seen the ones who are counting the exits. And I have seen the ones who look like you look right now.”

She reached out and tapped the glass once, right next to where my hand was. “I know a father’s face. You have had it on since I came out that door.”

“Please,” I said. It was all I had left.

“Stay right here,” she said. “Do not move.”

She did not go to the front desk. She went back through the door she had come out of, down the delivery hall, and she was gone maybe three minutes.

I stood there with my heart going like the truck does on a cold start. Then the door opened again.

Rosa held it with her hip and looked at me and said the thing I had been waiting two hours to hear.

She said, “Come on back. She is asking for you.”