The Glass I Stood At for My Son

When she saw me her face just folded. She put both her hands over her mouth.

“They would not let me find you,” she said through her fingers. “Mom said you went home. She said you left.”

“I did not leave,” I said. I was already across the room. “I have been right outside. I have been right outside the whole time.”

“I texted you,” I said. “Three times. Where is your phone.”

Brianna looked at her mother. The look went across that room like a cold draft.

“It is in my bag,” Lynette said. “I was holding it for her. She could not be answering a phone in labor.”

Nobody said anything for a second. Brianna closed her eyes and a tear ran sideways into her hair.

“Give it to him,” she said. “Give Cole my phone.”

Lynette dug it out of her purse and set it on the blanket. She did not hand it to me. She set it down where I could reach it, which for her was a long way to travel.

Then she stepped back toward the window and stood there with the cardigan pulled tight around her.

Her mouth was a line. She started to say my name in that flat warning way she had, the way that used to shrink me down to the size of a kid off a delivery route.

It did not work that time. I was not even looking at her.

I was looking at the little clear bassinet they had wheeled in next to the bed. At the thing in it that was making a small, furious, hiccuping noise.

Rosa put her hand on my back between my shoulders and gave me the smallest push.

“Go on, Dad,” she said. “He is yours.”

The First Time I Held Him

I did not know how to pick him up, and I did not care.

Rosa showed me. Hands under the head, she said, and she settled him into the crook of my arm.

He was heavier than I thought and lighter than I thought at the same time. He stopped the hiccuping noise and opened one eye at me, like he was not impressed yet.

His face was red and squashed and perfect. He had a full head of dark hair.

My hair. The hair Lynette had always called that mess.

I sat down in the chair by Brianna’s bed because my legs quit on me. I held him, and for a minute nobody in that room said a single word.

The only sound was the little machine beeping and Brianna crying soft into her hand.

“His name is Wade,” Brianna said.

We had talked about it. Wade was my grandfather, the one who raised me after my dad went.