The Glass I Stood At for My Son

What Lynette Was Afraid Of

She waited until Rosa stepped out and Brianna had drifted half asleep. Then she came and stood by the chair.

I did not get up. I kept Wade against my chest.

“You think I did this to be cruel,” she said. Low, so Brianna would not wake. “I did not.”

“You called me nobody to a desk clerk,” I said. “You held my son before I did. I was eight feet away.”

She flinched at that. I will give her that much. She flinched.

She sat down on the edge of the other chair and put her hands in her lap and looked at them.

“Her father stood where you are standing,” she said. “Twenty-three years ago. Held her just like that. Cried, even.”

“And he was gone before she started school,” she said. “I raised her by myself on a cafeteria salary. I swore nobody would do that to her twice.”

Her voice caught. She pushed it back down the way she pushed everything down.

“When you turned up, I saw him. I saw every man who ever held a baby for a photograph and then went out for cigarettes.”

“I did not think you would stay,” she said. “So I made sure that when you did not, you would at least not be on any paper. I thought I was protecting her.”

It was the most she had ever said to me that was not an order. I sat with it. Wade made his small noise and settled against my chest.

“I am not him,” I said finally. I was not angry the way you yell. I was past that.

“I know you cannot see it from where you are standing,” I said. “But you are going to watch me, Lynette, for about the next fifty years.”

“And you are going to run clean out of ways to call me gone.”

She did not answer. She looked at Wade for a long time, at his dark hair.

Something in her face came loose. A tear went down it that she did not bother to wipe.

She did not say she was sorry. She was not built to say it fast, and I did not expect it.

But she slid the water pitcher closer to Brianna’s reach without being asked. She moved her own chair back a few inches and let me have the space by the bed.

For Lynette, that was a white flag the size of a bedsheet.

The Papers

Around one in the morning a woman from the records office came in with a clipboard. For once in that building the clipboard was on my side.

She was the birth registrar, and she had two things to do.

One was the information for the birth certificate. The other was a form I had never heard of.

It is called a Voluntary Acknowledgment of Paternity. In Illinois it is how a man who is not married to the mother puts his name on his child, legally, right there at the hospital, both parents signing, with a witness.

“You are the father,” the registrar said. It was not really a question. She had clearly already talked to Rosa.

“I am the father,” I said anyway. “Cole Mercer.”

She set the papers on the rolling tray table, clicked her pen, and handed it to me.

I had Wade in my left arm, sound asleep now, his fist still near my finger. I signed with my right hand, with my son laid across the other one.