Brianna signed after me, awake enough, her hand shaking. She smiled at me the whole time she did it.
The registrar asked for the baby’s full name for the certificate.
“Wade Earl Mercer,” Brianna said, before I could.
Earl was my grandfather’s middle name too. She had kept that part back to surprise me. I had to look up at the ceiling for a second so I would not come apart in front of everybody.
Mercer. My last name, on the certificate, under his, in ink, in a county records office at one in the morning.
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His grandmother sat three feet away and watched it happen and did not say one word to stop it. There was nothing left to stop.
He was a Mercer. He had been a Mercer the whole time. The paper just caught up to the truth.
I asked the registrar, before she left, what would have happened if I had not gotten back there. If I had given up at the glass and driven home.
She was honest with me. She said the mother can still put the father’s name down later, but it gets harder, and sometimes there are forms and waiting and a man has to prove what he already knows.
“It is a lot easier,” she said, “when he is standing right here holding the baby. You made it easy.”
I had not felt like I made anything easy. I had felt like I stood at a window for forty minutes and almost lost everything to a clipboard and a cardigan.
When it was done the registrar took her clipboard and left. Rosa came back in to check on Brianna.
She saw the signed form on the tray and she patted my shoulder on her way past.
“There it is,” she said. “Told you. A father’s face.”