The Day Dad Held the Baby

“His oxygen tank ruins the pictures,” Brynn said. She said it the way you would say the gravel road was washboarded again, like it was nobody’s fault and there was nothing to be done.

We were standing in her kitchen on a Thursday afternoon in May. The sun was coming in over the sink, and the baby was asleep in the swing by the table, ticking back and forth.

I had driven out with a pan of scalloped potatoes and a stack of burp cloths I had hemmed. I had only asked one thing. I had asked what time I should bring Dad to the church on Sunday.

Brynn had the guest list stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an ear of corn. She took it down and handed it to me, as if the paper would explain it better than she could.

It was all there in her neat round handwriting. Her folks. Her sister and the kids. Me. Cody’s cousins from Arnold. The couple who would stand up as sponsors. Twenty-six names, and a little checkmark after each one.

My father’s name was not on it. Lyle Ashby, eighty-eight years old, the baby’s great-grandfather, the only one of his generation still living on either side, was not on the list.

“Brynn,” I said. “Did you just forget him?”

She folded her arms over her sweatshirt and looked at the swing instead of at me. “I didn’t forget. I thought about it a lot, Dottie. It’s a small church and it’s a short service and the photographer is only booked for an hour.”

“He can sit in the back pew,” I said. “He won’t take any room.”

“It’s not the room.” She let out a breath. “It’s the tank and the tubes and the wheelchair. Every picture we take, it’ll be right there in the middle of it. This is the only time she gets baptized. I want the pictures to be about her.”

I stood there holding that list. I could hear the swing clicking and a meadowlark somewhere out past the machine shed. I did not say anything for a long while, because the only things I could think to say were not things you say in front of a sleeping baby.

My father bought grain at the elevator in town for forty-one years. Every farmer in that end of Custer County knew his truck and his handshake and the way he would round a test weight in your favor if it was close.

He was the man who called you at supper in a wet fall to tell you the elevator would stay open late. He was the man who sat with my mother in the hospital in Kearney for nineteen days and never once complained about the chair.

Since February he had lived at the care home in Broken Bow. His heart was tired and his lungs were worse. He was on two liters of oxygen around the clock, and he hated every inch of the tubing.