The Day Dad Held the Baby

“I got about forty,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want them. I can leave them out of the gallery if…”

“I want all of them,” Brynn said. “Every single one. I want the one with Cody kneeling. And the one where she’s holding his tubing.” She swallowed. “I want one big. For the wall.”

The photographer looked at me, and at Dad, and she smiled.

“I’ll put those first,” she said.

The photographs came in the middle of June, on a hot clear afternoon when the wheat along the road had started turning gold. Dad was right about the wheat, by the way. That quarter by the creek made forty-two.

Brynn drove them over to the care home herself. I was there. She had picked one out and had it printed big and framed, in a plain oak frame from the hardware store in Broken Bow.

It was the one from the font. Dad in his wheelchair in his gray suit jacket, his white hair shining, the baby in her white gown in his arms. Me crouched beside the chair in my sage green dress, with one hand on it. The tall clear windows behind us and the late-morning sun pouring in. The stone font at the edge of the picture.

And there, right on the back of the chair, plain as day, was the green oxygen tank.

Brynn had not cropped it. She had not had it edited out. She held the picture up for Dad and said, “I got two. One for you. And one for over our fireplace.”

Dad looked at it for a long time. Neva came in with his afternoon pills and stopped in the doorway and said, “Oh, Lyle,” and set the cup down and came to look.

“Well,” Dad said finally. His voice was thick. “That’s a fine-looking baby.”

Dad hung his copy on the wall across from his bed, where he could see it first thing every morning, right beside the grain markets.

I go out to Cody and Brynn’s every Sunday afternoon now. Brynn and I are not the same as we were before that Thursday in May. We are better. I think she knows I could have made it ugly and did not, and I know she could have kept her reason to herself and did not.

The big print hangs over their fireplace. Hadley is nearly a year old now, crawling everywhere, and when Brynn holds her up to the picture, she points at the man in the wheelchair and squeals.

Brynn tells her, “That’s Grandpa Lyle. He held you first, at church.”

That is not quite true. Pastor Elwin held her first, and Brynn before that, and me in the hospital the day she was born. But I do not correct her. In the way that matters, it is true.

They have taken a lot of pictures since. Her first birthday at the care home. Easter on the lawn out front, under the lilacs. Dad in his chair with Hadley on his knee, both of them with frosting on their chins.

The tank is in every picture, and nobody minds.