The Day Dad Held the Baby

He did not hate it for himself. He hated it because he thought it made other people uncomfortable. He was always tucking the line behind his ear, smoothing it down along his collar, as if he could make it disappear if he was neat enough.

And here was the thing that made my hands shake, standing in that kitchen. This was not the first time.

Four years earlier, at Cody and Brynn’s wedding, Dad had been on a walker and a smaller tank. The photographer had arranged the family on the church steps, and somebody had steered Dad over to the side, to a folding chair in the shade, so he would not be in the way.

He ended up in none of the family pictures. Not one. I found that out later, when the album came. I let it go, because it was a wedding and it was not my day, and because Dad told me not to make a fuss.

“Doesn’t matter a lick,” he had said. “I was there. I saw it.”

Now it was going to happen again, only this time he would not even be in the building.

I know what some of you are thinking. Call your son. Tell Cody what his wife did and let him straighten it out.

I thought about it the whole drive home on the county road, with the windows down and the dust coming up behind me in the afternoon sun.

But Cody was working sixteen-hour days that week, planting beans for the farm he works for and two neighbors, coming home after dark and leaving before light. He had left the baptism up to Brynn because she was the one home with the baby.

If I called him, he would have to choose between his mother and his wife in the middle of planting, three days before his daughter’s baptism, over the phone in the cab of a tractor. Somebody would say something that could not be taken back.

Dad had already been left out once. I was not going to make a war over a three-month-old baby. I was not going to have Hadley’s baptism remembered as the day her parents fought.

So I did not call. I did not argue. I went home, still with the pan of potatoes on the seat beside me, and sat at my kitchen table until I knew what I was going to do.

I drove to Broken Bow on Friday morning. Dad was in his chair by the window in the day room, with his tank on the back of the wheelchair and the newspaper folded to the grain markets.

He still read the markets every morning. He said it kept his mind honest.

“Beans are up eleven cents,” he said, before I even sat down. “Cody will want to hold some back.”

“He’s planting them as fast as he can,” I said. “You should see the dust.”

He smiled. Then he asked me the question I knew he would ask. He had been asking it every visit since the baby was born.

“Sunday’s the baptism, isn’t it? What time do I need to be ready?”