The Day Dad Held the Baby

I folded the chair and laid it in my trunk with the spare tank wedged in a blanket. The tank on his lap went in a carrier on the floor between his feet, with the line running up to his cannula.

We drove out of Broken Bow with the windows cracked and the radio off. The church sits eleven miles out on a gravel road, a little white frame building with a cemetery behind it and a row of cedars on the north side for the wind.

Dad had been baptized in that church. So had I. So had Cody. We had buried my mother out behind it, under the cedars.

“Look at that wheat,” Dad said, as we passed a quarter of wheat by the creek. “That’s going to make forty bushels if it gets one more rain.”

“You think?”

“I know,” he said. “I bought wheat for forty-one years. I know what forty bushels looks like in May.”

We did not talk about Brynn. We did not talk about the list. He watched the fields go by, and every few minutes he reached up and tucked the tubing behind his ear.

There were already a dozen pickups and cars in the gravel lot when we pulled in, and the photographer’s little white car parked right by the front steps.

The church has a ramp on the side that the men built years ago for a widow who came every Sunday on a walker, and I was grateful for every board of it. I got Dad out and into his chair, with the tank on the back and the spare hanging from the handles.

My heart was pounding. I will be honest about that. I was not sure what I was doing was right. I only knew that the other thing was wrong.

We came in through the side door at the back, just as the organist started the prelude. I parked Dad’s chair at the end of the last pew, right up against the aisle, and I slid in beside him.

A few heads turned. Then a few more.

Across the aisle sat a farmer I had known all my life, a man Dad had bought grain from for thirty years. He looked at Dad and something moved in his face. He leaned over the pew and put out his hand, and Dad shook it.

He did not say a word. He did not have to.

Two pews up, an old woman from my mother’s quilting circle turned all the way around in her seat and gave Dad a little wave with her bulletin. He lifted his hand off the armrest and waved back.

The family was in the front pew. I could see the back of Cody’s head, his hair still damp from the shower, his good blue shirt. I could see Brynn’s hair pinned up, and the white of the baptism gown over her shoulder.

During the first hymn, Brynn turned around to look for someone. Her sister, maybe. Her eyes went across the church and landed on the last pew.