The Day Dad Held the Baby

Pastor Elwin laid one hand on Hadley’s head and one hand on Dad’s shoulder. He said the blessing. I could not tell you a word of it. I only know his voice broke once in the middle and he had to stop and start again.

The photographer had moved up to the front pew without anyone asking her to. I saw her lift her camera, and lower it, and lift it again. She took picture after picture.

Brynn had not moved from the step. She stood there by the font with her empty arms, watching her husband kneel by his grandfather, and I saw her face come apart, very quietly, the way a young woman’s face does when she has just seen herself from the outside.

I did not look at her for long. It was not my moment to watch. It was hers to have in private, as much as anyone can be private at the front of a country church.

When the blessing was done, the church said amen, and it was the loudest amen I have ever heard in that building.

After the service, people came up to Dad one after another. Old farmers who had sold him grain. Women from the circle. A man who had worked the scale at the elevator with him in the seventies.

They shook his hand. They patted his shoulder. Nobody made a speech. One old man just stood there with his hand on the back of the chair for a full minute and then said, “Good to see you, Lyle,” and walked away blowing his nose.

I did not go to Brynn. I want that understood. I did not say a word to her, then or later, about the list. I did not look at her across the room with any meaning in my eyes. I had brought my father to his great-granddaughter’s baptism. That was all I had come to do.

Cody stayed beside his grandpa through the whole receiving line. He held the spare tank. He fetched a glass of water. At one point he bent down and fixed the tubing behind Dad’s ear himself, gently, the way Dad always did.

The potluck was in the fellowship hall downstairs, but there was no way to get a wheelchair down those stairs, so the church ladies did what church ladies do. They carried it up.

They set a card table at the back of the sanctuary by the windows, with a paper tablecloth, and brought up a plate of ham and scalloped potatoes and green bean casserole and a slice of rhubarb pie, and a cup of black coffee, and they sat Dad there in the sun like a king.

I sat with him. Cody sat with him. After a while, the baby came back to him too, in her little white gown, asleep in a carrier on the chair beside his.

Brynn came up the stairs about twenty minutes later. She was carrying a paper plate she had not touched. She stood at the end of the card table, and she did not sit down.

“Grandpa Lyle,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “Can I talk to you?”