My mother was sitting in the porch swing with a pitcher of iced tea sweating on the rail beside her, wearing the expression she used to wear when I was nine and had broken a window. “Richard Hale,” she said. “Sit down. Both of you, actually.” Both of us? I turned my head. On the far side of the porch, in his wicker chair, with a newspaper held up in front of his face, sat my father. He lowered the paper an inch. His eyes were bright. “Hello, son,” he said. Then the newspaper went back up, shaking slightly, and I realized with astonishment that my seventy year old father was trying not to laugh.
“The clinic called me at eleven this morning,” my mother said. “They were looking for Richard Hale at this phone number, the one in your file from when you were twenty two and still on our insurance. I said, which one? And the young lady said, oh, there are two. They merged the charts, honey. Yours and your father. Three years of tests, and a paper you carried folded in your wallet for eight months, and it was not yours.” She drew a breath. “It was his. Your father had his vasectomy in nineteen ninety one, right after your brother. He has been a Richard Hale with a zero in his results for thirty three years.”
I stared at my father. The newspaper dropped, and now he was crying with laughter. “I always wondered,” he said, between gasps, “why they kept calling me about fertility counseling. I thought it was a scam.” My mother swatted him with a placemat. And I, the man who had driven ninety miles an hour down the interstate convinced that his wife had betrayed him, sat down hard on the top step and then shot up again. “Claire,” I said. “She is in labor. I left her in the delivery room.” My mother was already holding out her purse. “Your father will drive,” she said. “I will sit in the back and say the rosary.”
A hospital paper with a zero on it turned out to belong to the wrong Richard Hale, and the right one had a baby to meet.
I have never been in a car like that Buick. My father drove with the intensity of a man who has waited all his life to be useful, and my mother sat in the back seat gripping the handle above the window and praying out loud for every traffic light. We ran two of them. We arrived at the hospital at four minutes to midnight, and I ran down the corridor, past a wall of framed photographs of smiling babies, and shoved through the door of the delivery room. Claire looked up at me from the bed with sweat on her forehead and murder in her eyes. “You,” she said.
“I am an idiot,” I said. “It was not my paper. It was my father. There was a clerical error.” She stared. “The paper in your wallet?” “The paper in my wallet.” The nurse at the foot of the bed made a strange sound and pressed her lips together. “Mr. Hale,” she said. “Is this the same Mr. Hale whose blood type came up wrong in the portal?” “It was the portal,” Claire said. “It showed me the wrong blood type for him. I read it out loud. I thought it was a typo.” “It was your father in law,” said the nurse, and began to shake.
Our son was born at 12:41 in the morning, seven pounds and nine ounces, with a full head of dark hair and an expression of profound disapproval. I held him against my chest and wept without shame. Claire reached over and took my hand. “I am going to kill you,” she said gently, “after the baby is a little older.” I told her that I understood. I told her I would build the gallows myself. She was laughing, and the nurse was laughing, and my son opened one eye and looked at the entire room as though we were all out of our minds.
Dr. Patel called the next morning, very contrite, and offered to rerun my test free of charge for the rest of my life. I told him once would do. The result came the following week. Thirty eight million, normal motility, and a note from the doctor in blue pen. Mr. Hale, you are entirely healthy and, by definition, the father of at least one infant. Claire read it out loud at the breakfast table and then framed it, to my great embarrassment, and hung it in the downstairs bathroom, where every guest who has visited us since has had the chance to admire it.
That night, in the nursery, I told Claire everything: the paper in my wallet, the three years, the silence. I apologized for eight months of it. She shook her head and took the baby out of my arms. “I saw you folding that paper,” she said. “Since the spring. I thought you were dying.” I stared at her. “I did not want to ask,” she said. “I was afraid you would tell me.” We looked at each other in the dim yellow light, and then we both laughed, quietly, so as not to wake the baby, because neither one of us had asked and both of us had suffered for it.
We named him Owen Richard Hale. My father insisted that he be given the middle name, and insisted that everyone know why, and at the christening he stood up in the church hall with a glass of ginger ale and told the entire story. He told it beautifully. He told it with gestures. He did the voice of the young lady at the clinic. My mother pulled on his sleeve twice, and he went right on, and I looked around the room at forty guests laughing until they wept, and Claire, with the baby in her arms, laughing hardest of all.
I still carry the wrong paper in my wallet. I could not tell you why. Maybe it is a reminder that a sheet with a number on it knows nothing about who loves you. Maybe it is just that I like to remember the porch, and my mother in the swing with her iced tea, and my father behind a newspaper that shook with silent laughter. Before you believe a paper that frightens you, ask the person who loves you. That is the lesson I got, at the price of one very long drive.
