Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [47]
Frank again wanted to take the long way back, bypassing Texas altogether. Bessie said: “It makes no sense, when we can drive straight across. I don’t want to have this baby along the side of this road, Frank, in the back seat of this car. I want to get back to California.” For once, Bessie won the fight, and they began making their way across the infinitely wide state of Texas. This time, there was no doubting it: Frank did not want to be in Texas. He seemed nervous every mile of the trip, and since Texas was so damn big, Frank’s nervousness lasted. He tried driving all night so he could get through the state faster, but there’s no such thing as an unbroken drive across Texas. Bessie would wake up in the morning light, in the backseat with the baby, and find her husband passed out from sleeplessness in the front. It felt so urgent to get through and out of the place, Bessie drove the car herself a few times, eight and a half months pregnant, though she barely knew how to drive.
Then, driving along Route 67, it became evident that they wouldn’t make California. The baby was coming and they needed to find a hospital. A man at a gas station directed them down the highway to McCamey; it was an oil worker’s town, he said, and it had a good hospital. As the car wheeled into the hospital driveway, and Bessie sat in the backseat clutching the door handle with one hand and her overfull belly with the other, Frank turned to her and said: “Don’t tell anybody a damn thing in this place. Let me do all the talking.” That was all Bessie could remember. Next thing she knew, she was on a gurney, being wheeled under hallway lights into the delivery room.
A FEW HOURS LATER, SHE AWOKE TO THE SOUND of a Texas nurse’s twang. “Mrs. Coffman?” the nurse said. “Are you all right, Mrs. Coffman? Can you hear me?” In her groggy state, Bessie thought: Why doesn’t Mrs. Coffman answer the woman? Is Mrs. Coffman all right?
Then she felt my father’s hand on her shoulder, shaking her lightly. “Bessie, can you hear us? It’s okay, it’s me, Walter.”
Bessie opened her eyes to see her husband, standing on the right side of the bed she was in. On the other side stood the nurse, holding my mother’s new baby. Seeing the baby, Bessie came to and reached out to hold her child.
“Here’s your baby, Mrs. Coffman. You have a healthy and beautiful son. In fact, I’d say that little Faye here is just about the prettiest baby I’ve ever seen in these parts.”
That finished waking Bessie. “Little Fay?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Frank. “I already gave them the information for the birth certificate. I told them we had settled on the name Faye Robert Coffman.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” the nurse said. “And you have a truly devoted husband. He insisted on staying here by your bedside. He wanted to be here when you woke up.”
All Bessie could do was stare at the new baby and its already vivid blue eyes and think: Did I wake up a different person? Or have I gone crazy?
LATER, WHEN THEY WERE ALONE, IT HAD ALL COME BACK to Bessie: the desperate drive across Texas, and the news that they were using yet another name. All that made sense to her—at least as much as anything made sense in their lives at this point—but what she couldn’t fathom was the particular name that Frank had come up with for their new son. “How,” she asked, “could you give a child a name like that: Fay Robert Coffman?”
“I don’t think it’s such a bad name. You couldn’t do any better. Besides, I spelled it a little differently. I put an e at the end of Fay.”
“I don’t care how it’s spelled. You’ve still named your son after your mother and another one of your sons—somebody you don’t even love. What the hell has gotten into you?”
“Calm down,” said Frank. “We’re not going to stay in Texas forever. But while we’re here, his name is Faye Robert. And my name is Walter. Don’t forget it.”
A couple of days later they checked into a local hotel, the Doyle, while waiting for Bessie to get her strength back for traveling.