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Show registration desk or to check the hospital floor plan posted near the elevator, he moves through the halls with the precision of a surgeon. It is his second visit to the hospital that day. Only a few hours before, having made sure his wife was safely in the hands of the doctors, he had rushed home to shower and change from his blue jeans and t-shirt. When his first child came into the world, he wanted to be wearing a suit. Now, shaving cream still clinging to the lobes of his long ears, he returns, suited, and finds a place in the waiting room with the other fathers. The total trip has taken only a little over an hour. What he doesn't know is that the waiting has just begun. At first the empty time will feel familiar, like a chronic ache, a swelling, a leg you have learned to favor. For six years, they have waited, every month hoping only to have disappointment arrive with the blood. While their friends and family have brought children into this world with apparent ease and even grace, the man and his wife have struggled, refusing to admit to others, and barely to themselves, that they even want a family. Infertility in the 1960s is not well understood; doctors have prescribed various medications for ovarian stimulation, but each treatment feels less like science and more like guess work. A history of miscarriage in the family has also kept them company these six years. When they learned of this pregnancy, adoption papers had been signed, the hope for a biological child given up. In fact, a baby had already been matched, a baby they then had to surrender. For close to ten months, they have waited for the arrival of what has up until this moment only been a held breath. Hours later, the young man still sits in the windowless room of the Kingsville County Hospital, the shaving cream wiped from his ear. Nurses flit by offering the |