Part 3 — Who Was In The Old Photo
I held the photograph in both hands. It showed a young man in a paramedics jacket standing beside a road in the snow, with a wrapped newborn in his arms. I knew that man better than I knew myself. It was my husband, Tom.
Tom had been a volunteer medic for twenty years, and in the winter of 1997 he was driving home from a shift when he found a car stalled on the shoulder of Highway 16. A frightened young woman named Rosa sat inside, in labor, with no phone and no help.
He delivered her first child in the front seat of that car, wrapped the baby in his own coat and drove them to Tacoma General himself. He never told me the whole story. Tom was not a man who boasted about the good things he did.
That first baby was Marias older brother. When Rosa learned Tom had passed in 1999, she kept the photograph, hoping that someday she could thank his family. Years later, when she became pregnant with Maria, she asked specifically for a nurse named Margaret.
She had not known I was Toms wife until her daughter told her the name on my card. She had only known a nurse who stayed with her baby in the snow, and a medic who had saved her son before that.
I sat on that bench outside Safeway and cried. Not for sadness alone, but for the strange comfort of discovering that my husbands kindness had traveled all the way down the years and landed in my hands again.
Kindness does not stay where it is given; it waits twenty five years and then buys a can of formula in a grocery line.
Maria told me her mother had passed the year before and left her one request, to find the nurse. She had no idea where to start, and then the nurse paid for her formula without being asked.
I took Maria and her baby to my house for lunch. Her daughter, six weeks old, is named Rosa Margarita. I held her while Maria ate, and the baby opened her eyes and looked straight at me with a look I knew.
That week I helped her sign up for food assistance and a pediatric clinic. A neighbor of mine, a social worker, found her a childcare program, and my church donated a crib and a car seat.
Maria works part time at a bakery and takes classes at the community college. She wants to become a nurse. I have promised to write her recommendation, and I intend to make it the best one the school has ever read.
I kept the photograph on my mantel next to Toms picture. Maria came by on Sunday with her baby and said, I think they would have liked each other.