…”his business partner. Kevin. But he told me he’d had a vasectomy.”
My father, Dr. Robert Hale, had been the chief urologist at the hospital for twenty years. Five weeks earlier, my husband, Mark, had surgery there for testicular cancer, caught early. I was already seven months pregnant by then. Mark spent the week in recovery and then went through a short course of treatment. His doctor had confirmed that the treatment had left him infertile, probably permanently. Mark had never told me that last part. He’d been too proud.
The mistress, whose name was Brooke, kept shaking her head. “He told me he was divorcing you.”
“He told me he was at work late,” I said.
Mark tried to take Brooke outside to talk. She pulled away from him and called Kevin right there in my living room. We all heard Kevin say, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. That vasectomy thing was a lie.”
My aunt actually gasped out loud.
My father stopped laughing. He put his phone away and said quietly, “Mark, you lied to two women in this room. And you used my hospital’s records to keep your own wife in the dark. I’m sorry, but I won’t let you upset my daughter any more today. Please leave.”
Mark left. Brooke left after him, crying into the phone. The guests stood in silence for a moment, and then my best friend picked up a gift bag and said, “Well, who wants to see the onesies?” Everyone laughed, and somehow the shower went on.
My son was born a month later. Mark asked to be in the room. I said no. He came to the hospital the next day with flowers and an apology. He was his son’s father, and I let him meet him. But I had already filed for divorce.
Kevin and Brooke are, as far as I know, raising their baby together. Mark’s business with Kevin collapsed within a year.
My father is the best grandfather a child could have. He tells my son that he once laughed at a baby shower so hard it saved his mother’s life. My son doesn’t understand the story yet. He just likes the part where Grandpa laughs.
