Chapter 4

4

When Mrs., Panim was finally set to be released from the hospital, she had asked for her husband an endless amount of times, but whoever she asked, she was told they did not know where he was.

Finally, she confronted Dr. Newsom.

“Where is my husband?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” the doctor said, again putting his hand through his hair like a comb. “I just don’t know where he is.”

Right before Mrs. Panim was going to be allowed to leave the hospital with her son, one of the nurses who attended to her when she was out, the older nurse, with thick legs and a limp--told Mrs. Panim about the supposed whereabouts of her husband.

“You must swear that you won’t tell Dr. Newsom or anybody here that I told you this,” the nurse said.

Mrs. Panim nodded in agreement.

“Your husband visited the hospital to see how you were doing when you were out cold, and he was taken to see your child for the first time by me, and it happened before you were well.

“When I took him to see the baby in the maternity ward, and he was shown the child, he shook his head back and forth and back and forth so much that I thought he was going to throw his whole body out of joint.”

Mrs. Panim started to cry.

“He then did something kind of odd,” the nurse continued. “Your husband just stood there for about 10 minutes shaking his head, and then, he took out a penny from his pocket, and flipped it in the air.”

“What?” Mrs. Panim said through her sobs.

The nurse continued. “I clearly saw that it fell on heads when it hit the ground, He picked it up, put in my hand, turned to the nurse’s station, thanked them for showing him his son,, and then he left.”

“He hasn’t been back here since?” Mrs. Panim asked through her sobs as the nurse gave her the penny.

“No, I am sorry, we have not seen him since.”

Mrs. Panim promptly put the penny among her belongings, and walked to the maternity ward to get her son.

She kept the penny in a plastic bag stapled to her son’s birth certificate, safely stored in her bedroom vanity.

Abraham Lincoln Panim now had a name. He might have been named after a coin that his father gave to a nurse, but Mrs. Panim still kept her part of the bargain between she and her now evidently estranged husband, giving her son a strong name to match his gender, the gender that her husband knew before anyone else did, simply by flipping a coin.

So as Abraham Lincoln Panim grew up, Mrs. Panim raised him as a single mother. She never took down her wedding photos or any photos of her husband, and she always thought that he would return.