Nine Calls From My Hospital Bed

The drive nobody talks about

They left a little after ten thirty. My father paused at the door, his cap back on his head, and he looked at me for a moment, and I thought for one second that he might say something, that some door might open in him that had been painted shut my whole life.

He said, “You always were the tough one.” And I could not tell, I still cannot tell, whether it was an insult or the closest thing to an apology he had in him. Maybe both. He turned and followed my mother out.

I found out later, from a cousin who heard it from Shelby, that the ride home was ninety minutes of silence, and that when they got back to the farm my father went out and sat in the machine shed by himself until nearly two in the morning, which is the exact hour I had come out of surgery the night before. I have thought about that a great deal. I like to think he sat out there and did some arithmetic of his own. But I do not know. I have stopped needing to know.

Teresa came in after they were gone and checked my lines and did not mention any of it, and just before she left she squeezed my foot through the blanket, which is a thing nurses do, and she said, “You get some sleep now, Ms. Denning. You had a big day.” And I laughed, and it hurt, and it was the best hurt of the whole day.

What healed and what didn’t

My lung came back. It took a while. I spent eleven days in that hospital and another six weeks doing breathing exercises with a little plastic device that made a blue disc rise in a chamber, and I got to where I could make the disc rise to the top, and then I got to where I could walk the fence line again, slow at first and then not slow.

The wreck settled with the trucking company’s insurance the following spring. Warren handled it. It was a real amount of money, more than my father had made farming in his life, and I put every dollar of it into the Eleanor Denning Foundation, because I did not need it and because it felt right that the money that came out of the worst day should go to the young farmers who were having their worst days too, the ones a hailstorm away from losing everything.

My family and I did not speak for a long time. Shelby texted me twice in the first month, once to say she hoped I was feeling better and once, three weeks later, to ask, in a very careful roundabout way, whether the thing my mother had told her about the will was true. I told her it was. She did not text a third time.

My mother wrote me a letter that summer, four pages in her careful hand, and it was the closest she has ever come to seeing herself. It still was not close. It was mostly a defense with a few apologies mixed in like raisins in a bad cookie, but I keep it, because at least she picked up a pen. I wrote her back one page. I told her I was not angry anymore, which was true by then, and that I forgave her, which was also true, and that forgiveness did not mean the will was changing back, which she needed to hear stated plainly because otherwise she would have heard forgiveness as a negotiation. She did not write again.

My father, of all of them, is the one who came around, in his stunted flinty way. He showed up at the seed store one afternoon the following year, on some pretext about soybean varieties, and he stood at the counter and did not buy anything and finally said, “That foundation. The Eleanor one. I heard the Bakersfield boy got a grant off it. Good kid. Working ground his daddy lost.” And I said yes, he did. And my father nodded and looked at the seed racks for a while and then he said, “Your grandmother would’ve liked that.” And he left. That was it. That was the whole thing. But from my father, that was a symphony, and I stood behind the counter after he drove off and I cried for the second time in this whole story.