The Thousand My Wife Laughed At

I should have said something. I have turned that evening over so many times since that I have worn the edges smooth, and the one thing I cannot forgive myself for is that I did not say anything. I stood there in my own kitchen and I let my wife talk to my father like he was a stranger who had knocked on the wrong door.

“Diane,” I finally managed. “It’s just a thousand dollars. He’s good for it.”

“That’s not the point.” She shut the water off. “The point is he won’t tell us what it’s for. Grown man, won’t even say. You want us to just hand it over like he’s a teenager. If my father showed up asking for money and wouldn’t say why, you’d have questions too.”

Dad put his cap back on. “It’s all right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked. Forget I did. I’ll figure it another way.”

“Dad.” I came around the counter. “Hold on.”

“No, no.” He already had his hand on the door. “Your wife’s right. I ought to have planned better. I’m sorry to have troubled your evening.” And he looked at me, just for a second, and there was something in his face I did not have a word for then. I have a word for it now. It was disappointment, but it was not aimed at me. It was aimed at himself, for having needed anything at all.

He drove off down G with his taillights going small in the dark, and Diane said, “I don’t know why he can’t just be straight with us,” and she went to bed, and I sat up at the kitchen table a long time with a cold cup of coffee feeling like I had failed a test I had not known I was taking.

I meant to call him the next day. I want that on the record too. I meant to call him and tell him of course, come get the thousand, I didn’t care what it was for, he was my father. I even reached for the phone around noon on Wednesday.

But Wednesday I had a water heater to replace at the Lindeman place and then a furnace that would not light over in the next county, and I am a one-man operation, Renner Heating and Plumbing, and the days get away from a man. I told myself I would catch him at church Sunday. I told myself it could keep.

It could not keep.

Thursday afternoon my phone rang while I was under a sink, and it was Marv Bauer, which was strange, because Marv ran the funeral home in town and we were friendly but he did not call me. I wiggled out from the cabinet and answered and he said, “Dale, your dad’s at the hospital in Ottumwa. Ruth Dahl found him down in his kitchen this morning. They’ve taken him up for surgery. You need to go.”