The Thousand My Wife Laughed At

I do not remember the drive. I remember the waiting room, the gray carpet and the coffee that tasted like the pot, and a surgeon younger than me coming out in his scrubs to tell me my father had a bleed in his gut that had been building for a while, that he had lost a lot of blood, that they had him open and were doing what they could but that I needed to understand it was serious, that a man of seventy-one with a bleed that size, they could not make promises.

A bleed that had been building for a while.

I sat down hard in that plastic chair. He had known. Some part of him had known he was not right, and he had stood in my kitchen Tuesday night with his cap in his hands worried about a thousand dollars, and my wife had laughed at him.

I called Diane. She said, “Oh, no, is he going to be okay?” and then she said, “Do you want me to come?” and there was a hitch in the way she said it, a half a second where I could hear her thinking about her plans, and I said no, stay home, I’ll call you, and I hung up and I did not call her back for a long time.

What I want to tell you about is who did come.

Ruth Dahl came first, of course, because it was Ruth who had found him. She is a widow, lives a mile and a half from Dad on the other side of the Schroeder farm, a little bent woman in her eighties with her hair in a white knot. She came into that waiting room and took both my hands in her cold ones and said, “Your father was going to bring me my groceries this morning. He brings them every Thursday. When he didn’t come I got a bad feeling, so I had the Hartley boy drive me over.” She was crying. “He has brought me my groceries every Thursday for six years, Dale. Since Harold passed. He never once let me pay him for the gas.”

I did not know that. I want to be honest. I did not know my father drove Ruth Dahl her groceries every Thursday. I thought she had family.

Then the Hobbs came. Travis and Katie Hobbs, a young couple, maybe twenty-five, farm rented ground south of town. I knew them a little from church. Katie was carrying the kind of grief that you can see on a person, and I did not understand why they were there, at a hospital, for my father, until Travis shook my hand and could barely get the words out. “Your dad,” he said. “I don’t know what we’d have done. I don’t know how to ever thank him.”

“For what?” I said.