The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

So the next evening I ate my supper, and when Walt folded his napkin and said “I’ll see you at the fire,” I gave him a two minute head start, and then I set down my own napkin and I followed him out into the dusk.

He did not take the car. That surprised me. He walked, out the lodge drive and down the gravel county road toward the little town of Brandt’s Mill, which was not much, a grain elevator and a tavern and a hardware and a few streets of houses under big cottonwoods. The light was going purple and gold the way it does over the Sandhills in June, and the man ahead of me walked with his hands in his pockets and his head up, in no hurry, a man who knew exactly where he was going.

I kept back. I felt ridiculous, a gray haired woman in her good cardigan skulking down a county road after a man, and if a car had come by I would have had to pretend I was out for an evening constitutional. But no car came. He walked into town and turned down a side street and stopped in front of a low brick building with a wheelchair ramp and a hand painted sign, and the sign said BRANDT’S MILL CARE CENTER.

He went in like he belonged there.

I stood across the street under a cottonwood, and I will tell you my heart was going like a trip hammer, because I did not understand, and the things I did not understand were worse than the things I had feared. Did he have a mother here. A relative. Was this where the money went. I waited. I counted. And after a few minutes I could not stand it, and I crossed the street, and I went up to the window at the end, the big window that looked into a common room, where the light was on.

And I looked in.

There was a man in a bed by the window. An old man, older than Walt, older than me, so thin the blanket barely rose over him, with the look of a person the illness has nearly finished with. He was alone in the room except for Walt. And Walt had pulled a chair up close to the bed, and he was holding the old man’s hand in both of his big quiet hands, and his head was bent, and his mouth was moving, and I could not hear through the glass but I knew the shape of the words because I had grown up on them in a Lutheran pew in Ardell, Nebraska.