The Toys My Brother Threw In The Fire

Seven in the morning

A truck door woke me.

I know the sound of my father’s truck door. It is a 2004 Silverado and the driver’s side has needed a new hinge pin since about 2011. It does not shut so much as drop.

I got up off the floor with my neck in a knot. Noah was still asleep, on his stomach, one arm hanging off the bed where my hand had been.

The clock on the stove said 7:02. I looked through the front curtain.

My father was on my porch.

He was wearing the same shirt as the day before, the short-sleeved blue plaid one my mother irons for company. It was wrinkled all the way up the back. His boots were unlaced. I do not believe that man had been to bed.

He did not knock. He stood on my welcome mat with his seed cap in one hand. In the other hand he had something small, wrapped up in one of my mother’s dish towels, the yellow one with the roosters.

He was holding it against his chest the way you would hold a hurt bird.

I stood on my side of the door. I did not open it. I could see him through the little window, and he could see me.

“Jenna,” he said. “Please answer your phone.”

“I’m standing right here, Dad.”

“I know it.”

His voice cracked on that. I had heard my father’s voice crack exactly once before, at his own mother’s funeral, and he had covered it with a cough.

“I can’t say it looking at you,” he said. “I tried it in the truck all the way in and I can’t. I’ll go sit in the cab. You just pick up when it rings. Please. I’m asking you.”

My father is sixty-eight years old. He farmed four hundred acres until his knees gave out, and then he drove a propane truck for the co-op for eleven more years. I have never heard him ask for one thing. Not a ride, not a second helping, not for help getting up off the ground the time the ladder went out from under him. He has not begged for anything in his life.

“Say what?” I said.

“What your nephews told me at that fire last night. After you left.”

I felt the floor tilt a little.

He looked down at the dish towel.

“And what your mother pulled out of it,” he said.

He started to unfold it. His hands were shaking, and he has big hands, and it took him a moment to find the corner.

It was Clover.

He was damp. He was cleaner than he had been in years, more silver than gray, and he smelled like dish soap and my mother’s dryer sheets. The fur along his left side was short and stiff and brown at the tips. His left ear was half the length of his right one, and the end of it had been folded over and closed with tiny stitches in gray thread.

I opened the door.

“She went in after them with the tongs before you were out of the driveway,” my father said. He was talking to the rabbit, not to me. “Took them right out of Kyle’s hand. The bear was gone. The dog was gone. She got this one because he was up on the edge. She washed him in the sink with Dawn. Three times. She sewed that ear at two in the morning with her reading glasses on and her hands going like this.”

He held up his own shaking hand to show me.

“I sat in the kitchen and watched her do it,” he said. “I didn’t do a thing. That’s the story of me, Jenna. I sat there and watched.”

I took the rabbit. He was still warm from the dryer, or from my father’s shirt.

“Sit down, Dad,” I said.