The Voicemail Nine Days After I Left

I walked out the mudroom door. The yard light had come on. The dogs followed me to the Ranger and I had to push old Bess’s nose out of the door to get it shut.

Nobody came out on the porch.

I drove the three miles of our gravel to the county road, and then the fourteen miles north to Valentine with the Sandhills going dark on both sides of me, and I did not cry until I passed the turnoff to the cemetery where my mother is.

Then I cried so hard I had to pull over by the fence.

Let me tell you what six years looked like, so you understand what I drove away from.

My mother died in March of my junior year at Chadron State. Pancreatic. It took eleven weeks from the day they found it. I came home for the funeral with one suitcase and a plan to go back in the fall.

Nobody told me I couldn’t go back. It was just that the first week, I found six months of unopened mail in a grocery sack beside her desk. The second week I found out my father did not know which bank held the operating note. The third week the propane ran out because nobody had called for a fill.

Mom had done all of it. She did it so quietly that the men in that house believed those things did themselves.

So I picked it up. One thing, then the next thing. By fall I was doing every bit of it, and nobody ever said the word “stay” out loud. I just never left.

Then four years ago my father had his heart attack in the calving barn. Two stents and a list of seven prescriptions. Some once a day, some twice, one that had to be taken on an empty stomach, and a blood thinner the clinic adjusted every few weeks after his blood draw.

Every Sunday night after the dishes, I sat at the kitchen table with seven orange bottles and two plastic pill organizers, and I filled two weeks’ worth, morning and night. I had started keeping two weeks ahead after a blizzard shut the highway for five days one January.

Every morning I set his morning pills beside his coffee cup. Every night I set the night ones beside his plate.

He took them without looking at them, the way you take a napkin.

I got up at a quarter to five. I cooked for three men, kept the house, did the ranch books on Mom’s old desktop, and went back to that desk after supper until eleven.

I was twenty-seven years old and I had not slept past five o’clock since I was twenty-one.

And two winters ago, when I came down with the flu and was flat on my back for four days, the whole place came apart so fast it scared me. Nobody could find the checkbook. My father missed his pills for three days and never mentioned it.

So when I got better I wrote it all down. Everything. I typed up forty-some pages and put them in a blue three-ring binder with tabs. I wrote my brother’s name across the front in black marker, because he was the one who would inherit the place, and he was the one who ought to know how it ran.

I handed it to him in the shop one afternoon.