The Application My Father In Law Kept
“She told me what you did with your coat,” she said finally. “She told me you lay down on the floor.”
“Anybody would have.”
“Anybody didn’t,” Karen said. “Half that street drove past her house Tuesday morning on the way to work.”
Emma gave Mrs. Petersen the card. Mrs. Petersen looked at it a long time.
“Is this your daddy’s truck?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, it’s a good one,” she said. “You be proud of that truck.”
Emma looked up at me. It was the look from the kitchen doorway, turned inside out.
I had not told anyone outside the house. Rick had told his wife, who works the register at the Hy-Vee on the east side, and I am told that is the same as putting it on the radio. The paper ran four inches on Friday under a picture of the truck. City crew finds woman, 84, after fall in garage.
Men I had never spoken to nodded at me at the gas station. The fellow from North Carolina Avenue stood on his porch the next Tuesday at twelve below and held his salute until we were past.
Then came Sunday.
We go to the Lutheran church Kelly was baptized in. So do Walt and Jean, third pew on the left, forty years in the same seats.
Pastor read the prayer list and got to Edna Petersen, recovering from surgery. That was all that was said in the service, which suited me.
Coffee hour is in the basement. I was getting Ben a doughnut when Karen Petersen came down the stairs. She had come to thank her mother’s church, and she crossed that whole room to me.
She did not lower her voice. I do not think she knew how.
“My mother lay on her garage floor two hours Tuesday morning,” she said. “She is alive because this man knows his route so well that an empty curb looked wrong to him. I have lived in the city a long time. I had forgotten there were places where the man who picks up your trash knows your name.”
The room had gone quiet around the coffee urn.
“Dan, she says she was never scared, because she knew you were coming. I don’t know what the city pays you. It isn’t enough.”
Somebody set a cup down and started clapping, which Lutherans do not do. Then all of them were. Kelly was crying and laughing at once.
I looked at my shoes. And then, because I could not help it, I looked across the room.
Walt was standing by the wall with his cup. Jean had her hand over her mouth. Walt was not clapping. But I saw his hand come up, slowly, and go to his shirt pocket, and rest there.
Three different men went over and said something to him and tipped their heads toward me. I saw him nod each time. He left without his second doughnut.
He came the following Saturday.
I was back in the garage, this time with a space heater, sharpening the blades for the snowblower. I heard a car door and knew the sound of it. Walt has driven a Buick off his own lot for as long as I have known him.
He walked up the drive in his good overcoat and stopped at the edge of the concrete, the way a man stops at the edge of someone else’s property.
“Dan.”
“Walt. Come in out of it.”