The Girl Who Read Him the Box Scores

“Who comes to see you, Dad? During the week, I mean.”

My father did not have to think about it.

“Just you,” he said, “and the girl who mops.”

He said it the way he used to report the weather off the porch. No complaint in it. Just the count.

I was sitting on the edge of his bed at Cottonwood Court in Hastings, Nebraska, on a Sunday afternoon in September, with his statement folded in my shirt pocket. I had picked it up out of my own mailbox on Friday and carried it ninety miles because one line on it had started to itch at me.

Companion Visit Program, daily. $340.00.

It had been on every statement since he moved in. Fourteen of them. I paid it out of his account the same way I paid the room and board, the barber, the cable. I have his power of attorney and I am careful with it. I had never once asked him about that line, because I thought I knew what it was.

“Nobody else?” I said. “Somebody from the home? A lady, maybe, comes in and sits a while?”

“The aides come in. They’re good to me. They’ve got eleven other people to get to.” He turned his face toward the window. He can still tell light from dark and a person from a doorway, and he can tell you what color shirt you have on if you stand close. Print is gone. Faces are mostly gone. “Carol Jean calls from Arizona. Wednesdays and Sundays.”

“I know she does.”

“That’s a telephone. That’s not company.” He reached over and patted the straight chair that sat between his recliner and the bed. “The girl who mops sits right there.”

“She sits.”

“Every morning but her days off.”

“And does what?”

“Reads me the box scores.”

I looked at the chair. It was the plain kind every room in that building has, vinyl seat, wooden arms. I had sat in it most Sundays for fourteen months and never wondered who else did.

“What’s her name, Dad?”

“Angie.” He smiled a little when he said it. “She’s a Royals girl. I’m working on her about the Cubs.”

My father is eighty-four years old. He carried the mail on a rural route out of the Juniata post office for thirty-five years, a hundred and twelve miles a day, sitting on the passenger side of a Buick so he could reach the boxes, steering with his left hand and working the pedals with his left foot. He can still tell you who lived at every one of those boxes and what kind of dog they had. Two years ago his eyes went, and last summer he fell on the back steps of the house he and my mother built, and that was the end of living alone.

His mind is as good as mine. Better, on baseball.

So when he told me nobody came but me and the girl who mops, I did not think he was confused. I thought, somebody has been taking $340 a month out of my father’s savings for a visitor who does not exist.

And right behind that, a worse thought. I had been glad to pay it.

“You all right?” Dad said. He hears a silence the way he used to hear a loose fan belt.

“I’m fine. Thinking.”

“Well, don’t strain anything.”

I stayed until they brought his supper tray. I cut up his pork chop, which he allows me to do and nobody else, and I told him I would see him next Sunday like always.