The Girl Who Read Him the Box Scores

Angie looked at the floor. She had on white sneakers gone gray at the toes.

“You don’t know about the hip,” she said.

“No.”

“It was the winter of ninety-eight. I wasn’t born yet. Grandpa had passed, and Grandma was out there alone, and she went down in the kitchen on a Monday night and broke her hip and couldn’t get to the wall phone.” She said it plainly, the way people tell a story they were raised on. “Tuesday your dad put her mail in the box. Wednesday he came by and Tuesday’s mail was still in it. She never missed her mail. She’d walk down for it in a blizzard. So he drove up the lane, and the dog was carrying on, and he knocked, and then he looked in the kitchen window.”

I had never heard this in my life.

“He broke the glass in the back door with his elbow,” Angie said. “He put his coat over her and his own cap on her head, and he drove back down to the Hendersons’ to call, and then he came back and sat on the kitchen floor with her till the rescue unit got there from Hastings. Forty minutes. She said he talked the whole time. She said he told her every single thing that happened in the World Series that year so she’d stay awake.”

“He never told us.”

“Grandma said he asked her not to make a fuss. He finished the route after. He was two hours late and he said the post office about had a fit.” She looked up. “She lived till I was seventeen, Mr. Olson. She taught me to make noodles. She’s the one who came to my graduation. I had a grandma because a mailman noticed a full box.”

I could not say anything for a moment.

“So no sir,” she said. “Fifteen minutes isn’t much.”

“Where does the paper come from?”

“Casey’s. I stop for gas anyhow.”

“You buy it.”

“It’s the Omaha paper. It’s got the good box scores.” She shrugged. “He can’t see them, and the aides don’t have time, and the television goes too fast for him. He likes it read slow so he can keep it on his hand.”

I got my billfold out. I am not proud of that, but it is what my hand did.

She stepped back. “No sir. We can’t. It’s in the handbook, we can’t take anything from a family, not even at Christmas. I’d lose my job.”

“For the newspapers, then. That’s your own money.”

“No sir.” She was firm about it. “I’d rather buy them.”

I put the billfold away. I stood there in that hallway with a mop bucket between us and nothing in my hands to give her.

“Then I’ll say it,” I said. “Thank you. I drive in on Sundays and I tell myself he’s looked after the other six days, and I never knew by who. It was you. I can’t tell you what that is to me. I don’t have the words, I sell tractor parts.”

Her eyes filled up, and she wiped them on the shoulder of her scrub top, quick.

“He talks about Sunday all week,” she said. “You ought to know that. Starting about Thursday. He’ll say, Mark comes Sunday. Like I might’ve forgot.”

I had to look at the ficus for a while.

“One more thing,” I said, when I could. “And then I’ll let you get back. In fourteen months, has anybody else ever come in to sit with him? Anybody from the home. An activities person. A volunteer.”