The Left Pocket of Mom’s Sunday Coat

“I’m going to tell you something and it’s not going to sound like much of a reason,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“I go out that door six, eight times a day. To the shop. To the mailbox. To feed the cats. And every time, there it is. Right at my shoulder. For six weeks I’ve gone out that door with my eyes on the floor like a whipped dog so I wouldn’t have to see it hanging there waiting on Sunday.” He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn. “This morning Darla’s standing in the porch with her teeth chattering and I looked up, and I saw a cold woman and I saw a coat. And I thought, well, there. Now it’s good for something. Now I don’t have to look at it.”

He lifted his eyes to me.

“That’s the truth of it. I wasn’t giving Darla anything. I was getting it out of my sight. And I used her to do it.”

I had come out there ready for a different man. For the stubborn one. I did not have anything prepared for this.

“You couldn’t touch it either,” I said.

“No.”

“I stood right there on that porch a week after. I had my hand out. I knew what was in the pocket and I couldn’t.”

“You knew about the envelope.”

“I watched her do it that Wednesday. I didn’t know about the back.”

He looked toward the door, toward the coat.

“I didn’t know about the back in forty-nine years,” he said.

I took a breath. “Dad, why you? That week. She was the one who was sick.”

My father looked at his hands for a long time.

“We had words that Wednesday,” he said. “Coming home from Norfolk. The blower’d quit in the pickup back in September and she’d been after me to fix it before it got cold. She said it again on the highway. And my knee was hurting and I’d just been told I needed the other one done too, and I said,” and he stopped and started over. “I said, ‘Margaret, I have heard it. I do not need to hear it every day until one of us dies.'”

The kitchen was very still.

“She didn’t say another word the whole way home. Not mad. She just let it lay. Then you came with the chili and she was sweet as pie all through supper, and I figured it had blown over.” He shook his head slowly. “And all that time she’s sitting right where you’re sitting, writing my name on the back of her envelope.”

“She wasn’t keeping score, Dad.”

“No. That’s what gets me. That was never her way.” His voice went on him then, just for a second, and he waited it out. “I snapped at her about a forty-dollar part. And she went and put ten dollars in the Lord’s basket for me. I’ve had that going around in my head since eleven o’clock this morning.”

I reached over and put my hand on his wrist. He let me. That is the nearest thing to a hug you get from my father at a kitchen table, and I took it.

After a while he got up. I thought he was going for more coffee. He went to the desk in the corner, the rolltop where my mother kept the stamps and the checkbook, and he opened the second drawer down and came back with the box.