The Man I Let Go Before Christmas

Nobody would use Earl’s nail. His apron stayed on it, folded once, with the nickel still in the pocket for all I knew. I walked past it forty times a day for two weeks and I did not touch it either.

Jeff told me, a good while later, that a fellow at the Legion had told Earl that same week he ought to go see a lawyer. Earl said he had never sued anybody in his life and was too old to start.

Then, on the twentieth, Missy’s appendix burst.

She had been poorly since Thursday. She thought it was the stomach bug that had been going around Paige’s school, and she is a woman who will not call a doctor for herself until she has finished the laundry. Saturday afternoon I came in from shoveling the walk and found her on the bathroom floor, gray as dishwater, with her knees drawn up.

I carried her to the truck.

They had her in surgery inside of two hours. It had ruptured, the surgeon told me after, probably the day before, and the infection was all through her belly. He said they had cleaned out what they could and put in a drain, and now it was antibiotics in the arm and waiting, and she would be on the fourth floor a week at the least, maybe longer.

Missy’s mother came up from Stevens Point the first two nights and then had to get home to Missy’s dad, who cannot be left long. After that it was Paige and me. I took the week off, which the plant gave me without a word, and we lived out of that fourth-floor waiting room. There was a row of green chairs and two vending machines at the end of the hall, one for pop and one for crackers and candy bars.

The machines did not take dollar bills. There was a slot for them, and a little handwritten card taped over it that said the bill reader was out of order. From the yellow of the tape, that card had been there a good long while. The cafeteria closed at six thirty. After that, if you were hungry on the fourth floor, you needed quarters, and I never had any.

By Tuesday Missy’s fever was down. By Wednesday, Christmas Eve, the surgeon said the thing I had been waiting on: she was going to be all right. Not home for Christmas. But all right.

She sent us home that afternoon. She was propped up on two pillows with her hair flat on one side, and she sounded like herself for the first time in four days.

“Go home. Feed that child something that didn’t come out of a machine. Take a shower, Rob, I mean that kindly. Come back at seven and we’ll have our Christmas Eve right here.”

So I took Paige home.

The house was cold. I had turned the heat down Saturday without thinking. The tree was up in the front room, because Missy puts it up the day after Thanksgiving, but nobody had plugged it in since the twentieth. There were dishes in the sink from a breakfast five days old. I got a frozen pizza out of the freezer and set it on the counter and stood there looking at it.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Paige said. “I like pizza.”

At a quarter to five somebody knocked on the front door.

Paige got there before I did. I heard the door open, and the cold come in, and then her voice.

“Dad? There’s a man.”

I came around the corner drying my hands on a dish towel.