The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

I drove home at one in the morning. Jenna was up. I told her all of it at the kitchen table, under the birthday banner she had not gotten around to taking down. When I got to the watch she got up and went and stood over Wyatt’s crib for a while.

We did not hear from my father for four days.

My mother called each evening. He was eating. He was not sleeping much. He had gone out to the shop and cleaned every tool he owned.

“He’s all right,” she said. “He’s just a long way down in himself. Leave him be.”

“Did you know, Mom?”

She was quiet. “No. But I knew Gil knew something. Forty-four years I’ve watched Gil look at his plate.” A breath. “When you said one for Gil, I thought, well. Maybe it’s time somebody let that poor man set it down.”

Saturday morning my father called at seven.

“You busy?”

“No sir.”

“I want to go out to Pierce. I don’t want to drive it by myself.”

The cemetery sits on a rise outside of town with a row of cedars on the north side for a windbreak. It was about twenty degrees and the ground was hard. Gil’s truck was already there.

Walt and Lorraine Brandt share a stone. Gray granite, a sheaf of wheat cut into it, his dates and hers.

The three of us stood there in our coats.

I had half braced for Dad to be angry with her. He stood a long time looking at her name.

“She was twenty-four years old,” he said. “Alone out there with a four-year-old and a man who’d walked off. No word for eight months.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m sixty-six. I’m not going to stand here and judge a girl of twenty-four.”

Gil let out a breath like he had been holding it since 1971.

Then my father took off his glove and laid his bare hand on the top of the stone, on his father’s side.

“I’ve got your watch,” he said. His voice was steady. “I know what it’s for now.”

He stood there a minute.

“I haven’t done right by what you taught me. I’m fixing to. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

That was all. No speech. He put his glove back on and we walked to the trucks.

At the gate he stopped.

“There was a name on that list,” he said. “Under Gil’s. Some woman over by Tilden. It said first cousin.”

Gil and I waited.

“I looked at it a good while.” He pulled his cap down. “Maybe in the spring. Maybe not. I had a father. I’m not short one.”

He came to our house the next afternoon, Sunday, straight from church. He was by himself. My mother told me later she had offered to come and he had said no, this one he had to carry in alone.

He knocked. In nine years he has never knocked on my door. He walks in hollering.

Jenna was feeding Wyatt. She had him in the high chair at the end of the kitchen table, the red oak one, with sweet potatoes and cut-up noodles on the tray. She looked up when Dad came in behind me, and I saw her back go straight, the way it had gone straight every Sunday dinner for a year.

He had his cap in both hands. He was still in his church clothes.

“Jenna,” he said.

“Frank.”

“I need to say something to you and I’d like to say it right. If you’ll let me.”

She set down the spoon. “Go ahead.”