Four Hours in the Dark to Dad
Then she pulled a folded paper from her pocket and passed it over the rail after the rabbit. “You can have my picture.” She had drawn it in the truck, on the back of a gas receipt, in the green crayon Tom kept in the glove box. A house, a sun with long lines, and four small people in a row. She pointed at each from where she stood. “That’s you, that’s Mama, that’s me, that’s Daddy.”
I had to turn away. I put my knuckles against my mouth.
Tom had not moved from the doorway. He was a big man with his cap in his hands and his throat working, and when my father finally looked up at him, Tom crossed the room, put out his hand, and said, “Mr. Pruitt. I’m Tom. I should’ve come down and knocked on your door a long time ago.”
My father shook his hand and held on to it.
“Son,” he said, “I’d have let you in. I’d have opened that door to a man standing on it. I just couldn’t make myself go out and hold it open.”
“Yes, sir,” Tom said. “I understand that one.”
“I expect you do,” said my father.
He coughed, and we all waited, patient, while he settled. Josie stood at the rail in her mask with her chin resting on the cold metal.
“Grandpa,” she said, “are you going to come see my house?”
My father looked at me.
“He’s going to think about it,” I said. “We have a room.”
“Wait,” said my father. “That wasn’t…”
“We have a room, Dad,” I said. “The sewing room. The doctor wants someone watching your heart this winter, and I can’t be four hours away from you. I’d go out of my mind. I can’t lose you right after I found you.”
“I’ve got a house,” he said. “And a garden. And a truck.”
“You can have the truck. We’ll figure out the garden.”
“I can’t move in with my daughter and her husband at seventy-one years old.”
“Not forever,” I said. “For the winter. Just till you’re stronger. Then we’ll see.” I held his eyes. “And Dad? Please. Let me do this for you. You let me have ten years of being proud. Let me have one winter of being useful.”
He was quiet a long time. The monitor ticked. Josie hummed something to herself that was not quite a tune.
“Your mother,” he said at last, “would say I was being a fool.”
“She would.”
“All right,” said my father. “For the winter.”
He was discharged on a Monday, five days later, with a bag of pill bottles and a portable oxygen tank on a little cart that he hated on sight. Pauline, who was off that night, stopped by on her own time the evening before, in a cardigan and street shoes. My father tried to thank her.
“Mr. Pruitt,” she said, “you handed me the card. I only dialed the number.”
I wrote to her in November, with a photograph of the three of us at the Thanksgiving table. She sent a card at Christmas: I think of that morning more than you know.
I keep that card in the drawer where I used to keep the unsent letters.
My father did not move in all at once, and it was not tidy.