The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

The year of mornings

Our town has about fifteen hundred people in it, a Cenex, a Lutheran church, a Catholic church, a bar that serves the best walleye basket in the county, and the grain elevator where my father worked for thirty-six years.

He started there sweeping the dust out of the pit in 1965 and retired as the manager in 2004.

People still call it Walt’s elevator, though the co-op has merged twice since and the name on the side is somebody else’s now.

My mother, Arlene, died six years ago of a heart that just quit one February night.

After that, Dad lived alone in the yellow house on Third Street with his recliner, his radio, and the co-op calendar he hung by the phone every January.

The first sign was small. He left the burner on under the coffee pot and melted the bottom right out of it.

He laughed about it and bought a new one at the hardware store and said Arlene would have had his hide.

The second sign was not small. Last August he drove out to the elevator at four in the morning, in his slippers, to open up for harvest.

The night man found him sitting in the scale house, waiting for trucks that were never coming.

That was when I started going over every morning. My bus route starts at 6:40, so I was at Dad’s by 5:30 with two coffees from the Cenex, one black for him and one with cream for me.

I’d check the stove knobs. I’d check that his pills were gone from the Monday slot and not the Thursday slot.

I’d check the back door, the space heater, the mail, and the calendar, where he still wrote the day’s weather in pencil.

Then I’d sit with him for twenty minutes while the radio gave the markets. Corn, beans, spring wheat. He always knew the price of corn. He sometimes did not know my name, but he always knew corn.

Between routes I went back. After the afternoon route I went back again. Pete, my husband, took the nights when his shift at the ethanol plant let him, and our son Tanner mowed the lawn and shoveled the walk without being asked twice.

I did not tell my brothers most of it. I told myself it was because Mike had enough on his plate.

His wife, Karen, had been fighting breast cancer since spring, and he was driving her to Fargo for treatments three times a week.

And Scott was in Denver, which might as well be the moon. He called Dad every Sunday, and Dad would hold it together for those ten minutes the way a man holds his stomach in for a photograph.

So my brothers saw the Sunday version of our father. I saw the Tuesday at 5:30 version. They were not the same man, and I never put the two side by side for them. That part is on me.