The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

Why the vote counted

You might wonder why a vote around a kitchen table meant anything. It meant something because of a piece of paper signed at the bank in 2015, back when Mom was still alive and Dad was sharp as a tack.

They had made their wills and their powers of attorney the same afternoon. Dad named Mike and Scott together on his power of attorney.

Mom said it at supper that night, and she said it kindly: the boys handle the paper, Lori handles the people.

I was not hurt by it then. I was thirty-eight, I had a little boy and a husband working swing shifts, and I did not want to handle anybody’s paper. I would have said the same thing she did.

But it meant that when it came to selling the house, signing the papers at Prairie Rose, and writing the checks, it was my brothers’ names on the line.

They did not need my vote. They held the meeting to be decent about it.

I knew one more thing, though, because I had asked the social worker at the clinic in July.

A power of attorney lets you act for a person. It does not let you overrule him while he can still tell you what he wants.

And on most mornings, before nine o’clock, my father could still tell you what he wanted. He wanted his coffee. He wanted the markets. He wanted to be home.

The driveway

Pete was in the yard when I pulled in, working on the snowblower for winter with the parts spread out on a feed sack. He looked at my face and set his wrench down.

“Two to one,” I said.

He wiped his hands on the rag in his back pocket and did not say anything for a while.

Pete is not a talker. He’s a man who listens to an engine for a full minute before he picks up a tool.

“Fargo,” he said finally.

“Ninety miles. The first of October. And they sell the house in the spring.”

“Huh,” he said. Then he looked past me at our trailer, and I saw him do the arithmetic I had already done in the car, and I loved him for doing it without me having to ask.

We live in a single wide on four acres two miles south of town.

It’s a sixteen wide, 1998, three bedrooms, with a deck Pete built and a garden I fight the rabbits for every summer. The third bedroom was where things went to be forgotten.

“Spare room’s got my reloading bench in it,” Pete said. “And Tanner’s drum set. And your mother’s sewing machine.”

“I know.”

“Bench can go in the shop. Drum set can go in the shop, too, honestly. I’d pay him to play it in the shop.”

I started to cry then, standing in the driveway, and Pete put his arm around my shoulders and smelled like gas and two stroke oil, and we stood there until the dog came over to see what was wrong.

“I’m not going to take my brothers to court,” I said into his shirt. “I won’t do that. I won’t stand in front of a judge against Mike. Dad would die of it.”

“Nobody said court,” Pete said. “I said spare room.”