The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

Asking Dad

Before we moved a single thing, I drove to Third Street on Saturday morning to ask my father. I needed him to say it. If he had said no, I would have let it go, and I mean that.

He was in the recliner with the radio on. The co-op calendar showed a combine in a sunset, and he had written “clear, 54” in the little box for that day in his slanting pencil.

“Dad,” I said, and handed him the black coffee. “Pete and I were wondering if you’d like to come stay out at our place for a while. In the back bedroom. You could bring your chair.”

He looked at the coffee. Then he looked at me for a long time, the way he used to look at a load of beans before he probed it.

“Out by the slough?” he said.

“Out by the slough. Two miles south. You used to come out and shoot pheasants with Pete before Tanner was born.”

“Pete’s a good shot,” Dad said. “Better than your brothers. Don’t tell them.”

“I won’t.”

He drank the coffee. Then he said, very clearly, “Is there coffee out there?”

“Every morning,” I said. “Same as here.”

“Then I’ll come,” he said, and went back to the markets like we had settled the price of a load.

Moving day

Pete borrowed the neighbor’s trailer and we used his 2011 Silverado to haul everything. The recliner went first, a brown La-Z-Boy with the right arm worn shiny from forty years of Dad’s elbow.

Then the radio, an old Panasonic set to the farm station out of Fargo. Then the co-op calendar, his reading lamp, his Bible, his cribbage board, and the afghan Mom crocheted the winter Scott was born.

Tanner carried the boxes without complaint, which was its own small miracle for a sixteen year old. He moved his drum set into the shop himself and said, “Grandpa needs the room more than I need to hit stuff.”

Pete spent Saturday afternoon on the bathroom. He put in two grab bars, one by the toilet and one in the tub, and screwed them into the studs, not the paneling, because he said paneling would hold a towel and nothing else.

He put a motion light in the hall that came on soft and yellow at night.

He put a chime on the back door that played a little tune whenever it opened. He moved the knife block up to the top of the fridge.

I made up the bed with the good sheets and hung the calendar on the nail where my mother’s sewing calendar used to be.

Pete hung the reading lamp. Tanner set up the radio on the dresser and found the farm station on the first try.

When Dad came in Saturday evening and saw his chair by the window, he sat down in it with a long sigh, the kind a man lets out at the end of harvest. He put both hands on the worn arms.

“Well,” he said. “That’s my chair.”

“That’s your chair,” I said.

He looked around at the wood paneling, at the lamp, at the calendar. “Arlene,” he said to me, “you put the calendar up crooked.”

I went over and straightened it. I did not correct him about the name. I just straightened the calendar, and he nodded, satisfied, and turned the radio up a notch.