The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

The text

I sent my brothers one text that night, the same text to both. I wrote it four times before I sent it, because I wanted it to say what it said and nothing more.

“Dad is staying with us now, at his own request. He’s safe and settled. Come for Sunday dinner next week, both of you, and see for yourselves. Six o’clock. I’m making Mom’s hotdish.”

Mike called within two minutes. I let it ring twice and then answered, standing out on the deck in the dark so Dad would not hear.

“You took him,” Mike said. His voice was not loud. Mike doesn’t get loud. He gets very calm and very cold, like the elevator office in January.

“I asked him,” I said. “He said yes.”

“He’d say yes to a ride to the moon, Lori. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. We put down a twenty five hundred dollar deposit at Prairie Rose. Did you know that?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There’s a waiting list. That bed was a gift. And you’ve got him in a trailer two miles out of town with no nurse, no locks, nobody awake at night. What happens when he walks out into the slough in January?”

“Pete put a chime on the door,” I said, and even as I said it I knew how it sounded to him.

There was a long silence on the line. Then Mike said, “A chime,” in a voice so flat it could have leveled a road. “You’re going to protect him with a doorbell. Scott and I will be out Sunday. We’ll talk then.”

Scott texted an hour later. It said, “I can’t believe you did this without us.” I wrote back, “You did the other thing without me.” Then I deleted it and wrote, “Sunday. Six.” He didn’t answer.

The week

I won’t pretend that week was easy. Dad got up at 2:40 Monday morning and the chime played its little tune and Pete was out of bed before I was even awake.

He found Dad on the deck in his pajamas, looking at the stars. Dad said he was checking the weather for the morning.

Pete sat with him in a lawn chair for half an hour and talked about the 1993 flood until he got sleepy.

Tuesday he asked me three times where Arlene was. The third time, I said she was at circle at church, and he said, “Good, she likes that,” and went back to his crossword.

I told myself it was not a lie, exactly. Mom was in the Lutheran cemetery a quarter mile from the church. She was close enough to circle.

Wednesday he did not know Tanner at all when Tanner came home from football practice. He looked at this tall boy in a sweatshirt and asked him, politely, if he was the new hired man.

Tanner did not miss a beat. “Yes sir,” he said. “I’m the new hired man. You want to play some cribbage while I’m on break?”

That was how it started. Dad had taught Tanner cribbage when Tanner was six, sitting at the yellow house’s kitchen table with a board Dad made from a piece of walnut in his garage. Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair is six.

Now Tanner set the board on a TV tray beside the recliner and dealt. And Dad’s hands remembered what his mind did not. He counted his hand faster than Tanner did. He pegged without looking.

“You can’t count to fifteen, hired man,” Dad said on the first hand, and Tanner laughed so hard he nearly knocked over the tray.

By Thursday they played every evening after supper. Tanner would come in from practice smelling like grass and sweat, wash his hands, and set up the board without being asked. Some nights Dad knew him. Some nights he was the hired man.

“Does it bother you?” I asked Tanner one night, washing dishes, while Dad dozed. “When he doesn’t know who you are?”

Tanner dried a plate and thought about it. “Not really,” he said. “He still plays the same. He still cheats on the pegging when he thinks I’m not looking. That’s Grandpa. That part he didn’t forget.”

I had to turn back to the sink for a while after that.