The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

Friday

On Friday morning Dad woke up clear. It happens like that sometimes with this disease, like a fog lifting off the river for an hour before it settles back.

I came in at 5:30 with his black coffee, the way I had at the yellow house for a year, and he was already sitting up in the recliner with the radio on low.

“Lori,” he said. My name. My own name. “You still drive that bus?”

“Route Four,” I said. “Same one.”

“You’ll be late,” he said. “Go on. I’ll be fine. Is Pete up?”

“Pete’s up.”

“Good man, Pete.” He took the coffee and held it in both hands. “This is the place out by the slough.”

“It is.”

He nodded slowly, looking at his calendar, his lamp, the window with the gray light coming up over the beans. “Your mother would have liked it here,” he said. “She always said a trailer is easier to keep.”

I did not trust my voice. I kissed the top of his head, where the hair was thin and white, and drove Route Four, and cried in the bus barn parking lot before I picked up the first kid.

By noon he was gone again, asking for Arlene. But I had that hour. I put it away where I keep the important things.

Sunday

I made Mom’s hotdish, the one with tater tots and cream of mushroom and the ground beef browned with onion.

I made a pan of bars. I set the table with the good dishes, which in a single wide means the dishes without chips.

Pete wore a clean shirt. Tanner wore a clean shirt, too, which I had not asked him to do. Dad wore his flannel, the red and black one, because it was September and the evenings had turned.

At ten after six, two pickups pulled into the yard, one behind the other. Mike’s gray Ford, Scott in a rental from the Fargo airport.

They had planned to arrive together. That told me everything about the conversation they meant to have.

I heard their doors. I heard their boots on Pete’s deck. I took the coffee pot off the burner and poured a cup for Dad, black, and carried it in to the living room.

He was in the recliner by the window. Tanner was on a kitchen chair across from him, the cribbage board on the TV tray between them, and they were in the middle of a hand. The lamp was on. The paneling glowed the color of honey.

I set the coffee down by Dad’s right hand. He reached for it without looking, the way he always did. “Thank you, honey,” he said, and played a seven.

Then the door opened, the chime played its little tune, and my brothers stood in the doorway in their jackets, looking in.