The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

What they saw

I wish I could tell you what was on Mike’s face. I have thought about it since, and I think it was the face of a man walking into the wrong room and finding it is the right one.

They had come to argue. I could see it in how they stood, Mike a half step in front, Scott with his hands in his jacket pockets.

They had rehearsed it in the truck, probably, or on the phone from Denver.

What they found was their father in his own chair, with his own afghan over his knees, counting a cribbage hand out loud with his grandson. “Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a run of three is seven.”

“It’s six, Grandpa,” Tanner said.

“It’s seven, hired man. Count it again.”

Tanner counted it again. It was seven. He moved Dad’s peg and grinned, and Dad grinned back, and neither of them had looked up yet at the two men in the doorway.

“Dad,” Mike said.

My father looked up. He looked at his sons for a long moment, and I held my breath, because I did not know which man was going to answer. The Sunday man or the Tuesday man.

“Well, look who it is,” Dad said. “Michael. Scotty. Come in, you’re letting the cold in. Shut that door.”

Scott shut the door. Mike just stood there.

Supper

We ate first. That was Pete’s idea, and it was a good one. Nobody can stay in a fighting mood over tater tot hotdish, and Pete knows my brothers well enough to know that.

Dad ate two helpings and told a story about a farmer named Arnie who once tried to sell him a load of oats with a dead badger in it.

Every one of us had heard that story fifty times. Mike laughed like it was the first.

Then Dad got tired, the way he does after a big meal, and Tanner helped him back to the recliner. Pete went out to check on something in the shop that did not need checking.

So it was just the three of us at the table, the way it had been at Mike’s a week before. Except now the legal pad was not there, and Dad was snoring softly in the next room.

Mike folded his hands. Dad’s gesture again. “Lori,” he said. “This can’t be the plan. You know it can’t. You’ve got a job, a kid, a husband who works shifts.”

“I know what I’ve got,” I said.

“Prairie Rose has nurses all night,” Scott said. “They have a locked unit. They have activities. Music therapy, I think. They have a chaplain. Dad would be safe there. That’s all we wanted, was for him to be safe.”

“I know that’s what you wanted.”

“Then why are you fighting us?”