The Girl Who Brings the Coffee

The chair

Then a voice came from the living room. Not loud. Just clear.

“Michael.”

All three of us turned. Dad was awake in the recliner. Tanner was sitting on the floor beside him, putting the cribbage pegs away.

Dad’s eyes were on the kitchen doorway, and they were clear. I could tell from across the room. Friday clear.

Mike got up and went in. Scott followed. I came behind them and stood in the kitchen doorway.

“Sit down,” Dad said, and they both sat on the couch across from him, two grown men in their jackets, like boys who had been called into the elevator office.

Dad looked at them for a long time. Then he said, “I know what you boys want to do. I heard it on the phone. You want to put me in a home in Fargo.”

“Dad,” Mike started.

“I’m talking,” Dad said. And Mike stopped, because no one in our family has ever kept talking when Dad said that.

“I know I’m losing it,” Dad said. “I’m not a fool. I know I forget. I know some days I don’t know who’s who. I called your sister by your mother’s name twice this week. I know that.”

He put his hand on the arm of the recliner, the worn shiny spot.

“But I know where I want to be. I want to stay here. With the girl who brings the coffee.”

Nobody said anything. Tanner was very still on the floor.

“She comes every morning,” Dad said. “Every morning for I don’t know how long. Black, the way I like it. She sits with me for the markets. I don’t always know her name, boys. But I always know she’s coming.”

He looked at Mike. “You were always good with the books, Michael. You and Scotty both. Your mother said so. But this isn’t books. This is where an old man wants to wake up. And I want to wake up where the coffee is.”

Mike put his face in his hands.

I had never in my life seen my older brother cry. Not at Mom’s funeral. Not when Karen got her diagnosis.

But he sat on our secondhand couch in a single wide south of town and he cried into his hands like a little boy.

Scott put his arm around him. Dad reached over and put his hand on Mike’s knee and left it there.

“Now,” Dad said, after a while. “Which one of you two is going to play this hired man in cribbage? He’s getting cocky.”