The Wheelchair They Took Away

“Glenn,” I said. “You’ve been fixing their cars for thirty years. What did you think they’d do?”

I got him through the evening. I am not going to describe it, because he would not want me to, and because it is nothing a thousand other couples have not done in a thousand other kitchens. I took the commode chair out of the closet and he said, “Well, here’s an old friend,” in a voice so dry I almost laughed. At nine o’clock, with the lamp turned low and his glasses folded on the nightstand, he reached for my hand and said, “Thirty years I looked under hoods for people. Now I’m sitting in a kitchen chair like a pickup up on blocks.” And I said, “Hush,” and he said, “No. It’s funny. You have to let it be funny,” and we both laughed.

Lorinda Tibbets came Friday morning at nine, before I had thought to call anybody else.

She is Garth’s wife, a round, steady woman who has run the funeral lunches in the basement of Marlow Lutheran for twenty years. She came up the ramp with a folding transport chair in one hand and a tuna casserole in the other, and she set both down in my kitchen as if she had done it a hundred times.

“It’s from the loan closet behind the church kitchen,” she said. “It’s got a good seat. It’ll go through any doorway in this house.”

It did. It was twenty-four inches across. I stood in my own hall and looked at it and could not think why I had not called the church on Thursday. I had thought of every way to beg a stranger and had not once thought of asking the people who would have come in ten minutes.

Glenn said, “Lorinda, I’d shake your hand, but I’d have to find it first,” and she laughed and put it in his.

While I washed the casserole dish she stood by the sink. “Garth told me about the store,” she said. Her voice was low. “It isn’t only you. My mother, in March of last year. They took her hospital bed out of her front room, with her barely out of the hospital, because she was three days behind. Eighty-one years old. I paid $230 to get it back. I never told Garth.”

“Lorinda, I’m so sorry.”

“I thought it was only my mother who was too poor to be treated like a person.” She dried her hands on my towel. “Alice Bauer’s Walter had a lift recliner from that store, after his stroke. They came for it too. I expect there’s more, if anybody asked.”

She patted my arm and went home.

By Saturday at 7 there were nine pickups along our road.

I counted them from the kitchen window, standing at the sink with a coffee pot in my hand. Men got out in canvas jackets and the blue work shirts with their names over the pocket, which they keep wearing after the shop has closed on them, the way some men keep wearing a wedding ring. Bud came first, with a thermos and a metal toolbox older than Greg. Wayne Hoffman had brought three dozen sweet rolls from the bakery in Marlow, because his wife had said a man does not show up at someone’s house empty-handed.

They stood in my yard in a loose half circle and did not say much. They looked at the house.