The Coffee Table That Came to My Porch

The eyes

The truth is that I had known since April.

I had been seeing a specialist in Hays for what the doctor called dry macular degeneration, which means the middle of what I look at has been slowly going soft, like a photograph left on a dashboard. I can see the edges of things. I can see you at the corner of the room. What I cannot do is look straight at your face and see it clearly.

He had a pamphlet. He had a number: twenty over seventy in the right eye, worse in the left. He said the words “night driving” and “fog” and “reconsider” in one sentence, in the gentle voice they must teach in school for men like me.

I said I understood. I drove home that afternoon in broad daylight on a road I could have driven asleep, and told nobody.

Not my daughter, Karen, who lives in Wichita and calls every Sunday at four. Not my neighbor. Certainly not the table.

So that summer I did a careful, foolish thing. I drove only when I had to, and I told myself the dark was the safest time, because the road was empty at that hour and an empty road forgives a man.

It is a funny kind of reasoning. You are most dangerous exactly when you are most sure you are not.

I got by on habit. I knew every soft spot in the gravel and every bend of the county road by the feel of the wheel, and I took the highway through town at twenty miles under the limit and let the pickups behind me find their own way around. In August a man on the Lucas square held up two fingers and asked me how many he had up, as a joke, and I laughed along and got into my truck and sat there for a long while before I started it.