The Recliner That Went to Town

The night I didn’t argue

I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay under the slanted ceiling listening to the furnace kick on and off and the wind push snow against the north side of the house, and I went over it every way I could.

I could have gone downstairs in the morning and told Dad. That was the obvious thing.

But Dad was still learning to walk after a stroke, with blood pressure the doctor was still trying to get under control, and a new marriage he was proud of.

A man in that shape does not need to referee his wife and his daughter.

I’d read enough of the pamphlets from the hospital to know that stress was one of the things they kept warning about. I wasn’t going to be the stress.

I texted Brian at five in the morning, because he gets up at four thirty for the mill.

I told him what she’d said. He called me instead of texting back, which is how I knew he was upset.

“Nine hundred dollars,” he said. “Kel, that’s more than our house payment.”

“I know it.”

“You want me to drive out there and talk to her? I can go after my shift. I’ll be civil.”

I stood in the cold upstairs hallway in my socks with the phone against my ear, and I thought about Brian in his mill jacket standing in Dad’s kitchen.

He would be civil. He always is. And it would still land on Dad.

“No,” I said. “Not yet. Let me try something first.”

“What are you going to try?”

“I’m going to pay it.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear the radio in the truck and his turn signal clicking. Then he said, “Okay. If that’s what you think. But I’m writing down the date.”