The Recliner That Went to Town

Telling Carla

I gave Carla the check that afternoon after my route. She was folding towels on the dining room table.

She took it, looked at the amount, looked at the memo line, and put it in her purse without a word.

Dad told her at supper. I was there. I’d offered to leave the room, but he said no, he wanted me there.

He said it plain and calm, the way he used to tell the seed dealer what he was planting.

“Carla, after the first of the month I’m going to stay at Kelly’s in town for a while. For the therapy. Josh says I need every session, and I keep missing them out here.”

She set her fork down. “For how long?”

“Until I’m walking,” Dad said. “Then we’ll see.”

“And whose idea was this?” She was looking at me, not at him.

“Mine,” Dad said. “Kelly tried to talk me out of it.”

That was true, but Carla didn’t believe it. I could see it on her face.

She finished her supper without another word, washed her plate, and went upstairs. We heard the bedroom door close, not slammed, just closed.

Dad and I sat at the table a long time after. He reached over with his good hand and patted mine twice, the way he did when I was little and had a fever. “She’ll come around,” he said. “She’s had it rough.”

I didn’t know then what he meant by that. I wish I had.

Getting ready

Brian took two days of vacation from the mill. He measured our back step and went to the lumberyard and came home with treated two-by-sixes and a box of deck screws and a sheet of plywood for the landing.

He built the ramp in our backyard in twenty-degree weather with Emma holding the boards.

He figured the slope at one inch of rise for every foot of ramp, the way the building code says, which meant a ramp nineteen feet long with a turn at the bottom.

Then he came inside and started on the dining room. We moved our table out to the garage and put a twin bed in its place, with a rail on one side that Brian bolted to the frame.

He moved the lamp so Dad could reach the switch with his right hand.

When I came home and saw it, I sat down on the edge of that twin bed and cried for the first time since the night Carla named the number.

Emma sat down next to me and put her head on my shoulder and didn’t say anything at all.