The Recliner That Went to Town

The first of December

It snowed the night before, three or four inches of the light, dry kind that blows around the yard and fills in your tracks behind you.

By morning the sky had cleared and everything was blue-white and still.

Brian had to work a shift at the mill he couldn’t get out of, so it was Emma and me.

We borrowed Gene Anderson’s pickup because our car couldn’t fit the recliner, and Gene said keep it as long as we needed.

It was a brown recliner, a big one, older than Emma. The arms were worn shiny and the footrest squeaked.

Mom had bought it for him for their thirtieth anniversary, and he said it was the only chair in the world that fit him.

Emma took the footrest end, the lighter one, and I took the back, bad shoulder from the bus door and all.

We got it through the living room and out the front door sideways, and then we started down the porch steps one at a time.

Dad stood at the tailgate of Gene’s truck in the snow, one hand on the truck bed and his cane planted in the snow beside him, watching us.

He’d told me he wanted to walk out on his own, with the cane and not the walker, and I let him, though I didn’t take my eyes off him once.

Carla came out on the porch as we reached the bottom step.

She was wearing her quilted tan jacket and jeans, and she stood with her arms crossed against the cold, smiling a tight smile, watching us.

“If he goes,” she said, loud enough to carry across the yard, “he’s choosing.”

Emma looked at me over the footrest. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself to.

Dad didn’t turn around. He kept his hand on the tailgate and his eyes on the road. But he answered her, and his voice carried just fine.

“I’m choosing two blocks, Carla.”

Then he let Emma help him up into the cab, his good foot on the running board, her hand under his elbow.

Carla stood on the porch until we pulled out, and when I looked in the mirror at the end of the driveway, she was still standing there.

Town

I won’t pretend it was easy. Our house was small even before we put a grown man and a recliner in it.

Brian slept on the couch for two nights before Dad found out and made him stop.

But here is what happened. On Monday, Dad and I walked to therapy. Two blocks.

He used the walker, and I walked beside him with my hand near his belt, and it took us eleven minutes, and he was so tired when we got there he could barely talk.

On Wednesday, it took nine minutes. On Friday, eight. Josh came out to the waiting room on Friday and saw him come in the door, and he grinned like a kid at a county fair.

“Look at you, Walt,” he said. “You walked here?”

“Two blocks,” Dad said, breathing hard. “Every day I’m walking two blocks.”

He didn’t miss a session in December. Not one. When it snowed, Brian went out at five in the morning before the mill with a shovel and cleared the sidewalk the whole way to the clinic door, both sides of the street.