The Deer Blind Where Our Bed Used to Be
So I went inside and made supper. Kyle came in an hour later with sawdust on his jeans from making room in the garage, and he told me about the blind’s carbon lining all through our meatloaf.
The thing nobody understood about that blind, at first, was his Grandpa Walt.
Walt Bauer raised Kyle more than Kyle’s own father did.
He farmed a hundred and sixty acres west of town and hunted deer every December of his life out of the cab of an old pickup, with a thermos of coffee and a blanket over his knees.
Every fall Walt would get the outdoor catalogs in the mail, and he would sit at his kitchen table and fold down the corner on the page with the big blinds.
The ones with the chairs and the heater and the windows. He would show Kyle and say, “Someday, boy. Someday we’re going to hunt like rich men.”
Walt died in the fall of 2006, in his chair, with that catalog on the side table. Kyle was twenty-three. He kept the catalog. It is in his gun safe to this day, with that page still folded down.
That night I lay on my side in our low bed and listened to Kyle breathe, and I thought about the morning I would have to get out of it with stitches.
Then I picked up my phone and texted my mother.
“Can I come stay with you after the surgery? Our bed isn’t going to work.”
It was eleven at night. My mother is sixty-eight and goes to bed at nine. She wrote back in under a minute.
“You’re coming home with me. Your dad says the same. Don’t argue.”
I didn’t tell Kyle until the next morning.
He was at the counter filling his thermos at four thirty, the way he does every workday, and I stood in the hallway in my robe and told him I would be recovering at Mama’s.
He stopped pouring. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “The couch is fine. I’ll get you set up.”
“It’s not fine,” I said. “And I’d rather be somewhere I can get up by myself.”
He looked at me for a long second. I could see him trying to figure out if this was about the blind, and deciding not to ask.
“Suit yourself,” he said, and screwed the lid on the thermos, and went to work.
My surgery was on a Thursday at seven in the morning. Mama drove me to Waterloo at five in her old Buick with a blanket over my knees, the same way Walt used to sit in his truck.
Kyle had asked for the day off. He did ask, I know that, because I heard him on the phone.
But it was the middle of fall, every hog site in three counties was eating, and the co-op had two drivers out already. They told him they had nobody to cover his route.
“I’ll come up the second I’m done,” he told me the night before. “I’ll be there by supper. I promise.”
The surgery went the way it was supposed to.
I don’t remember much about that day except a nurse with cold hands and a warm voice, and my mother sitting by the window with her crossword, not doing a single clue.
Kyle came at six thirty. He still had his co-op jacket on and smelled like ground corn and diesel. He stood at the foot of the bed holding his cap in both hands like he was at a funeral.
“So you’re good?” he asked.