The Deer Blind Where Our Bed Used to Be
I know because he told me, and because my brother Rusty drove past the house on Sunday morning on the way to church and saw Kyle through the bedroom window in his sweatpants, ducking into that blind with a cup of coffee like a man going to his office.
Word got around the co-op anyway, the way it does in a town our size. But Kyle told me later the teasing was not what got to him.
What got to him was his supervisor, an older man named Ron, who asked him in front of everybody at the scale house how his wife was doing after her surgery.
“And I didn’t know what to say,” Kyle told me. “Because I didn’t actually know, Hol. Not really. I knew the date. That’s all I knew.”
On Monday, the third day, I was sitting in my mother’s recliner by the front window, eating a bowl of tomato soup, when I saw Kyle’s pickup coming down the gravel road at about five in the afternoon.
He had asked Ron to let him go at two, and for once the co-op found somebody to cover.
There was something in the bed of the truck, tied down with ratchet straps, wrapped in plastic. Two long flat shapes, one on top of the other.
My mother saw it at the same time I did. She put down her dish towel and said, “Well, now,” and went to the kitchen phone. I heard her say, “Dale? He’s here. Bring your brother.”
My brothers were in the yard inside of ten minutes, both of them, with their hands in their jacket pockets.
I watched through the front window. I could not hear what any of them said. I saw Kyle straighten up from the tailgate and face my brothers, and I saw him say something short.
Then I saw Dale nod, and step forward, and take hold of one end of the plastic.
They carried it in through the front door. It took all three of them.
It was a queen mattress and an adjustable base, the kind with a motor under it and a little remote on a cord, the kind they sell to people with bad backs and new hips.
My father held the storm door. My mother moved the coffee table.
They set the base down right there on the front room carpet, in front of the picture window, and laid the mattress on top of it, and Rusty found the outlet behind the end table and plugged it in.
Kyle was red in the face, and not from the carrying. He took his cap off and held it in both hands, the way he had at the hospital.
“It’s twelve hundred,” he said to me. “I know what you asked for was six hundred. They had the six hundred one, but I asked the lady at the store, and she said after the kind of surgery you had, the one where the head comes up is what she sells everybody.”
“Where did you get twelve hundred dollars?” I asked him.
“Took the stand back to Fleet Farm,” he said. “It was never opened. And the heater, since you made them leave it in the box. That was thirteen fifty back. The rest of it went in the can.”
He looked at the floor. “It was a dumb stand anyway. Grandpa never hunted off a stand in his life.”
“I didn’t want to just set it up in our room and call it fixed,” he said.