The Deer Blind Where Our Bed Used to Be
“I wanted you to see it first. Then I’ll take it home and set it up wherever you want, whenever you say. Or I’ll leave it here. Whatever you want, Hol.”
My mother made a little sound in the kitchen doorway. My father cleared his throat and suddenly needed to look out the window.
“Try it,” Dale said quietly. “Go on.”
So I got up out of my mother’s recliner, the slow way, and I walked over and sat down on the edge of that mattress.
It was the right height. I rolled to my side and lay down, and Kyle handed me the little remote on its cord.
I pushed the button with the arrow pointing up. There was a soft hum, and the head of the bed lifted, slow and steady, and lifted me with it.
It sat me all the way up without my stomach doing a single thing.
I had not sat up by myself, without my arms and without help, in eleven days. I did not know how much I had missed it until it happened.
I sat there in the middle of my mother’s front room with my hand over my mouth.
Kyle pulled one of my mother’s kitchen chairs over and sat down next to the bed.
My brothers took one look at us and found something they needed to do in the barn. My mother went back to the stove. My father went with the boys.
“Will you tell me what they did?” Kyle asked. “The surgery. All of it. I want to know what I’m supposed to be helping with.”
So I told him, all of it, and he asked questions. Good ones.
He asked how long before I could drive, and whether I would need him to take time off for my follow-up, and whether stairs were all right, and whether it was going to hurt like this the whole six weeks.
He listened to every answer. He didn’t look at his phone. He didn’t once say the word couch.
When I told him about my father’s step stool and the handrail, he got up and went into the spare room and looked at it for a long time, and came back with wet eyes.
“Your dad bent that conduit by hand,” he said. “Without a bender. You can see the marks.”
“I know,” I said.
“I should’ve built you that,” he said. “I’m the one who should’ve built you that.”
Then he told me about Grandpa Walt, and the catalog in the gun safe, and the page with the corner folded down.
I had heard it before, but never like this. He told it like a man setting something heavy down that he had carried too long.
“He talked about that blind every fall for twenty years,” Kyle said.
“And then he died in his chair with the catalog on the table. And I’m standing in Fleet Farm, and there it is, and it’s on sale, and I just thought, now. I’ll do it for him now.”
“I know,” I said. “I knew that the whole time.”
“I didn’t think about you at all,” he said. “That’s the truth of it. I wasn’t trying to put you second. I just didn’t think. And I don’t know which one is worse.”
I didn’t answer that, because I didn’t know either. I reached over and took his hand instead.
His knuckles were cracked from the cold, the way they always get in October. We sat there with the furnace running and the light going orange in my mother’s front window.