The Recliner I Carried to the Camper

That camper is a twenty-six foot white travel trailer from the nineties. Mike bought it off a man in Willow Springs for deer season years ago, and it has leaked over the bed ever since.

I knew it had no ramp. I knew it had two narrow metal steps and a door barely wider than my shoulders. I knew all of that, and I let it go, because Danny said he wanted it.

That is on me. I am not going to pretend it is not.

By the time I got to him, Danny had made it to the top step and was sitting in the doorway with his back against the frame, breathing hard, his hands black with mud.

He did not look at me. He looked out at the shop, at the dark windows, at anything that was not my face.

“Go on back in, Dawn,” he said. “I’m fine. I do this every night. It’s good for my arms.”

I set his chair upright and wiped the seat off with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. The cushion was soaked through. He was going to have to sit on that tomorrow.

“How do you get to the bathroom?” I asked him. My voice came out quieter than I expected it to.

He pointed his chin at the shop. “Mike leaves the side door unlocked. There’s the toilet in there, the one he put in for the guys. It’s wide enough if I take the door off.”

“You took the door off the shop bathroom.”

“Back in September,” he said. “Mike didn’t care. He said nobody uses it but me and the propane man anyway.”

Kylie had come out behind me. She was standing at the edge of the yard light in her purple hoodie with her arms wrapped around herself, not crying anymore, just watching her uncle.

“Uncle Danny,” she said. “You can come in the house. Mom said you could. She said it twice.”

Danny smiled at her, the way he always smiles at her, like she hung the moon. “I know she did, Kylie-bug. But I pay my way out here. I’m not a charity case.”

I did not understand that sentence the first time he said it. Pay his way. I thought he meant the electric. I thought maybe he was splitting the propane.

“Pay your way how?” I asked.

He went quiet, and I watched him realize he had said something he was not supposed to say. He rubbed his hands on his jeans and made it worse.

“It’s between me and Mike,” he said. “Don’t make it a thing, Dawn. Please. It’s fair. He gave me a place and I pay him for it. That’s how it ought to be.”

“How much, Danny?”

He looked at Kylie and then he looked at me, and I think he decided it was better to say it than to have me go find out on my own.

“Six hundred a month,” he said. “Mike said charity starts at home. He said that was the way to do it so I wouldn’t feel like a burden. And he’s right. I don’t.”

Danny’s disability check comes to about fourteen hundred dollars a month. I know that because I helped him fill out the forms the first time, and it took seven months to come through.