The Sack Breakfast in the Bread Box

Then he took the sack, tucked it inside his jacket, and walked on toward town. I let out a breath I did not know I had been holding.

Thursday morning I went down with the second sack, a little better. I had turned the burner down. The eggs were still ugly, but they were not burned.

When I opened the bread box, there was something already in it. Wednesday’s sack had come back, folded flat into a neat square, creased sharp with a thumbnail.

Across the fold, in pencil, in a careful square hand, it said: “Eggs were a little done. Still good. Thank you. T.”

I stood there with the flashlight on that paper and laughed out loud. It was the first time I had laughed since Jen went into surgery. A boy who could not afford breakfast was critiquing my cooking, and he was right.

At ten after five I was waiting at the post, flashlight down so it would not blind him.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning, sir.” He looked at the sack in my hand and then at me. He did not reach for it. He waited, like he was not sure whether it was a trap.

“I burned yesterday’s,” I said. “Today’s are better. Not good. Better.”

His mouth twitched. “Yesterday’s were fine.”

“Your note says different.”

That got a real smile out of him, quick and gone. He took the sack and tucked it in his jacket the same way.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Tyler Haas,” he said. “Ed Haas is my grandpa. Out on the township road past the Lutheran cemetery.”

I knew Ed’s place. Every lineman at our co-op knows it. Ed is on home oxygen, and his account sits on our medical list, which means we call before any planned outage and we never pull his meter for a late bill. I had driven past that little gray house a hundred times.

“How’s your grandpa doing?” I said.

“He has good days,” Tyler said. “I’ve got to go, Mr. Lindgren. They dock you if you’re late.”

He was walking before I could say anything else. I watched him go and realized he had known my name all along.

Thursday Jen moved from Mankato to the swing bed at our little hospital in town. The therapist had her up with a walker, sweating and white in the face, doing laps of the hallway.

That evening she asked me to bring her Bible from her nightstand. She has read a chapter every night of our married life, and three nights without it had made her more cranky than the knee.

I found it where she always keeps it, under her reading glasses. It is the black leather Bible her mother gave her at confirmation, and I noticed right away it would not close right. The cover stood up off the pages almost an inch.

I opened it standing beside the bed, and strips of paper slid out onto the quilt.

They were strips torn off the tops of paper sacks. The fold part, where you roll the sack down. Every one had a line written on it in that same careful square pencil hand.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and started picking them up. Then I started reading them, and I did not get up for a long time.