The Sunday Drive That Settled Daddy’s Rent

He read it once. Then he took his glasses off, wiped them on his shirt and put them back on, and he read it again. His mouth got thin.

“Sherry says Bobby’s rent goes on my bill here,” he said slowly. “She told me the rent and my checks cover it, with a little left over for the taxes on the place.”

I had not known that. I had not known she had told him anything at all. I had to sit still for a minute before I could answer him.

“Daddy,” I said. “I’ve been paying your bill. Twenty-one hundred a month. Sherry told me your money was gone.”

He looked at me then, and I will never forget it. It was not anger yet. It was the look of a man who has walked out to the barn in the morning and found the door standing open and the stalls empty.

“How long,” he said.

“Since you came in here. Three years.”

He set the form down on the arm of his recliner. He laid his hand flat on top of it, those big old knuckles swollen up from the arthritis. He sat that way for a long time, looking out the window at the parking lot.

“Why didn’t you call your sister,” he said. It was not a question so much as him checking my thinking. That was always Daddy’s way.

“Because it’s not my money,” I said. “It’s yours. And because I figured you might like to ask somebody about it yourself.”

He was quiet a moment more. Then he said, “Get my hat.”

I got his brown felt hat off the hook behind the door, the one with the sweat stain on the band that Mama always tried to scrub out. I got his tan quilted jacket out of the closet, because it was October and the wind on that ridge can bite even on a clear day.

I signed him out at the front desk for a family outing. The aide on duty, a big kind girl named Kayla, helped me get him from the wheelchair into the front seat of my car.

We did not talk much going out. The road to the farm runs past the Methodist church where Mama is buried and past the old consolidated school where Daddy went through the eighth grade. He looked at both of them as we went by but he did not say anything.

When we turned off the blacktop onto the gravel lane he sat up straighter. I saw it. It was as though somebody had run a wire up through his back.

“Bobby’s got the beans out,” he said. He was looking at the bottom field, where the stubble lay pale and short. “Looks like they did all right. That bottom always did make beans.”

He knew every field by name. The bottom. The long piece. The hill pasture. The tobacco patch, which has not grown tobacco in twelve years but which he still calls the tobacco patch. He named them to himself as we went past, the way some people pray.

The old gray tobacco barn stood off to the right on the rise. Daddy and his brother built that barn in 1956. The siding has gone silver and some of the tier poles inside are broken now, but it is still standing straight.

The black cattle were spread out across the hill pasture, grazing in the sun. Bobby runs about sixty cows out there. They are good cattle, Angus mostly, and they lifted their heads and watched us come down the lane.