The Sunday Drive That Settled Daddy’s Rent

“Teresa,” he said, low, so Daddy would not hear. “I’m sorry. My wife does our books. She sends that form every year. If I had known.”

“I know, Bobby,” I said. “I know you didn’t. If you hadn’t sent that form, I’d still be paying.”

He nodded and went back across the field to his tractor, and he did not look back.

Daddy did not say one word the whole ride back to town. Not at the church, not at the school, not at the stoplight. He sat with his hat in his lap and looked out the window, and every so often he rubbed his thumb across the fingers of the hand that had held the corner post.

I did not try to make him talk. I have known my father fifty-six years, and I knew that when he goes quiet like that he is not sulking. He is working. He is turning a thing over like a field, all the way to the bottom.

“Teresa,” he said, when I pulled in at the home. “Call your sister. Tell her I want her here tomorrow at ten. Tell her I said to come by herself.”

“Do you want me here?”

“I want you both here,” he said. “I’ve got two daughters. I’ll talk to both of them.”

I called Sherry from the parking lot. She answered on the second ring, bright and busy, with the television going behind her. I told her Daddy wanted to see her at ten in the morning and that he had asked for both of us.

There was a long silence on the phone. I could hear her breathing.

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “He wants to talk to us.”

“What about?”

I thought about what to say. In the end I said only, “I took him out to the farm today, Sherry. We saw Bobby.”

The silence went on so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she said, “Ten,” in a small voice I had not heard her use since we were girls, and she hung up.

I got to the home at a quarter till ten. Daddy was dressed and shaved and sitting up in his recliner with his good cardigan on, the green one Mama knitted him. He had his hat on the table beside him and his hands folded in his lap.

Sherry came in at five till. She had on her church coat on a Monday. Her face was pale and her eyes were already red, and she stood in the doorway like a girl called to the principal’s office.

She is fifty-nine, three years older than me. When we were little she braided my hair every morning before the school bus and walked me to my classroom on the first day of every year until I was in the fourth grade and told her to quit.

“Sit down, Sherry,” Daddy said. His voice was kind. That was the worst of it for her, I think. If he had been angry she could have been angry back.

She sat in the chair by the window. I stood by the door. Daddy looked at her for a long time.

“I went out to the place yesterday,” he said. “First time in three years. The beans made fifty-two on the bottom. Bobby’s keeping it nice.”

Sherry nodded. She was twisting the strap of her purse around and around her fingers.

“He told me where he’s been mailing my rent,” Daddy said. “I’d like you to tell me where it went after that.”