The Sundays My Father Never Explained

“It’s a waste of Sundays, Dana. It was a waste when he could drive himself, and I am not burning a whole afternoon to haul him forty miles to sit with people none of us know.”

My brother Craig said it standing in our father’s kitchen with his seed cap in his hand, the way he always held it in that house, as if Mom were still alive to tell him to take it off.

Dad was sitting right there at the table. He heard every word of it. He looked down at the crossword he had been working left-handed since August and filled in one more square.

“Those Sundays should have belonged to his grandkids,” Craig went on, quieter now, but not much. “Kayla’s fifteen. Ben’s twelve. Ask them how many Sunday dinners Grandpa ever stayed for. Go ahead and ask them.”

I didn’t ask them. I didn’t have to. I knew the answer, and so did Dad, and so did Shelly, who was out in the pickup with the engine running because she had never liked coming into that kitchen since Mom died.

“I’ve got the last cutting of hay to put up before it rains Tuesday,” Craig said, “and the beans after that. I can’t do it, and I’m not going to pretend he should be doing it anyway.”

He put his cap back on at the door. That was how you knew Craig was finished talking. He had been doing it since he was a boy, and I don’t think he has any idea he does it.

The screen door slapped shut behind him. Dad finished the crossword clue he was on, set the pencil down square with the edge of the paper, and looked at me over his reading glasses.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose that’s that.”

It was the first Saturday in October. I have carried a rural mail route for sixteen years, six days a week, a hundred and eight miles of gravel.

Sunday was the one day I did not have to drive anywhere.

“What time do you leave?” I asked him.

He looked at me a long moment. “Church lets out at eleven. I eat a sandwich. I’m on the road by a quarter to twelve. I’m there by half past.”

“Then I’ll be here at a quarter to twelve,” I said.

He nodded once. Dad was never a man for thanking out loud.

He just reached across the table with his good hand and patted mine twice, the way he used to pat a heifer’s neck after he got her into the chute.

I should tell you why I said yes, because it isn’t a nice truth.

I said yes because I agreed with Craig. I thought the whole thing had gone on long enough, and if I drove Dad once, he would see it for himself.