The Sundays My Father Never Explained

The stroke and the six months

The stroke came in the middle of August, a small one, the kind the doctor at the regional hospital called a warning shot. It took some of the strength out of Dad’s right hand and left a little drag in his right foot.

He was home in four days. He was mad about it in five.

By the end of the week he was out in the machine shed trying to change the oil in the old Ford tractor he kept for mowing ditches, and I had to take the wrench out of his hand.

The doctor had to report it to the state, the way doctors in Iowa do after a stroke, and the letter came from the Department of Transportation the first week of September. Dad’s license was suspended for six months, pending a medical review in March.

He read the letter standing at the mailbox. I know because I was the one who put it there.

He folded it in thirds and walked back up the lane without a word.

The next morning he gave me the keys to his Buick and asked me to start it once a week so the battery wouldn’t go down.

For most things, it didn’t matter much. I ran his groceries out on my way home from the route. Craig’s Shelly took him to his therapy appointments on Tuesdays. Pastor Jim picked him up for church and brought him home again after.

It was only the Sundays that nobody would touch.

For nine years, every single Sunday, my father had driven forty miles south to the county care home in the next county over.

He went in good weather and bad. He went the week of Mom’s funeral. He went the Sunday after his own gallbladder surgery, which he wasn’t supposed to do.

None of us knew a single soul who lived there. When I asked him, years ago, he said, “Some old friends,” and changed the subject.

When Mom was alive she said, “Leave him be, Dana,” and that was the end of it.

So we left him be. Craig grumbled. Shelly stopped setting a place for him at Sunday dinner.

And I told myself it was an old man’s habit, the way some men can’t stop going to the sale barn after they have sold the last cow.

The first Sunday

He was waiting on the porch when I pulled in at a quarter to twelve.

He was in his church clothes still: the pressed blue check shirt Mom had always ironed for him, tan slacks, his white hair combed straight back with water the way he has worn it my whole life.

He had a brown paper sack in his lap. When he got in the car I saw it was butterscotch candies, the cheap kind in the yellow wrappers, two pounds of them from the Casey’s in town.

“Who are those for?” I asked.

“The card table,” he said, and that was all I got for the first twenty miles.

Somewhere past the grain elevator at the county line he started humming “In the Garden” under his breath. It was Mom’s favorite.

I hadn’t heard him hum anything in four years, and I didn’t say a word in case he would stop.

The care home was a long, low brick building at the edge of a town about the size of ours, with mums planted along the walk.

Dad signed us in at the desk without looking, like signing his own name on a check.

I had my speech all ready for the drive home. I had practiced it on the route all week.

You’ve given these people nine years, Dad. Nobody could ask for more. You can let this go now.

Then we came around the corner into the dayroom, and the whole place lit up.

It was a bright October afternoon and the sun was coming in through the big windows, but that wasn’t it. It was the faces. Every face in that room turned toward the door at once and broke open.

They were sitting at the card tables and in the vinyl armchairs and in their wheelchairs along the wall, and they waved and smiled and called out to him.

A man by the TV lifted his whole arm in the air like he was bidding on a heifer at a sale.

“Walt!” he hollered. “They told us you’d died!”

“Not yet, Marvin,” Dad said, and the whole room laughed like it was the best thing they’d heard all month.

By the window stood a small white-haired woman in a lavender cardigan, holding the back of a chair to keep steady.

She didn’t wave. She just watched him come across the room with his cane, and when he got close enough, she said, “You’re late, Walter.”

“I had a new driver,” Dad said.

“Is this her?” She looked me up and down, not unkindly. “She’s got your chin.”

“She’s got her mother’s everything else,” Dad said, and I had to look out the window for a minute.