The Sundays My Father Never Explained

The second Sunday and the third

I told myself it was just for the six months. Just until his license came back in March. Then he could decide for himself, and I would have done my part, and nobody could say I hadn’t.

The second Sunday, I bought the butterscotch myself on the way out, two pounds of the yellow ones. He saw the sack on the seat and patted it once.

By the third Sunday, I knew the room.

I knew Clarence wanted the cash corn price first and the beans second. I knew Edna wanted the bulletin read twice because she forgot the first time.

I knew Marvin cheated at pitch and that you let him, because he had been the best card player in his township and his hands were going.

I knew that Irene’s batteries got changed every Sunday whether they needed it or not, because she didn’t trust herself to do it, and she didn’t want to bother the aides with something so small.

I knew that Dad’s chair was the vinyl one by Irene’s, the one with the cracked armrest someone had patched with tape, and that nobody else sat in it all week.

Bev walked me out to the car that third Sunday while Dad was saying his goodbyes. She stood by the door with her arms crossed against the wind.

“He’s never missed,” she said. “In nine years. You know that?”

“I know,” I said.

“He even came the Sunday after your mother’s funeral,” Bev said. “Sat right there in that chair by Irene. Didn’t say ten words the whole afternoon. Irene held his hand the whole time and didn’t make him talk.”

I had not known that a woman I’d never heard of had held my father’s hand while he grieved my mother, when I was forty miles away, washing casserole dishes.

“Why does he come?” I asked her.

Bev looked at me a long time.

“That’s not mine to tell, honey,” she said. “But I’ll tell you what he does when he’s here. He sat with Marvin’s wife the night she passed, because Marvin’s boys were in Texas and couldn’t get here.”

“He writes letters for Clarence to his sister in Nebraska. He brought his own drill in and fixed the closet doors in the east wing because maintenance was three weeks out.”

She nodded back toward the building.

“Half of the people in there, he’s the only visitor they get. Your dad is the reason some of them get out of bed on a Sunday.”