The Sundays My Father Never Explained

Craig

Craig called that night while I was doing dishes. I could hear the dryer running at their place, and a television, and Ben asking somebody where his ball glove was.

“Shelly says you’ve been driving him down there,” Craig said.

“Three Sundays now,” I said.

He was quiet a minute. “You know I’m not trying to be hard on him.”

“I know.”

“It’s just that it’s been every Sunday, Dana. For nine years. You know what Kayla asked me last spring? She asked me if Grandpa didn’t like us. Fifteen years old, and she asked me if her own grandpa didn’t like her.”

I set the plate I was holding back down in the water. I hadn’t known that, either.

“He never once came to Ben’s Sunday ball games,” Craig said. “Not once. He’d go down there and sit with a bunch of strangers instead of watching his own grandson pitch. And I’m supposed to drive him? I’m supposed to make it easier?”

I want to be fair to my brother, because I wasn’t fair to him then, in my own head.

Craig took over the home ground when Dad’s knees went, and he has farmed it every year since through two droughts and a derecho and bean prices that would make a grown man cry.

He works from dark to dark from April to November. Sunday afternoon is the one piece of the week he has with his kids, and he wanted his father in it. That isn’t selfish. That’s a son.

“I’m not asking you to drive him,” I said.

“Good,” Craig said, and then, after a minute, “Is he all right? Down there? Is he eating?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “He’s better than fine, down there.”

And that was the truest thing I had said in a month.

The index card

On the fourth Sunday, Dad fell asleep in the car about ten minutes from home. His church Bible slid off his lap and landed on the floor mat on its spine.

When I pulled into his lane I reached down to pick it up for him, and an index card fell out from between the pages. It had been tucked in at the Twenty-third Psalm, which tells you something about my father.

It was in his handwriting, the square farmer printing he had always used on his feed receipts and grain tickets. The ink had gone a little shaky toward the bottom, the way his hand had gone since August.

It said: “Irene. Batteries, every Sunday, 312s. Hair, Thursdays, $25, Deb at the shop. Phone bill, the 15th. Christmas, the good chocolates, not the cheap ones. New winter coat every third year, size small. She won’t ask.”

And then at the bottom, underlined twice so hard the pen had nearly gone through the card: “Never tell Craig.”

I sat in the car in the dark with the engine running for a long time, holding that card. Dad was snoring a little. The yard light came on by itself, the way it does at dusk.

Never tell Craig what?