The Inheritance I Had Not Earned
I kept a log of it all, in three green spiral notebooks, with a blue pen, in plain words, the way I’d once written bus schedules. It was the one place the work stayed down in ink.
Keith was not absent, and I want you to understand that before you judge him. My brother called every Sunday at six o’clock, on the dot, for six years. He sent five hundred dollars on the first of every month, never late. He drove the two hours out for Easter, for Christmas, for Pop’s birthday, and for one Packers game a season.
And I planned every one of those visits like a wedding.
That is the part I think about most.
On the Friday before each visit I shaved Pop and washed his hair at the kitchen sink with a pitcher. On Sunday morning I got him up an hour early and into the green cardigan with the leather buttons that Mama knitted in 1989, and combed his hair, and sat him in the recliner by the window, in the light. I took the bed alarm off the mattress. I hid the commode on the back porch under a quilt. I put out the good coffee cups and made a pie.
I told myself I did it for Pop’s dignity, and I did. A man who has raised two children does not want his son to see him in a gait belt. And in one of his clear hours, in the third year, he had asked me to promise something.
“Don’t tell Keith how it is,” he said, holding my wrist. His grip was still strong in the good hand. “He’ll drive out here and be miserable and be no use. He’s not made for it, Sandy. Let him think I’m doing all right.”
“Pop, he ought to know.”
“Promise me.”
So I promised. I kept that promise to the end, and I made it look easy. That is the thing I understood a few days after the funeral and wished I had understood sooner. I made it look so easy that my own brother looked at it for six years and saw a woman in a recliner. He wasn’t looking at a lie. He was looking at a performance, one I gave with all my skill because I loved him and I loved our father. I did it so well that it erased me.
That Saturday night, after the dishes were done and the cousins had gone and Renee had taken the kids to the motel out on Highway 10, Keith stayed.
He slept in his old room at the top of the stairs. I heard the floorboards give him away a while, and then the light under the door went out. I lay down on the daybed in the front room beside Pop’s empty bed. I had turned off the alarm the day before, with a click I felt in my chest. But at ten minutes to three, I woke.
I woke the way I had woken more than two thousand times, my eyes opening by themselves, and listened for him. The breathing. The little rattle.
There was only the clock in the kitchen, four minutes fast, and the furnace coming on.
I got up. I always get up. I found my slippers and stood by his bed in my flannel nightgown, and put my hand out to roll him, and touched the cold rail, and the bare mattress, and the folded blanket where my father had been.