The Inheritance I Had Not Earned
I stood the way you stand at a window waiting for headlights that aren’t coming. And then, out of long habit, I straightened the blanket and tucked the corners and smoothed the pillow where his head wasn’t. Because that is what I did at three. I turned him, and tucked him, and said, “There you go, Walt.”
“There you go, Walt,” I said now, to the empty bed, in the dark.
A board creaked in the hall behind me.
My brother stood in the doorway in his sock feet and a Brewers T-shirt, with his hand on the frame, and his face was one I had not seen since we were children. He looked like the boy who had let go of the bicycle seat.
“Sandy,” he said. His voice was rough. “What are you doing?”
I could have lied. I almost did.
“It’s three,” I said. “I get up at three.”
“Dad’s been gone since Tuesday.”
“I know, Keith.”
“Then why?”
I gave him the only answer I had. “My body doesn’t know yet.”
He didn’t speak. I watched him look at the rail on the bed, and the gait belt on its hook, and the stack of folded draw sheets on the dresser. He had walked past all of it that afternoon and seen furniture. Now, in the middle of the night, it began to turn in front of him into what it was.
“Go back to bed,” I said gently.
He stood there another minute. Then he said, in a voice I had to lean toward to hear, “How many nights, Sandy?”
I smiled a little, because it was such a Keith question. A number.
“Read the notebooks,” I said. “They’ll tell you.”
He nodded once and went back up the stairs, slowly, one board at a time. I lay on the daybed and looked at the ceiling, and for the first time in a long while I did not pray for anything. I only said thank you, and I was not sure for what.
What happened on Sunday morning, I did not see. I was at Trinity Lutheran, hearing the Sunday school children butcher the Doxology. I’m telling it the way Keith told it to me afterward, and the way Brooke and Harlan and Marcy filled in the blanks, because those four people are the reason this story ends the way it does.
When I got up from the daybed at six, the bottom drawer of the sideboard was open and the good tablecloth was folded on a chair. The notebooks were gone. Then I turned, and he was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with only the stove light on. He had never gone back to bed. The three green notebooks were stacked in front of him, and the first one was open.
“I’m going to church,” I said. “You can come. Or you can stay.”
“Stay,” he said, hoarse. “If that’s all right.”
I drove the three miles to town with my hands shaking on the wheel.
He read for two hours without lifting his head. He read me some of it afterward, on the porch.
March 19. Day 4 home. P. slept 90 minutes. Turned at 11, 1, 3, 5. Skin on left hip pink, not broken. Watching it. He said “Sandy” today, the whole word, first time. I went into the pantry and shut the door.
May 22. Door County trip with the girls from the district. Cancelled. Fourth time. Nobody to stay with P. Everyone was very nice about it.