The Day Dad Gave Me Away
Dad’s therapist was a young woman named Jenna, and once in July he said her name to me clear as a bell, and then laughed at himself.
There were bad weeks. In August he got a urinary infection and was confused and miserable for ten days, and Connie called me at the clinic crying because he’d tried to get out of bed by himself in the night and slid to the floor.
She couldn’t lift him. Jake drove over at four in the morning and picked him up like a child.
I want to say that for Connie. When it was bad, she called. She never once kept me out.
She just kept her hand on the checkbook and her eyes on the bills, and she kept telling me, gently, about all the things Dad didn’t remember.
The week before the wedding Jake and two of his cousins drove out to the church with a load of treated lumber and built a ramp over the front steps.
The church had a ramp at the side door, but it went into the basement. Jake said my dad was coming in the front door like everybody else.
They built it in one Saturday afternoon. Jake sanded the handrail by hand so nobody would get a sliver.
When the pastor came out to look at it, he ran his hand along the rail and said they could leave it up after, if they didn’t mind, because old Mrs. Pederson had been asking for one for years.
The night before the wedding I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my childhood bedroom at Dad and Connie’s, because that’s where my dress was, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars my mother stuck on the ceiling when I was eight.
Around two in the morning I heard the hum of the stair lift.
I went out into the hall and there was Dad in his robe, riding it down, with Connie walking beside him on the stairs, one hand on his shoulder.
“He wanted a glass of milk,” she whispered up to me. “Go back to bed. Big day.”
I stood at the top of the stairs and watched them in the kitchen light.
Connie poured the milk and held the glass while he drank it, then wiped his chin with a dish towel. She said something to him I couldn’t hear, and he patted her hand.
I went back to bed and lay there a long time, thinking about how a person can be right about one thing and wrong about another, and how the two can live in the same tired heart.
The third Saturday in September came up clear and cool, the kind of morning you only get on the prairie in the fall.
The beans had turned gold, and the sugar beet trucks were already running on the highway, shedding dirt clods on the shoulder.
My cousin Kim did my hair in Connie’s bathroom. Blonde, pulled into a low bun at the nape of my neck so the veil could sit on top.
She wanted to curl pieces around my face and I wouldn’t let her. Plain, I said. Everything plain.
Jake’s mother came by at ten to pin Dad’s boutonniere on. It was a white rose with a little sprig of wheat, which Jake had insisted on.