Five Plates and a Folding Chair

It was about the house on the west side where I grew up, with the crabapple in the front yard and the basketball hoop Dad never took down.

My mother left when I was eleven. She lives in Denver now with her second husband, and we talk on birthdays.

Dad raised me by himself for three years, which meant a lot of hot dish and a lot of driving me to volleyball in his work clothes.

He met Lorna when I was fourteen. She worked the front desk at our dentist’s office, and she laughed at his jokes, which not everyone does.

They married the summer before my freshman year of high school, in her sister’s backyard in Brandon.

I would not say Lorna and I were ever close. I would say we were careful with each other.

She did not try to be my mother, and I was grateful for that. She kept the house clean and she kept Dad fed, and he was happier than I had seen him.

Two years ago, in October, Dad had chest pain carrying a box up a porch on the east side. He finished the route.

Of course he finished the route. He drove himself to the emergency room afterward, still in his work clothes, and they kept him.

Triple bypass. He was fifty-six. I remember the surgeon drawing on a whiteboard, three little lines around a heart, and Lorna holding my hand so hard my rings left marks.

That was one of the good moments between us. I have not forgotten it.

He was off work for three months. A UPS driver cannot just go back after heart surgery.

He had to heal, and then he had to pass his DOT physical again before they would let him behind the wheel. Short-term disability covered about half of his check.

Lorna’s paycheck from the dental office did not stretch. I knew it because I saw the stack of mail on the counter when I came to sit with him.

The mortgage statement was on top. There was $19,000 left on a house he had been paying on for twenty years.

I had been saving since I started at dispatch. Overtime, holidays, every shift nobody wanted.

I had a little over $15,000 in the bank, and I had been telling myself it was for a house of my own someday.

I wrote him a check for $12,000. I did not ask anybody.

I just went to the bank, and then I drove to his house and found him in the recliner with a pillow pressed to his chest, the way they teach you to hold it when you cough.

“What’s this?” he said. Then he read it, and his whole face changed. “Bailey, no. Absolutely not. That’s your money.”

“It’s going on the house,” I said. “So you don’t lie awake over it. So you can get better and not think about anything else. You can argue with me when you can laugh without holding a pillow.”

He cried. My father, who drove a package truck through blizzards for thirty years, sat in that recliner and cried.

Later, when he walked me out, he cried again in the driveway, standing there in his slippers in the cold.