Five Plates and a Folding Chair

I had to turn around and pretend to look for a knife in the drawer. I stood with my back to them for a minute.

When I turned around, Jess was cutting the pie and Kat was telling Dad about the time she had to tell a surgeon he was wrong.

Dad stayed almost two hours. He ate two pieces of pie, Lorna’s and then mine, to be fair, he said.

He asked Kat about her floor and told her about his own nurses, how one of them made him walk the hall four times a day and he hated her and loved her.

He asked Jess what she did for work, and she told him she does billing for a clinic, and he said, “So you’re the one who sends me those letters,” and she turned red and he laughed and said he was teasing.

And he asked Mo about her grandma. Just asked, and then listened.

She told him about the garden, the tomatoes she canned, the way her grandma used to say “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise” about everything, even the weather report.

“My ma said that,” Dad said. “Must be a South Dakota thing.” And Mo laughed and said her grandma was from Iowa, and he said, “Close enough. Same creek.”

Around nine, Kat had to go home and sleep before her shift.

Jess and Mo were going to stay over at my place, on the couch and an air mattress. Dad stood up and folded the chair and looked at it.

“I’ll leave this,” he said. “You need another chair.”

“Dad, you don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to.” He leaned it against the wall by the door. “But you need one. And now you’ve got one.”

I walked him down the stairs. He held the rail on the turn, and I walked a step below him the whole way, the way you do with someone you are afraid of losing, even if you would never say so.

Out in the parking lot it was cold and clear, and his breath came out in clouds.

His truck was parked under the light. He stood by the door with his keys in his hand and did not get in.

“I left at seven,” he said. “Sat there through the turkey and the football and Pam’s husband talking about his boat. And I looked at the clock and I thought, my girl is across town feeding three kids who don’t have anybody, and I’m sitting here.”

“What did Lorna say?”

“Nothing,” he said. “She was in the kitchen. I took the second pie off the counter, and I went out to the garage and got the chair, and she watched me do it. She didn’t stop me. She didn’t say anything.”

He looked down at his keys. “I don’t want you to think she’s a bad woman, Bailey. She’s not. There’s some things you don’t know. But this wasn’t right, and I should have said so on Sunday. I’m slow. You know I’m slow.”

“You came,” I said.

“I came.” He hugged me, hard, with his chin on top of my head the way he did when I was little. “Go on up. It’s cold. Tell your friends they’re welcome anytime. I mean that.”