Aunt Sharla waited until the physical therapist had walked Grandpa down the hall and back, and he was settled in the chair by the window of his rehab room, before she told him the house was sold.
She said it the way you would read off a grocery list. “It closed yesterday, Dad. A young couple from Olathe. One eighty-five, cash. You won’t have to worry about any of it now.”
Grandpa Emil was 87 years old and nineteen days out from a new left hip. There was a cup of red gelatin on the tray in front of him that he had not touched since lunch.
He set his spoon down very carefully, the way he did everything that spring, like the whole world had gone slick on him and he did not trust it anymore.
“The house,” he said. It was not a question. I was standing in the doorway with a sack of hamburgers from the drive-in, and I stopped right where I was.
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“And the ground,” Sharla said. “The garden too. All two acres. Dad, you can’t keep up a garden at 87. You couldn’t keep up with a kitchen floor.”
That last part was mean, and I think she knew it the second it was out of her mouth. She looked down at her purse and started digging in it for nothing.
Grandpa looked out the window. The rehab wing faced the hospital parking lot in Ottawa, and there was nothing out there but cars and a light pole and a sky the color of dishwater.
“Did you get my can out of the shed?” he asked her.
Sharla kept digging in the purse. “The buyers are taking the shed as is, Dad. It’s mostly junk. I can’t haul sixty years of junk.”
He nodded once. Then he picked up the spoon again and ate the red gelatin, every bite, slow and neat, and he did not say one more word to her that afternoon.
The hallway
I followed Sharla out into the hall. I am not a speech person. I put tires on tractors and grain trucks at the co-op tire shop, and most days I say about forty words, half of them to a lug nut.
But I caught up with her by the nurses’ station and said, “You could have waited until he was home. You could have at least let him walk through it one more time.”
She turned around, and her face was not what I expected. I expected her chin up. Her eyes were red all the way around, and her hands were shaking on that purse strap.
“Travis, I’m the one who found him,” she said. “Do you understand that? I’m the one who walked in at seven in the morning and he’d been on that floor since supper.”
I knew that. Everybody knew that. She had gone out to the place to drop off his pills on her way to work, the way she did on Thursdays, and found him lying between the stove and the table.
“He was cold,” she said. “He’d pulled the dish towel down off the oven door and put it over his legs. He was 87 years old and he’d been lying on linoleum for twelve hours with a dish towel for a blanket.”
“So you sold it while he couldn’t stop you.”
“I sold it while I could,” she said. “Do you know what assisted living costs in this county? Five, six thousand a month. He has his carrier pension and his Social Security and that’s it. That hundred and eighty-five is all that stands between him and a state bed someday.”