The Rent I Charged His Daughter

“All right,” I said. Then I turned to him, because Trudy was not the only one I owed. “Arlo, I charged your daughter rent to take care of you. I did it because I was afraid of losing this house, and I talked over you at the table because I knew what you were going to say. I’m sorry.”

He took a long time. “I know,” he said. “Do. Better.”

“Yes.”

And because I did not know what else to do with my hands, I said the one true small thing I had. “He used to make me coffee on Wednesdays. Before. I’d like to learn how he takes it now.”

“Half a cup,” Trudy said. “Warm, not hot, because of the left hand. One spoon of sugar, and you stir it for him and set it where he can reach it with his right. He can’t tell you it’s too hot until it’s burned him.”

I wrote it on the back of my hand with a pen. I did not have paper.

The Envelope

On Sunday the eighteenth, after church, I came with the box. I set it on the tray across Arlo’s lap and said, “This was in your roll-top, the bottom drawer. It’s sealed. I didn’t open it. I didn’t know whether it was mine to carry or yours to keep.”

He looked at it a long time. Trudy had stopped in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in her hands.

“Open it,” Arlo said. Then, because he is who he is: “Here.”

His good hand could not manage the flap. Trudy came and held the envelope steady, and with his thumbnail he worked it under the paper until it gave. He drew out two sheets. He did not read them. He held them out to his daughter.

“Trudy. I should have. Said it.”

She took the first sheet, heavy, cream-colored, with a university seal at the top, and I watched her read it twice. Then the thin yellow carbon. Then she turned the envelope over and read the pencil on the back aloud, in a flat voice. “Told her go. She would not. Dot has till summer. She does not know I read both.”

It was a letter of acceptance to the School of Nursing at Wichita State University, dated March 11, 1998, and her own typed withdrawal, dated April 9, declining due to a family illness. Dorothy Weidner died that June. By the fall, Trudy had taken a substitute job on the mail route to pay the funeral bills, and twenty-eight years went by.

“You. Were going. To be. A nurse,” Arlo said.

“I was.”

“You. Are.”

Trudy sat down on the arm of the recliner and put her forehead against his white hair. I went into the kitchen and ran water over cups that were already clean, because it gave me somewhere to be.

I had looked at that woman’s hands and seen a rival. I had never once asked what else they might have done. And I understood something about Arlo that I should have understood on the first day. He did not get slow in January. He was slow long before, slow like a river, and the people who loved him learned to wait. Trudy had known how her whole life. I had sat at his table for two years and talked over the top of him, as though the only thing wrong with his speech was a stroke.