Wednesdays
She was not late. Not that first Wednesday, or the one after, or any Wednesday that winter.
She drove down from Amarillo in the dark and pulled into the farm at seven-twenty, and she sat in that old Chevy with the heater fan roaring on high, riding to dialysis next to Daddy.
She told me later that the first few times they hardly talked. He drove, and she watched the fields go by, and the radio was on the farm report out of Amarillo.
She said it was the most uncomfortable she had ever been in her life.
Then about the third week, he started telling her things. Whose ground that was. Where the old schoolhouse used to stand before it burned. Which section her grandmother was born on.
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How he met our mother at a street dance in Dimmitt in 1971, when she was wearing a yellow dress and he was wearing the only clean shirt he owned.
Tina said she’d grown up in that county and never heard half of it.
She said she’d been so busy getting to Amarillo, she’d never looked out the window on the way.
On the way home she’d buy him an Allsup’s burrito, and he’d eat half and save half for supper. She started bringing a thermos. Then she started bringing a second thermos, for Pat.
Pat told me, laughing, that she was going to have to start drinking decaf. She was getting two coffees on Mondays and a thermos on Wednesdays and she couldn’t sleep.
The SUV
Tina kept the SUV through the spring. Then in May she sold it herself, privately, to a young couple in Canyon, and paid off the note and bought a used Corolla with a hundred and forty thousand miles on it, for cash.
She told me she’d never sleep listening for a tow truck again.
She never offered to pay me back the three thousand, and I never asked. That wasn’t the kind of thing it was.
But she started sending Daddy forty dollars a month for gas, folded inside a card, and he kept every one of those cards in the glove box of the Chevy.
She told me once, sitting on the porch steps with me in April, that she didn’t know how to be sorry enough.
I told her she already was. I told her she’d been sorry since that first Wednesday, and Daddy knew it, and so did I.
I’m not going to pretend I was perfect in all of this. I had wanted to see her face in that parking lot.
I’d wanted it bad. And when I saw it, it didn’t feel the way I thought it would. It felt like watching my big sister fall down.