The Breakfast at the Next Rally

Five weeks of small things

I did not say anything to Oren about his eyes during those five weeks. But I watched, and I helped, and I tried to make it easy for him without making a show of it.

He called Eric on the Wednesday after the Arcadia rally and said he was thinking about skipping November. Eric told him Delia would cry. That was true. Oren said he would think about it.

The next Sunday at church, I sat on Oren’s left, the side away from the window, so the morning light was behind him instead of in his face. I held the hymnal between us, close, and pointed to the verse with my finger like I was doing it for Delia.

He sang every word. He did not look at me once, but he did not move away either.

The Thursday after that, he asked Eric to drive him to Walmart because, he said, his truck was making a noise. Eric drove him. The truck was not making a noise.

I started picking him up for Delia’s Saturday soccer games. I said it was on the way, which it was not. He sat on the sideline in a folding chair with his cap pulled low, and when Delia scored, he asked me, “Was that her?”

and I said yes, and he cheered like it was the Super Bowl.

Delia was the one who figured out the card. She was making him a birthday card at the picnic table on our back patio, and she had been drawing all over it with tiny flowers and tiny letters the way she does.

Then she stopped and looked at it and started over on a fresh piece of poster board.

“What happened to the first one?” I asked her.

“Grandpa won’t be able to read it,” she said. “He holds the hymnal way out like Great Grandpa did. I’m making the letters big.”

She made every letter about three inches tall, in thick black marker, and she went over each one twice so it would be dark. The whole card said four words: Happy Birthday Grandpa Oren. It took her the entire afternoon.

I had to go stand in the yard for a minute after she showed me.

The recipe card

Eric’s mother was named Eileen. She died three years ago of a stroke, very fast, two weeks after the two of them came home from a trip to the Smokies in that same fifth wheel.

They had bought it the year Oren retired from the phosphate plant in Mulberry, and it was the thing she had wanted her whole married life.

The week I married Eric, Eileen gave me a recipe card in her handwriting for her sour cream pancakes. She said every Pruitt birthday since 1979 had started with those pancakes, cooked outside if the weather allowed, and now it was my job too.

After she died, nobody made them. Oren’s birthday went by twice with a store cake and a card. He never said a word about it. But I saw him at the second one, looking at the griddle by our back door like he was waiting for somebody who was not coming.

I took the recipe card out of my Bible, where I had kept it for eleven years. I bought two pounds of country sausage from the meat market in Bartow, a dozen eggs from a lady at church who keeps hens, and a bag of White Lily flour because that was the brand Eileen wrote on the card in parentheses.

I practiced the pancakes three Saturdays in a row on the griddle on our patio. The first batch was rubbery. The second batch was close. The third batch, Eric took one bite and put his fork down and did not say anything for a while, and that was how I knew I had it.

Then I called Francine Ostrander and asked her a favor.