The Breakfast at the Next Rally

Birthday morning

Oren turned seventy on that Saturday. I was up at a quarter after five.

I set up the griddle on the picnic table outside our camper, under the big live oak, where the moss hung down almost to the table. I lit the propane and let it heat.

Fog was still sitting on the lake. A sandhill crane walked across the far end of the row and made that rattling call they make, and somebody’s dog barked back at it.

Delia came out in her sweatshirt and helped me tape her poster board card to the end of the picnic table, facing the seat where her grandpa would sit.

She stood back and checked it from twenty feet away to make sure the letters showed.

Francine had done what I asked. By seven, there were two more picnic tables pulled up end to end with ours, and eighteen people from the chapter in folding chairs and on coolers, all of them in jackets, all of them holding their own coffee mugs.

Quinn brought a second griddle. Reggie’s wife brought a thermos of orange juice from her sister’s grove in Avon Park.

I cooked four batches of sour cream pancakes and two pounds of sausage and a pan of scrambled eggs. The smell of it drifted down the row in the fog.

Eric went and knocked on his father’s door at a quarter after seven. I watched Oren come down the step of his fifth wheel in his green polo and a windbreaker, blinking, and stop dead when he saw the tables.

Then he smelled the pancakes. I saw him smell them. His whole face changed.

“Is that Eileen’s?” he said.

“Sour cream,” I said. “White Lily flour. She wrote it on the card.”

He walked to the table slowly, with one hand on Eric’s arm, though he would have told you he did not need it. He sat down where Delia pointed, right in front of her card.

He looked at the card for a long time. I watched his eyes go over it. Big black letters, three inches tall, gone over twice.

“Happy birthday, Grandpa Oren,” he read out loud. His voice was not steady on the last word.

Delia said, “I made the letters big so you could see them.”

Nobody at that table said a word. Eighteen people with coffee mugs, and it was quiet enough to hear the moss move.

The envelope

I set a plate of pancakes in front of him, and next to it a plain white envelope. Inside was the paid invoice from Spencer’s shop in Lakeland, folded once, and under it a small card with the name and number of an eye surgeon in Lakeland that our school nurse had told me about.

On the back of the card, I had written a note.

Oren picked up the envelope and took out the invoice. He held it out at arm’s length. He tilted it toward the light coming through the fog.

He brought it close, then out again. I could see him trying to make the numbers out, and I could see him not making them out.

I leaned down beside him, close, so nobody else could hear, and I read it to him quietly. Five thousand twelve dollars. Paid in full. Then I read him the note on the back of the card.

It said: “The appointment is open any Tuesday. I already asked. I’ll drive you, and I’ll drive the rig until you’re ready. Nobody has to know anything you don’t want them to. Love, Cassie.”

He sat there with the card in his hand. He did not look at me. He looked at the lake for a while, and I thought maybe he would just put it in his pocket and eat his pancakes, and that would have been all right.

That was the deal I made with myself. I would make the offer, and the rest was his.

Then he put both hands flat on the picnic table and pushed himself up.

“Before anybody eats,” he said, loud, the same voice he had used on the row in Arcadia. “I owe this girl something. And I owe all of you the truth.”