The Breakfast at the Next Rally

The keys

Eric got up from his end of the table and walked down to his father. He did not make a speech either. He put his hand on the back of his dad’s neck the way Oren used to do to him when he was a boy, and he held it there.

“You should’ve told me, Dad,” he said.

“I know it.”

“I’d have taken the keys.”

“I know that too,” Oren said. “That’s why I didn’t.”

Then Oren reached into the pocket of his windbreaker. He took out his truck keys on the brass ring Eileen had given him, the one with the little fish on it, and he held them out across the table. Not to Eric. To me.

“You drive her home,” he said. “You park buses. You can park a fifth wheel.”

“I can,” I said, and I took them.

“And I’ll pay you back,” he said. “Every dollar. Pension check comes the third.”

I wanted to say no. Everything in me wanted to wave it off. But I looked at his face and I understood that if I did not take the money, it would sit on him the rest of his life.

A man like Oren does not get to be forgiven for free. He has to pay something or he does not believe it.

“Pay me back after the surgery,” I said. “Medicare covers most of it. Whatever’s left over, you cover, and then the rest comes to me. And you buy Delia a new soccer ball.”

“Deal,” he said. And he shook my hand across the table, firm, like he was buying a used tractor.

Then he sat down and ate four of Eileen’s pancakes, and the whole chapter sang happy birthday to him in the fog, badly, the way people sing at seven in the morning, and Delia sang the loudest.

The drive home

On Sunday, Reggie spotted me while I pulled Oren’s fifth wheel out of the site. I took it out in one pass, slow and wide, the way you swing a bus around a school loop.

A couple of the men on the row clapped, which embarrassed me, and Oren told them to hush.

Eric towed our camper behind his truck, and I drove Oren’s rig behind him, up Highway 27 through Avon Park and Frostproof and Lake Wales, past the orange groves and the cattle and the roadside stands with boiled peanuts.

Delia rode in the back seat of Oren’s truck with her new card rolled up on her lap.

Oren rode shotgun. For the first twenty minutes, he watched my mirrors more than he watched the road. Then he sat back.

“You’re a better driver than I was at your age,” he said around Frostproof.

“I have a better truck,” I said.

He laughed, the first real laugh I had heard out of him since Arcadia. Then he told me about the first trip he and Eileen took in that fifth wheel, to Cedar Key, and how she had made him stop at every little fruit stand on Highway 24 so she could buy a jar of something.

He told me about her singing in the passenger seat, off key, every hymn she knew. He told me about the morning in the Smokies, two weeks before she died, when she made those pancakes outside on a cold griddle and the steam came off them in the mountain air.

I listened. I did not say much. It was the most he had talked to me in eleven years of being his daughter in law.

At his place in Winter Haven, I backed the fifth wheel into the side yard between the shed and the orange tree in one pass, with Eric spotting. Oren stood in the driveway and watched me do it with his arms crossed.

“Eileen would’ve liked to see that,” he said.