The Breakfast I Carried at Seven

The first morning, Ivo Kiel was sitting at his kitchen table at seven o’clock with his hands folded in front of him, like a man waiting on a bus that was never going to come.

I saw his light from my driveway. I had just come off a twelve-hour night shift at the hospital in Harrison, and my feet hurt, and all I wanted was a hot shower and my own bed.

But Ivo’s kitchen light is never on that early. He is ninety-four, and in the nine years since his wife passed, he has kept the same hours: up at eight, coffee, the farm report on the radio, and a slow walk to the mailbox at ten.

So I crossed the yard in my navy scrubs and my gray cardigan, with the frost crunching under my shoes, and I knocked on his back door and let myself in, the way he had told me years ago to do.

“Mindy,” he said, and he smiled at me like I was the best thing he had seen all week. “I believe I missed supper.”

He said it like a joke. He was wearing his faded blue flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the top, and his suspenders, and his white hair was combed.

He had gotten himself dressed. He had just not gotten himself fed.

“When did you eat last, Ivo?” I asked him. I hung my bag on the back of a chair and looked around his kitchen, at the yellow curtains his wife had sewn, at the frost on the window glass.

He thought about it honestly, which is the way he answers everything. “Dinner yesterday,” he said. “I had a sandwich about one o’clock. Joelle came by in the evening and left me those.” He nodded at the counter.

Two frozen dinners sat on the counter beside the sink. Salisbury steak, both of them. They were still sealed in their boxes and their plastic film, and they had been sitting out all night.

I picked one up. The box had been torn at one corner, like someone had worked at it with his thumbnail and given up.

Ivo’s hands have the kind of arthritis that turns knuckles into walnuts. He can hold a coffee cup. He cannot peel back a plastic seal.

“Did you try to open them?” I asked.

“I tried the one,” he said. “Then I thought, well, I’ll just wait for breakfast. And then I sat down here to wait, and I guess I waited.”

He laughed a little at himself. “Old men are good at waiting.”

Eighteen hours. I am a nurse. I know what eighteen hours without food does to a ninety-four-year-old man on blood pressure pills.

I looked at his hands on the table and saw the little tremor in them, and I set my jaw and did not let him see it on my face.

“Well,” I said, “I’m hungry too, and I’m not cooking for one. You sit right there.”

He had eggs in the refrigerator, and half a can of biscuits that had not expired yet, and butter.

I scrambled two eggs slow in his cast iron skillet, the way he likes them, and baked the biscuits in his old oven while his percolator went to work.