The Breakfast I Carried at Seven

Day two: “7:00. He ate the second frozen dinner last night. Got the plastic off with a steak knife. Cut his thumb, small, I cleaned it and put on a bandage. Ate oatmeal and toast. Said grace.”

Day three: “7:00. Joelle did not come. Called 6:50, four minutes. Ivo says she is tired. He ate crackers and a can of peaches for supper. He had saved them, he said, for an emergency.”

That one sat with me all day at work. A man who milked cows twice a day for fifty years, saving a can of peaches for an emergency, and the emergency was just a Friday.

I want to say something here about the mornings themselves, because the notebook was the reason I started, but it was not the reason I kept going.

Ivo Kiel is the best company I have ever had at a breakfast table. He has opinions about everything.

He thinks the county should have paved our road in 1990 and never forgave them. He thinks the Razorbacks should run the ball more. He thinks my biscuits need more salt and is right.

He told me about his wife, Luella, who sewed those yellow curtains in 1971 and swore she would make new ones someday and never did, because she said they were too cheerful to replace.

He told me about the dairy, forty head of Holsteins, and the milk truck that came up the gravel road every other day.

On day eleven he told me about the winter of 1962, when the snow was so deep the milk truck could not get up the hill for a week, and he and his father hauled cans down to the county road on a sled pulled by an old mule named Dutch.

“Dutch hated that sled,” he said, and his whole face lit up.

“He’d lay his ears back and look at Daddy like, I’ll do it, but I want you to know I think it’s foolish. That mule had more sense than the both of us.”

I wrote that one in the notebook too, even though it was not a fact Inga wanted.

I wrote, “Day 11. Told me about Dutch the mule. Laughed till he coughed. Ate two eggs, sausage, biscuit.” I wanted Burl to know his father was still in there, all of him.

Every morning, he said the same grace. Every morning he folded his hands, bowed his head, and said, “Lord, make us thankful. Amen.”

Five words. I started bowing my head too, around the end of the first week. I am not sure he noticed. I think he did.

Clint started going over on his days off. His first day off, he just walked across the yard after breakfast and sat in the other kitchen chair, and the two of them talked cattle prices for two hours while I slept.

He came home at noon and stood in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“That man is sharp as a tack,” he said. “He is not confused. He is not sick. He is just alone, and he can’t work his hands.”

“I know,” I said.

“I fixed his thermostat,” Clint said. “It was stuck at sixty. He’d been sleeping in his coat.” He shook his head. “Sleeping in his coat, Mindy.”