The Breakfast I Carried at Seven

Here is what I believe about Joelle, and I believed it then too. She was not a wicked woman. She was a worn-out woman.

She had taken on a ninety-four-year-old uncle when nobody else would, and she was holding her own house together with two jobs, and somewhere along the way she told herself that a phone call and a frozen dinner were enough.

And the $2,400 was keeping her own lights on. I found that out later. I did not know it at the time.

At the time I just knew that a man I loved was going to bed hungry, and the money that was supposed to fix that was going somewhere else.

The days went on. The notebook filled up. Some days were good.

Day fourteen, he asked me if I had slept, and when I said “some,” he made me sit down and drink a cup of his coffee before I went home, and he talked about Luella until I almost fell asleep at his table.

Some days were not good. Day nineteen, I came in and he was on the kitchen floor. He had slipped reaching for the coffee can on the high shelf.

He was not hurt, thank the Lord, just stuck, and embarrassed, and cold. He had been there about forty minutes.

I got him up. I checked him over head to foot like I would any patient, and he was fine, a bruise on his elbow, and his pride hurt worse than anything.

“Don’t you write that down,” he said, and he was smiling, but he meant it.

I wrote it down. I wrote it down because a ninety-four-year-old man on a kitchen floor for forty minutes is exactly what Inga meant.

And Clint moved the coffee can to the counter that evening, and every other thing Ivo used from the high shelves, and he did not say a word about it to anybody.

Day twenty-two, Joelle did not call at all. Day twenty-three, she called twice and came by and stayed a whole half hour, and Ivo told me about it the next morning like it was Christmas.

“She sat and visited,” he said. “She’s a good girl. She’s just got a lot on her.”

I wrote that down too. I wrote down every good day she had, just as careful as the bad ones.

I wanted it to be fair. If Burl was going to read it, I wanted him to read the truth, not a case against his cousin.

Around the fourth week, Ivo started setting the table before I came. I would cross the yard at seven and find two cups out, and two forks, and the percolator already going.

He could not cook, but he could do that, and he did it every day.

“You don’t have to set a place for me,” I told him.

“I know I don’t,” he said. “Sit down.”

On the morning of day thirty, the second week of March, there was still frost on the kitchen window, but the sun was coming in earlier, and the yellow curtains were bright with it.

I carried over scrambled eggs and a biscuit, the same as the first morning.

I set the plate down in front of him. I set my notebook beside it, the way I always did, closed, with the pen on top.