The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

So I did the only thing I could think of. I said I would drive.

Regan signed the papers on a clipboard a social worker brought in. The home out past Grand Island had a bed for Dad on the twenty-third.

Regan said he would follow the transport van out there in his car.

In the hall, I asked him one thing. I asked him if he had been to see the place.

He said he had looked at the website and the inspection report and the reviews, and that the reviews were good.

“I promised Mom,” he said, and his voice changed on the word. “She made me promise in the hospital, Jana. Keep the farm. Don’t let it go to strangers. I’m trying to keep it.”

I believed him. I still believe him. Mom said the same thing to me, in the same bed, the same week.

She just did not hand me the pen, and so the promise sat heavier on him than on me.

I drove home that night on Highway 30 with the radio off.

Tom had the cattle fed and a pot of chili on the stove, and he did not ask me anything until I had eaten half a bowl.

“Two hours,” I said finally. “West. Past Grand Island.”

My husband is not a talker. He set his spoon down and looked at me across the table for a long time, and then he said, “He’ll hate it out there. He doesn’t know a soul.”

“I know,” I said.

“Do you want me to call Regan?”

I shook my head. Tom and Regan have always been polite with each other the way two men are polite when they have nothing in common but a woman and a Thanksgiving table. A call from Tom would only harden him.

“Then I’ll cover what I can,” Tom said. “We’re into calving in three weeks. But you go when you need to go, and I’ll get the chores.”

I am a rural mail carrier. I have carried the same route for nineteen years, a hundred and twelve miles of gravel and blacktop through two townships, six days a week with a rotating day off.

My sub is a woman named Bernadine who has carried for me since my kids were small.

When I called her and asked if she could take Thursdays for a while, she did not even ask me why.

The first time I drove out to see Dad was the Thursday after he moved.

It was a gray morning and the wind was coming hard out of the northwest, and the ditches along the interstate were packed with old snow.

The home was clean. I will say that for it, and I said it to Regan later, because it was true.

The floors shined. The aides wore purple scrubs and smiled at me at the desk.

But it was a long low building at the edge of a town where my father had never bought a gallon of gas.

Out the big window in the lounge there was nothing but a parking lot and a stubble field and the sky.

Dad was in his wheelchair by that window, in his plaid flannel shirt and the cardigan Mom knitted him the winter before she got sick.

His lunch tray was on the table beside him with the lid still on it.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, and I bent down and kissed the top of his head, where his hair was combed back wet the way he has combed it every day of my life.