The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

“Roads bad by the café?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” I said. “Some drifting on the county road past the Kucera place.”

“Huh,” he said. Then he looked out the window again. He did not ask me about the cattle or Tom or the grandkids. He did not ask me anything else at all.

An aide named Tina came in to check his tray. She was a kind, square-built woman about my age with reading glasses pushed up in her hair, and she lifted the lid and set it back down.

“He’s a sweetheart,” she told me in the hall. “But he’s not eating. Maybe half his meals, if that. He was 154 when he came in from the hospital. He’s 147 this morning.”

Seven pounds in a week and a half. My father is not a big man.

He does not have seven pounds to spare, and he has never in his life left food on a plate, because his own father would have tanned him for it.

When I left, he said, “Drive careful,” and then, very quietly, while he was still looking out that window, “Tell the boys at coffee I said hello.”

Dad had gone to the same café every morning at six thirty for as long as I can remember.

It sits on the corner of Main Street across from the grain elevator, and it opens at six for the farmers.

There is a round table at the back that seats about ten, and the same men have sat there for longer than I have been alive.

They drink coffee and they settle the price of cattle and the weather and the school board.

There is also a row of brass hooks on the wall by that table. The men hang their seed caps there while they drink, and they put them back on when they leave.

Dad’s cap had been hanging on the fourth hook since the morning of January ninth.

Nobody had moved it. The café owner, Lorene, told me that the first week.

She said Lew Vogt had told the whole table that the cap stayed on the hook until Abner came back for it.

On Saturday I stopped at the café on my route, the way I do most days, to drop the café’s mail and get a coffee in my thermos.

The coffee group was at the back table, all nine of them.

Lew Vogt is 81. He farmed the place south of Dad’s for fifty-three years, and he still has the shoulders of a man who threw bales for a living. He saw me come in and he set down his cup.

“Jana,” he said. “How is he?”

I meant to say he was fine. I had been telling people at every mailbox that he was fine.

But Lew was looking at me with those pale blue eyes, and the whole table had gone quiet, and I could not do it.

“He’s not eating,” I said. “He’s lost seven pounds. He asked if the roads were bad by the café, and he asked me to tell you all hello, and that is all he asked me about.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Alvin Hajek took off his glasses and cleaned them on his flannel shirt. Rudy Novak turned his cup around and around on the saucer.

“How far is he?” Lew asked.

“Two hours,” I said. “A little more if the wind is bad. Out past Grand Island.”