The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

Lew looked around the table at the other eight men. I watched him do it.

He did not say a word, and neither did they, but something went around that table the way it goes around a church when the offering plate comes.

“The senior center’s got a van,” Lew said. “That white one that takes folks to Columbus for the eye doctor. You still drive it some, don’t you?”

I did. I had been an approved volunteer driver at the senior center for six years.

I took the driver course and the background check, and I drove the van on my days off when they were short.

“It holds twelve,” Lew said. “There’s nine of us. What day are you off?”

“Thursday,” I said. “Bernadine’s taking Thursdays for me.”

“Then we’ll be here at eight Thursday,” Lew said, and he picked his cup back up. “Lorene, we’ll want two dozen kolaches in a box. Abner likes the apricot and the poppy seed.”

I called the senior center director on Monday. Her name is Arlene, and she has run that place on bake sales and grants and stubbornness for twenty years.

I asked her if I could take the van out of the county every Thursday for a while.

“For Abner Ressler and the coffee table?” she said. “Honey, I already heard. Lew was in here Sunday after Mass. Just sign the sheet and log your miles, and the men said they’ll cover the gas.”

That Thursday it was eleven degrees and clear. I picked up the van at the senior center at seven thirty and let it run.

Tom came over in his pickup and put a scoop shovel and a log chain in the back.

“In case,” he said. He checked the tire pressure on all four tires with the gauge from his shirt pocket. Then he squeezed my shoulder once, which is about as much as my husband says before nine in the morning.

At eight o’clock there were nine old farmers standing in front of the café in seed caps and canvas chore coats, holding their coffee in paper cups. Lew had a white bakery box under his arm.

They climbed in one at a time. It took a while. Clarence Kucera has a bad knee and Emil Hruby has a pacemaker and Shorty Vlasak, who is 86, needed Leonard and Stan to boost him up the step.

By Grand Island they were arguing about corn prices and whether the co-op was going to put up another bin.

By the time we turned off the interstate, they had settled the whole agricultural economy of eastern Nebraska twice.

We parked in the lot by the big window. The men climbed down slowly.

Lew went first, with the white box, and the others came behind him in their chore coats and their caps, and they walked into that lounge like they owned it.

Dad was in his wheelchair by the window, in his plaid flannel and his cardigan, holding a coffee cup that had gone cold.

He looked up at the door. He looked at Lew, and then he looked at the eight men behind Lew.

He did not say anything. My father has never been a crier, and he did not cry then. He just held out his coffee cup.

Lew took the pot off the cart by the wall and filled it.

Then he pulled a chair around and sat down, and the others found chairs or leaned on the wall, and somebody said, “Ervin’s got a white-faced bull calf.”