The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

“From that Stanton bull?” Dad said. “I told you not to buy that bull.”

And that was it. That was the whole greeting. Nine old farmers and my father, crowded around a wheelchair in a nursing home lounge two hours from home, arguing about a bull.

I stood at the edge of the group with the box open.

Lew had said grace in the van before we got out, the plain Catholic one, Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts. I held out the box and Dad took an apricot kolache.

He ate it in four bites. Then he took a poppy seed.

Then Leonard Hruby, who is Emil’s younger brother and the only one of them who will admit to a sweet tooth, slid a prune one onto Dad’s napkin when he thought I was not looking.

Tina came by twice with her clipboard. The second time she stopped in the doorway and just watched for a minute. When she caught my eye she lifted her eyebrows at me and smiled.

We stayed until two. The men played pitch at the table by the window, and Dad played two hands before he got tired.

Shorty fell asleep in his chair and nobody woke him, and Clarence told the same story about the 1975 blizzard that he tells every winter.

When we left, Dad said, “Same time next week?” He said it to Lew, not to me, and he said it like a man asking about a sale barn date, as if it was already settled.

“Same time,” Lew said. “We’ll bring the poppy seed. Leonard ate all the prune.”

The men had put a coffee can on the dash before we left the café that morning.

When I parked the van back at the senior center, there was a hundred and sixty dollars in it for gas, and a note in Lew’s square printing that said, Thursdays.

We went the next Thursday. And the Thursday after that. It snowed on the third one and the interstate was slick, and Tom drove the van himself that day while I sat in the passenger seat and handed out coffee.

By the middle of February, the aides at the front desk knew all nine men by name. They knew Shorty needed the chair with arms.

They knew Emil could not have the poppy seed because of his pills. They knew Lew took his coffee black.

By the end of February, they had set out nine extra chairs in the lounge before we even parked the van.

I saw them through the big window when we pulled in, nine plastic chairs in a half circle around Dad’s wheelchair, waiting.

One of the night aides had written it on the activity whiteboard in the hall, in purple marker, under the Bingo and the Bible study. Thursday: Abner’s Thursday.

That is what the whole staff called it after that. The cook started sending out an extra pot of coffee at ten.

The activities director tried once to bring the men a board game, and Lew thanked her very kindly and went right on playing pitch.

The thing I cannot forget is this. Tina told me in March that Dad ate on Thursdays.

On Thursdays he ate everything, the kolaches and his lunch and half his supper. On the other six days he went back to picking.

She showed me the chart. It was not supposed to make sense, and it did not, not in any way a doctor would write down.