The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

But there it was in her handwriting. A good day, then six thin ones, then a good day again.

“He saves one,” she said. “Did you know that? Every Thursday he wraps a kolache in a napkin and puts it in his cardigan pocket. He eats it Friday morning with his coffee. He told me it’s so Friday has something in it.”

I had to go out and sit in the van for a while after she told me that.

I sat there with the engine running and the heater on and the snowy parking lot out the windshield, and I prayed, which I do not do enough.

Regan came out to see Dad on the second Sunday of every month.

He drove close to three hours each way from Omaha, and he brought Dad the Omaha paper and a can of the cashews Dad likes.

I want to be fair to my brother. He did come. He did call the nurse’s station every week.

He paid every bill on the first of the month and kept a spreadsheet of every dollar, and I know he lost sleep over it.

But he came on Sundays, when it was quiet. He sat with Dad in his room and talked about interest rates and the Huskers.

He did not see the lounge on Thursdays, and he did not see the chart, because nobody had shown it to him.

He found out about the van from Dad himself. Dad told him, on the second Sunday in February, that the boys from coffee had been out. Regan called me that night from his car.

“Nine of them?” he said. “Every week? In the senior center van?”

“Every Thursday,” I said.

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear his turn signal clicking.

Then he said, in the careful voice he uses when he is trying not to raise it, “Jana, you’re making a show of it.”

“I’m driving the van,” I said.

“Everybody in town is going to know,” he said. “Everybody in town already thinks I put him out there to save a dollar. Now you’ve got the whole coffee table driving four hours to make a point.”

I did not argue with him. I did not tell him the men had thought of it, not me.

I did not tell him about the chart, because I wanted him to see it himself and not hear it from his little sister as one more thing he had done wrong.

“Nobody is making a point,” I said. “They miss him. That’s all.”

“I’m doing what Mom asked,” he said. “You know I am. I’m doing the responsible thing. Somebody in this family has to do the math, and it’s always me.”

“I know you are,” I said, and I meant it. “Drive careful, Regan. The interstate’s icy by Lincoln.”

I never said one word against my brother to those men. I want that understood.

Not in the van, not in the lounge, not at the back table of the café. When they asked about Regan, I said he was doing his best, and he was.

The third week of February we missed a Thursday. A storm came through on Wednesday night and dropped nine inches and the wind blew it all into the road.

The state closed I-80 from Grand Island to Kearney by six in the morning.

Lew called me at five thirty. “We’re not going,” he said. “I don’t care what those men say. I’m not putting Shorty in a ditch.”