The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

I called the home. Tina answered. I asked her to tell Dad we would come the next week, and that it was only the weather. She said she would.

Then she called me back at four that afternoon, which she had never done. She said Dad had sat by the window all morning, watching the parking lot.

She said when the van did not come, he went back to his room and did not eat lunch or supper.

The next Thursday, Dad weighed 138 pounds. He had weighed 154 in January and 160 at the sale barn in October, when Tom and I took him to watch the fall calves sell.

I told Lew in the van on the way out. I did not mean to make anything of it.

I just said the number, and then I said I did not know what else to do, and then I kept my eyes on the road.

But that day, when the pitch game broke up, I saw him go over and sit down by Dad’s wheelchair.

They put their heads together for a long time. I could not hear them. Dad nodded twice.

In the van going home, Lew asked me for Regan’s address in Omaha. I gave it to him. I did not ask him why.

I am not sure I wanted to know, and I knew Lew well enough to know he would not have told me anyway.

Lew called me on the second Tuesday night in March. I was folding towels. Tom had just come in from checking heifers and his coat was still steaming by the back door.

“Don’t come for all of us Thursday,” Lew said. “Take the other six. Me and Alvin and Rudy are going to Omaha.”

“Omaha,” I said. “Lew, what for?”

“Coffee,” he said, and he hung up.

I stood there with a towel in my hands. Tom looked at me from the doorway. “Lew?” he said, and I nodded, and he said, “Good,” and went to wash up. He did not seem surprised at all.

Thursday I drove six men out to the home. It was the first Thursday that felt thin.

The lounge had the nine chairs set out, and we left three of them empty, and Dad kept looking at those three chairs.

“Where’s Lew?” he said.

“Omaha,” I said.

Dad looked at me for a long minute. Then he picked up a poppy seed kolache and ate it, all of it, and he looked back out the big window at the white van in the parking lot and did not say anything else about it.

Thursday night at nine, my phone rang. It was Regan. I knew before I answered that something had happened, because my brother does not call me on weeknights. He texts.

“Jana,” he said. His voice did not sound like my brother’s. It sounded like it did when we were kids and he had done something he could not undo. “Lew Vogt is sitting at my kitchen table.”

“Right now?” I said.

“Right now. Him and Alvin Hajek and Rudy Novak. They drove Lew’s pickup. They were sitting on my front steps when I came home from work. My wife gave them supper.”

“They brought kolaches,” Regan said. “A whole box from Lorene’s. And Lew just set something down in front of me, Jana. On the table. He just set it down and didn’t say anything.”

“What is it?” I said.

He did not answer for a while. Then he said, “It’s Dad’s cap. From the hook at the café.”