The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

I sat down on the kitchen floor. I did not decide to. My legs just did it.

Tom came in and saw me there and sat down next to me without a word, the two of us on the linoleum with the dishwasher running.

Regan said Lew did not make a speech. Lew set the cap on the table, and he said, “We’re not here to tell you your business, son. We just thought you ought to see him on a Thursday.”

Then Alvin took out a piece of notebook paper and unfolded it. On it, in Alvin’s careful printing, were Dad’s weights.

Tina had told me, and I had told Lew, and Lew had told Alvin, and Alvin had written it down because Alvin writes everything down.

October, 160. January, 154. Then every Thursday and every Monday, all the way down to 138. And next to the Thursdays, in Alvin’s hand, a little mark. A check. Ate everything.

“He eats on Thursdays,” Rudy told him. That was all Rudy said the whole night, Regan told me. Rudy is the quietest man in the county. He said, “He eats on Thursdays, Regan,” and then he did not say anything else.

And then Lew told Regan about his own wife. I had not known this.

Lew’s wife, Irene, went into a home in Lincoln in 2011, because it was cheaper and it was close to her sister.

Lew drove down twice a week for three years. A hundred and forty miles round trip, twice a week, in the pickup.

He told Regan he did the math the same way, and that it was good math. He said he thought about that math every day since.

“She quit eating, too,” Lew told him. “I thought it was her heart. The doctor said it was her heart. Maybe it was. But I think it was that she was a long way from anybody who knew her when she was young.”

Regan said that was when his wife, Laura, got up from the table and went into the kitchen, and he heard her crying at the sink.

Then Lew took an envelope out of his chore coat and put it on top of Dad’s cap. Inside was a sheet of paper with his own ground rent written on it.

He has eighty acres he rents out north of town, and he wrote down what it pays him a year.

“That’s more than the difference,” Lew said. “Eighteen hundred a month, twelve months, I figured it twice. You put Abner back in town, and that pays the difference for as long as he lives. You keep your farm, son. You keep your promise to your mother.”

Regan told me he sat there and could not speak. He said he looked at that envelope on top of our father’s seed cap, and he thought about every spreadsheet he had made since January, and he could not think of one single thing to say.

“I’m not taking his money, Jana,” he said to me on the phone. His voice broke on it. “I’m not taking Lew Vogt’s ground rent. My God. What kind of man would that make me?”

“I know,” I said.

“I didn’t put Dad in the numbers,” he said. “That’s what I did. I did the numbers for the farm and the savings and the three years. I didn’t put Dad in them anywhere. I didn’t put Thursdays in them.”

I did not say anything. I did not need to. My brother is a smart man. He has always been the smart one.