The Coffee Group That Brought Dad Home

He had just been doing the math in the wrong column, and it took three old farmers and a seed cap to show him.

“I promised her,” he said, very quietly. “I promised Mom I’d keep it.”

“She made me promise too,” I said. “In the same bed. Regan, she didn’t mean keep it empty. She meant keep it so there’d be a home place. A home place is where Dad is.”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Can I ride in the van next week?”

He was standing at the café at eight the next Thursday, in a good wool coat and a pair of loafers that had no business in that much slush.

Lew handed him a paper cup of coffee and did not say a word about the night before.

He stayed. He did not check his phone once. And somewhere around Grand Island, I heard him laugh at something Stan said about the co-op manager, and I had not heard my brother laugh like that since Mom’s funeral lunch.

We walked into the lounge the usual way, Lew first with the white box. The nine chairs were out, and Tina had set out a tenth.

Dad was by the window in his flannel and his cardigan, holding his coffee cup.

He saw Regan behind Lew, and his face did something I will not try to describe.

Then he held out his coffee cup, the way he always did, and Regan, who had not poured coffee for our father since he was a teenager, took the pot off the cart and filled it.

Regan sat in the lounge all day. He played pitch, badly, and the men took his money, a dollar at a time, and he let them.

He watched Dad eat two kolaches and his lunch. He stood by the nurse’s station and read the chart for a long time.

Then, about two o’clock, Regan went over and knelt down by Dad’s wheelchair. I was at the edge of the group with the box.

I heard what he said, because the lounge had gone quiet and I was close.

“Dad,” he said. “I want to bring you home. To the home in town. By the café. Would that be all right with you?”

My father looked at him for a long time. Then he reached out and put his hand on the back of my brother’s neck, the way he used to when Regan was small and had done something good at the county fair.

“Your mother wanted the farm kept so you kids would have a place to come home to,” Dad said. “Not so I’d sit out here eating Thursday kolaches on Friday. I should have said so in January. I didn’t want to cost you.”

“You didn’t cost me anything,” Regan said. “I cost you. I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Well,” Dad said, and he patted his neck twice. “You came on a Thursday. That’s something.”

It took three weeks. There was a bed opening at the home in town, and Regan called every morning until they gave it to him.

He did all of the paperwork himself and drove out from Omaha twice to sign things in person.

He would not take Lew’s ground rent. Lew tried twice more, once in the van and once at the café, and the second time Regan put the envelope back in Lew’s chore coat pocket and buttoned the pocket shut.