The Lawn Chairs Facing the Road

Why I Called No One

People ask me why I did not call the sheriff or hire a lawyer in Quincy. I will say it plainly, once.

First, Arlen had signed that paper himself. On the third day, groggy from the medicine, he had written his name with an arm full of tubes, because Doug said the bank needed somebody and Janelle was a wreck. A hospital notary had witnessed it.

I knew what a courthouse would hear: a man who trusted his son-in-law, and a lawyer billing by the hour to sort out whether that was a crime.

Second, a lawsuit between a father-in-law and a son-in-law has only one ending, and it is not a ruling. It ends with my daughter standing in the middle of the room, choosing between her husband and her parents while two children watched.

Third, and this is the part I am least proud of and most sure about, I did not want to be right in front of anybody. I wanted the camper back. I wanted Arlen to see the ocean. Those were different things from wanting Doug punished, and I was too tired to carry both.

I did not tell Arlen for four days. I told him the morning they took the tube out of his chest, plainly, the way you tell a man the barn burned.

He listened with his eyes on the window. When I was done, he did not say anything for a long time.

“I signed it,” he said finally. “That’s on me, Lo. He asked for one thing and I gave it to him because I was too tired to ask what it was for.”

“Do you want me to call someone?”

Arlen turned from the window, and for the first time since the hay mow, I saw the man I married in his face.

“No,” he said. “Let’s see what he does. He’s got a mouth on him and a conscience, and the two have never gotten along. Give him a few weeks to hear them argue.” He closed his eyes. “If he’s got something to tell me, I’d like him to be the one to come tell me.”

That was our whole plan, and it was small. We would wait, and feed him, and see if a man would walk up a lane on his own feet.

Sunday Dinner

Every Sunday since 1990, after church, the Hanes family has eaten at our farm table. Janelle and Doug and the kids come out from town. Arlen’s brother Merle comes with his wife, Sharon, and whichever of their sons are not in the field.

Arlen came home on a Thursday with a bottle of pills for every part of the day. By Sunday he was in the recliner by the window with a blanket over his knees, thinner than I had ever seen him.

Doug carved. He had never carved at our table in his life. Arlen had carved every Sunday for forty years, standing at the head with his sleeves rolled and a knife my mother gave us as a wedding present.

“Sit, Arlen,” Doug said, taking the knife off the sideboard. “You’re not supposed to lift anything. I’ve got it.”

And Arlen, who had never been told to sit at his own table, sat down in the chair at the side while Doug Mercer stood at the head of the Hanes table and carved the roast. I carried the potatoes in and set them down very gently.

Doug is forty-five, with a good back, and he runs a one-man dirt business with a mini excavator and a skid steer. Half the county has had him out to level a yard. But I had noticed over the years that a certain kind of man comes into a family like ours, where the land is already owned and the table is already set, and spends years trying to hold something in the room that is his. I had never taken it for harm. I had taken it for weather.

“How’s the college fund coming?” I said, passing the beans.

Doug did not look up from the carving. “Fine. It’s all handled.”

“Janelle will want to see a statement, I would think.”

My daughter looked up from her plate. She is a school secretary, a quiet, careful woman with her father’s gray eyes. “I’m sure Doug has it,” she said.

“I do,” Doug said. “I have all of it.”