The Plate I Set for the Man Who Rents Dad’s Hay

The Second Can

When Dad came back inside, he did not sit down. He went past the table to the cupboard over the refrigerator, the high one that nobody uses, where Mom kept the Christmas platter and the good gravy boat.

He had to get up on his toes to reach the back of it.

He brought down a coffee can. A Folgers can, the big kind, same as mine. I did not know it was there.

I had lived in that house for twenty-two years and never once looked in the back of that cupboard.

He set it down beside my plate. He did not say anything. He just pushed it an inch toward me with two fingers and sat down in his chair.

I took the lid off. It was full of money. Not folded tips. Bills in bank bands, twenties and fifties, and on top a sheet of paper torn off one of his feed store notepads, with dates written down the side in his square farmer’s handwriting.

The first date was four years ago, the week after the funeral.

“Your mother always said you’d be a nurse,” Dad said. “Since you were little. She made me promise, at the end, that I wouldn’t let you give that up for me. So I’ve been putting a little back. Every calf check. Every load of wheat. And I’ve been waiting for you to be ready to tell me.”

I said, “You knew?”

“I didn’t know about Kearney,” he said. “I didn’t know about Wade. But I knew you were going to go someday, because you’re hers. I just figured I’d let you come to me.”

He picked up his fork again. “There’s a little over eleven thousand in there. That ought to get you through, with gas and books and a room if the roads are bad.”

I put my face in my hands and cried at the Sunday table like I was six years old, and my father let me.

He reached across and laid his hand on the back of my head, the way Mom used to when I had a fever. He left it there until I was done.

Then he said the thing I think about every single day now. He said, “Next time, you come to me first.”

Megan

We did not eat the pot roast until almost two o’clock, and by then it was cold, and Dad said it was the best he had ever had.

I warmed up a plate for him in the oven and we ate together at that table, the two of us, with the two empty plates still sitting there across from us.

After dinner I called Megan on speakerphone and set the phone on the table between us. She picked up on the second ring at her clinic and said, “What’s wrong,” because I never call during a shift. I said, “Nothing’s wrong. Dad wants to tell you something.”

Dad told her. He told it shorter than I did, the way men tell things. He said I was going to nursing school in Kearney in January and that he was paying for it out of the can and that was that. He did not say a word about Wade.

Megan did not say anything for a long time. Then I heard her start to cry, right there in the back hall of a dental clinic in Grand Island with patients in the chairs.

She said, “Oh, Katie. Mom would have driven you there herself. She’d have packed you a lunch and driven you there herself and sat in the parking lot all day.”

Dad had to get up and go look out the window over the sink for a while after that. I let him.