Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

The first thing I saw was a pair of work boots outside my father’s bedroom door, size twelve, steel toes, with sawdust and gray mill grit still packed in the treads.

My father wears a nine and a half. He has worn the same brown leather lace-ups for as long as I can remember, and he keeps them on a folded newspaper by the back door.

It was a Wednesday morning in late October. I had a pan of scotcheroos under a dish towel, the kind Mom used to make for church funerals, and I let myself in the side door the way I had done for fifty years.

“Dad?” I called. The kitchen was clean. His coffee cup was upside down on the drainboard. The radio on top of the refrigerator was off, and that was strange, because Dad keeps the farm report on until noon.

I knocked on his bedroom door. Nobody answered, so I opened it a crack. The bed was made with a brown blanket I had never seen. A man’s jeans hung over the back of Mom’s vanity chair.

I closed the door quietly. Then I stood in the hallway of the house my father built with his own two hands in 1966, and for a minute I could not think where my father was.

I found him on the back porch.

Dad built that porch the same summer he built the house. It is a three season room, knotty pine on the walls, with storm windows he puts up himself every October. There has never been a heat vent out there, because it was never meant for sleeping.

There was a narrow twin bed against the inside wall. It was the bed from Mom’s old sewing room, with the white chenille spread she bought at the county fair. Two quilts were piled on top of it.

A little space heater sat on a kitchen chair at the foot of the bed, ticking. A coffee can held his razor and his comb. His Bible lay on the windowsill with his reading glasses folded on top of it.

Dad was sitting on the edge of the bed in his gray cardigan, tying his shoes. He is eighty three, white haired, and he still sits up straight, because he spent sixty years on ladders and roofs.

When he breathed out, I could see it.

“Avonelle,” he said, and he smiled like I had caught him doing something nice. “You brought bars. Your mother’s kind.”

“Dad,” I said. “Why are you out here?”

He finished tying his shoe before he answered. That is how Dad does everything. A carpenter finishes the joint before he looks up from it.

“Garth has a fellow from the mill renting my room,” he said. “Nice young man. Dobbs. He works the swing shift, so I hardly ever see him.”

“And you sleep out here.”

“Garth says I sleep better in the cool,” Dad said. “And he’s not wrong. I always did like the window cracked. Your mother used to fight me about it every single winter.”

I looked at the storm windows. There was frost in the bottom corners, on the inside of the glass. The little heater was doing its best, and its best was not much.

“Dad, it was twenty six degrees last night.”

“I have two quilts,” he said. “And that heater. I’m fine, honey. Don’t make a fuss about it.”

I set the pan of bars on the chair next to the heater and sat down on the bed beside him. The mattress was the thin kind, the kind you buy for a guest who stays two nights and then goes home.