Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

Dad heard us. He came down the hall on his cane and stood in the doorway of the front bedroom and watched his son lean the headboard against the wall.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Then Garth said, “I’m sorry, Dad.”

He did not say anything else. He did not explain about the alimony or the truck or the cool air. He just said it, and stood there in the middle of the room that used to be my sewing room, with his hands hanging at his sides.

Dad walked over to him. He put his big square hand on the back of Garth’s neck, the way he did when we were small and had done something we could not take back.

“I know you are,” Dad said.

They put the bed together. I left them alone and went to the kitchen. I heard the drill once, and then I heard Dad saying, “No, the other way, the grain runs the other way,” and Garth saying, “I know, Dad, I know,” and both of them laughing about something I could not hear.

When they came out, the twin bed was leaning against the wall in the hall, and the oak bed stood in the front bedroom, where the light from the west window would fall across the foot of it every afternoon.

Garth stayed for lunch. It was the first meal the three of us had eaten together at one table since Mom’s funeral lunch in the church basement.

He did not say much. But before he left, he took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and set it on the kitchen table in front of Dad. It was the October envelope. The grocery money from the third.

“I didn’t spend it,” Garth said. “I couldn’t.”

Dad pushed it back across the table to him. “Get some groceries for that house,” he said. “Fill the refrigerator. You’re too thin.”

Garth looked at the envelope a long time. Then he put it back in his pocket, and he kissed Dad on the top of the head, which he had not done since he was a boy, and he went out to his truck.

Esther was on her step across the street. She watched him go. When he pulled away, he lifted one hand off the wheel to her, and after a moment she lifted one hand back.

That was in November.

Dad never went back to the house across town. Garth asked him once, at Christmas, if he wanted his room back now that it was empty. Dad thanked him and said no, he was settled where he was.

Garth lives there alone now. He comes on Sundays and takes Dad to church in his gray truck, and he sits on the left side, fifth pew back, and sings the melody while Dad sings the bass. He fixed the proud step on my porch himself, while Dad stood at the top and told him everything he was doing wrong.

Every afternoon when the weather is fair, Dad sits in his rocker on my porch, and Esther comes across Elm Street with two cups of coffee. Every afternoon when it is not, he sits in the front bedroom by the west window and watches the street where he walked my mother home.

The twin bed went to the church rummage sale in the spring. The space heater went with it.

Dad stayed, and the rocker never went back.