Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

My brother Garth is fifty five, three years older than me. He went to work at the paper mill right out of high school, and he is still there. He moved back into Dad’s house two years ago, after his divorce.

At the time it seemed like a blessing. Mom had been gone four years, and Dad was alone in that house with his tools and his radio. I lost my husband the year before Mom, so I knew what an empty house sounds like at four in the afternoon.

Garth was supposed to help. Mow the lawn, shovel the walk, drive Dad to his appointments in Wausau, keep an eye on him. Dad paid the taxes and the light bill out of his Social Security, and Garth lived there free.

Every third of the month, Dad went to the bank downtown, cashed part of his check, and gave Garth an envelope for groceries. I knew about the envelope. I thought it was fair. A man ought to feel like he pulls his weight in his own house.

I did not know about the porch.

“How long?” I asked.

Dad looked at his hands. They are big, square hands, with a white scar across the left thumb from a table saw in 1979. “Three weeks, about. Since the first of the month.”

“Three weeks.”

“It’s only for now,” Dad said. “Garth is in a tight spot. The alimony is more than he figured, and he’s got that new truck. Dobbs needed a place. It works out for everybody.”

It did not work out for everybody. It worked out for Garth, by five hundred dollars a month.

I wanted to say a lot of things, and I said none of them. My mother always told me that when you are angriest is when you should keep your mouth closed the longest, because nothing you say then is worth keeping.

“Have you had breakfast?” I asked instead.

“I had a bar,” Dad said, and he winked, because he had already taken one off the pan while I was busy looking at the windows.

I drove to work that morning with my hands tight on the wheel.

I am a title clerk at the county abstract office in Wausau. I spend my days running the chain of title on farms and lake lots and little houses like Dad’s, tracing who owned what all the way back to the first land patents.

At lunch I sat in my truck in the parking lot and called Garth. He picked up on the fourth ring, and I could hear the mill behind him, that low roar you never stop hearing once you grow up in a mill town.

“Did you put Dad on the back porch?” I asked him.

There was a pause. “He’s fine out there, Avie. He likes it cool. You know how he is with the windows.”

“It was twenty six degrees last night.”

“He’s got the heater.” Another pause. “Look, I’m getting killed with the alimony. And the truck note is six forty. Dobbs is a good guy, quiet, pays on time. It’s five hundred a month. It’s just till spring.”

“It’s Dad’s bedroom, Garth.”

“It’s a bedroom,” he said. “Dad doesn’t care where he sleeps. He slept in a tent at deer camp for forty years.”

“Deer camp was a week, Garth.”

“I have to get back on the line,” he said, and he hung up on me.