Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

I sat in the truck and looked at the maples along the parking lot. Most of the leaves were down. In central Wisconsin, by the last week of October, you can feel winter leaning on the door.

I thought about who I could call. I could call the county. I could call our pastor. I could call Garth’s ex wife, who still liked Dad a good deal better than she ever liked Garth.

But every one of those calls ended in the same place. Somebody would come to Dad’s house and ask him questions, and Dad would say he was fine, and then they would talk to Garth. And Dad would sit there watching his own son get talked to like a criminal in the house he built.

Dad would never put his own son out of that house. Not for any reason. I knew that the way I know my own handwriting.

So I would not ask him to. I would move Dad instead.

That afternoon I went back after work, while the sun was still up, and I sat with him on the porch with my coat on and my hands in my pockets.

“Dad,” I said, “I have that front bedroom doing nothing. It has a radiator and a window on Elm Street. I want you to come live with me.”

He shook his head right away. “I’m not going to be a burden on you, honey. You work all day long.”

“You’d be company,” I said. “I come home to nobody. I eat supper standing at the counter. You would be doing me a favor, Dad.”

He was quiet a long time. The heater ticked at the foot of the bed.

“What would Garth say?” he asked.

“Garth would have your bedroom rent,” I said. “And the whole house. He wouldn’t have to worry about you at all.”

Dad looked out the storm window at the backyard, at the garage he built in 1971 and the birdhouse he hung for Mom on the clothesline pole.

“I don’t want any trouble between you two,” he said.

“There won’t be any trouble,” I said. “There will just be you, at my house, warm.”

He rubbed the scar on his thumb. Then he said, “Elm Street,” the way you would say the name of an old friend.

“Elm Street,” I said.

“I walked your mother home down Elm Street every Sunday night for two years,” he said. “Esther Grabowski lived across the street from where you are now, even then. She’d watch us out her front window and tell everybody at school on Monday.”

“She still watches,” I said. “She knows when I take my garbage out.”

Dad laughed, a real laugh, and I knew then that he was coming.

I spent Thursday and Friday evenings getting the front room ready. It had been my sewing room since my husband died, which is to say it had been the room where I put things I did not want to look at.

I boxed up the fabric and the patterns and the old exercise bike. I washed the curtains and hung them back up. I bled the radiator, and it knocked and hissed and then ran hot, the way old radiators do when they finally decide to work.

Friday night I lay in my own bed and listened to the radiator knock in the next room, and I prayed that I was doing the right thing. Then I prayed for Garth, which was harder, and took a good deal longer.