Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

Saturday was bright and cold, the kind of late October day where the sky is so blue it looks painted on and the sun has no heat in it at all.

I had on my mustard canvas chore coat, the one I wear to rake, and my oldest jeans. I backed my red pickup up to Dad’s side door just after lunch. Garth was working a Saturday shift at the mill until three.

I was not sneaking. I had told Garth on the phone Friday that I was coming for Dad. He said, “Do what you want, Avie,” and that was all he said about it.

Dad was waiting in the kitchen with his coat on and his cane hooked over the back of a chair. He had packed his things in two paper grocery sacks and Mom’s old blue suitcase.

“I didn’t know what to bring,” he said. “I don’t have much out there anymore.”

He did not have much anywhere anymore. That was the thing that hit me hardest, standing in that kitchen. Everything he had worked for his whole life was in this house, and he had been living in one room off the back of it with a coffee can for a dresser.

I was carrying the first sack out to the truck when the bedroom door opened and a man came out in his socks.

He was about forty, broad in the shoulders, with a short beard and a gray sweatshirt from the mill. He had a coffee cup in his hand and sleep in his eyes. He looked at me, and at Dad, and at the suitcase.

“Morning,” he said. “I’m Dobbs. Are you taking Rudy somewhere?”

“I’m his daughter,” I said. “Avonelle. I’m taking him to live with me.”

Dobbs nodded slowly. “That’s nice. He’s a good old guy. He fixed the drawer in my room the first day I was here. It stuck, and he planed it down with a little hand plane and waxed it with a candle stub.”

“That sounds like Dad,” I said.

“Garth said Rudy had a room fixed up in the basement,” Dobbs said. “Said he liked it down there by his shop.”

I just walked to the back porch door and held it open for him.

Dobbs walked over with his coffee and looked in. He looked at the twin bed and the two quilts. He looked at the space heater on the kitchen chair and the coffee can with the razor in it. He looked at the frost still sitting in the corners of the storm windows.

He stood there a long time.

“Nobody told me,” he said, very quietly. “I swear, ma’am. Nobody told me he was sleeping out here.”

“I believe you,” I said. And I did. You could see it in his face. He looked like a man who had just found out he had been wearing somebody else’s coat all month.

“I’ve got a little girl,” Dobbs said. “She’s nine. She stays with me every other weekend at my mom’s. If somebody put my mom out on a porch so I could have her bed.” He stopped there and shook his head.

Then he set his coffee down on the washing machine, went out to the porch, and picked up the foot end of the twin bed frame without asking anybody.

“Where’s your truck?” he said.

We took the bed apart and carried it out between us. Dobbs carried the mattress by himself, folded over his shoulder. He went back for the space heater and then set it down again in the kitchen, as if he did not want to look at it.