Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

My house is a small blue one with a white porch, three steps up, halfway down the block. My husband and I bought it in 1998. It is not much, but it is warm, and the porch faces west, so it gets the afternoon sun.

I pulled into the drive and shut off the truck. Dad opened his door before I could get around to help him.

He got himself down with the cane and the door handle. Then he went up the walk ahead of me while I untied the rocker. He took the three porch steps one at a time, both feet on each step, his free hand on the rail.

When I came up the walk with the rocker in my arms, he was already at the top. He had the screen door pulled open and was holding it wide with one hand, his cane in the other, his white hair lifting a little in the wind, his gray cardigan buttoned over his plaid shirt.

He looked like he was the one taking me in.

“Mind the step, honey,” he said. “The second one’s a little proud. I can fix that for you.”

I carried his rocker up my porch steps and through my front door, and I did not cry, because I was holding the rocker and I did not want to drop it.

Across the street, a storm door banged.

Esther Grabowski came out onto her front step in a long brown coat and her house slippers. She is eighty, small and sharp eyed, with her white hair set every Friday at the same shop since 1970. She lives alone in the yellow house she grew up in.

She looked at the red pickup in my drive, with the twin bed frame in the back and the chenille spread folded on top of it. She looked at Mom’s blue suitcase on my walk. She looked at my father standing in my doorway with a cane.

Then she looked at me.

I just nodded. She nodded back. She did not ask me a single thing, not then. Esther has lived on Elm Street for eighty years, and she knows when a thing needs asking and when it can wait a day or two.

“Rudolph Kampe,” she called across the street. “Is that you?”

“Esther,” Dad called back. “You’re looking well.”

“I’m looking eighty,” she said. “Are you moving in over there?”

“My daughter’s taking me in,” Dad said.

“Well, it’s about time somebody did,” Esther said, and she went back inside, and I knew that by supper the whole street would know my father had come home.

I set the rocker in the front bedroom by the window, turned toward the street.

Dad came in behind me. He stood in the doorway a minute and looked at the room. The radiator was ticking under the window. The curtains were clean. The afternoon sun lay across the floor in a long yellow square.

He walked over and lowered himself into his rocker. He leaned his cane against the wall. He put his hands on the worn oak arms, right where they had always gone.

Then he looked out the window at Elm Street for a long time.

I stood in the doorway and did not say anything, and neither did he. The rocker creaked a little, once, the same sound it has made my whole life.

After a while he said, “This window faces west.”

“It does,” I said. “You get the sun in the afternoon.”