Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

“My bedroom window faces west,” he said. “At home. I built it that way on purpose. Your mother wanted the morning sun in the kitchen, and I wanted the evening sun in our room, so we could sit and watch it go down after supper.”

He was quiet again.

“Same way,” he said. “This one faces the same way mine did.”

I had not known that. I had picked that room because it was the warmest. I went out to the kitchen and stood at the sink with the water running so he would not hear me, and I cried for about five minutes, and then I washed my face and started supper.

We set up the twin bed against the inside wall that afternoon, while the light was still good. I put the chenille spread on it, and his two quilts, and a heating pad I bought new at the hardware store. Dad said the heating pad was foolishness. He used it every night after that.

We ate pork chops and fried potatoes at my kitchen table, and he told me about building his house in 1966, how he and my uncle poured the footings in one day and how Mom brought them sandwiches in a bushel basket.

He went to bed at eight o’clock in a warm room, under two quilts, with the radiator knocking. I stood in the hall a minute and listened to him breathe.

He slept until seven the next morning. He told me later it was the first time in three weeks he had slept straight through the night.

Sunday we went to church. Dad wore his good suit, the one we brought over in the dry cleaner’s bag, and I tied his tie, because his fingers have gotten too stiff for that. We sat where we always sit, on the left side, fifth pew back.

The last hymn was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Dad sang the bass line the way he has sung it for sixty years, a little behind the organ, his voice low and steady. Some of the older people turned around to look, the way they always do when they hear him.

Esther was three pews back. After service she came up and took Dad’s arm in the entry, and she walked him out to my truck herself, talking the whole way about the old high school and who was gone and who was not, and how half the rest had moved to Arizona.

Garth did not call Saturday. He did not call Sunday. Monday I went to work and left my phone face up on my desk all day, and it did not ring once. Monday afternoon Esther came over with a coffee cake and sat with Dad in the sun.

Tuesday was the third.

The third was always the day Dad went to the bank, cashed part of his Social Security, and paid his bills in person, the way he has done since before there was any other way to do it.

And every third, he handed Garth an envelope for groceries.

He had done it in October too. On the third. Two days after Garth moved him out onto the porch. He told me that on Monday night while we did the dishes, and I had to set the dish towel down and go stand on the back step for a minute.

I took Tuesday afternoon off. I told my supervisor I had a family matter, which was the plain truth.