Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

Garth’s hand came down slowly to his side.

I could have said something then. I had three weeks of things saved up. I had the frost on the inside of the glass and the coffee can and the thin mattress, and Mom’s oak bed with the wheat stalks on it, and another man sleeping in it.

I did not say any of them. They were already standing there on the walk with him. He did not need me to name them out loud.

“I didn’t,” Garth said finally. His voice was thick. “Dad, I didn’t think it got that cold out there.”

“It was twenty six degrees, son,” Dad said quietly. “The night before your sister came.”

Garth looked down at his boots. Then he looked at Esther, who was still standing, and at Benedikt, who had not gone back to raking, and at the mail carrier, who was looking very hard at the envelopes in his hand.

He turned around and walked back to his truck. He did not slam the door. He sat in the cab for a long minute with the engine off. Then he started it and drove away, slowly, the way he came.

Esther sat back down. She picked up her coffee. Her hand was shaking a little, and she held the cup in both hands so it would not show.

“Well,” she said. “Somebody had to.”

Dad reached over and patted her hand on the arm of the wicker chair.

“Thank you, Esther,” he said.

“Don’t thank me, Rudolph,” she said. “Your wife would have done it with a rolling pin.”

Dad laughed so hard he had to hold on to the arms of his rocker. I sat on the top step in the sun and laughed with them, and I did not feel like I had won anything. I only felt like my father was home.

I did not hear from Garth on Wednesday.

Thursday, Dobbs Kettering called my house. He had found my number in the phone book. He said he had found a place, a room over a garage near the mill, and he was moving out on Friday.

“Garth came and gave me notice Wednesday,” Dobbs said. “But I’d already told him I was going. I told him Monday. I couldn’t sleep in that room anymore, ma’am. Not after seeing that porch.”

Saturday morning, a week to the day after I moved Dad, Garth’s gray truck pulled up in front of my house again. It was about ten o’clock, bright and cold, and Dad was at the kitchen table doing the crossword in pen.

I went out on the porch. Garth was standing at the back of his truck with the tailgate down.

In the bed of his truck, wrapped in moving blankets and tied down with straps, was the oak bed. Mom and Dad’s bed. The headboard with the wheat stalks. The footboard. The side rails. The slats bundled with twine. Even the old box spring, in a plastic sheet.

Garth looked up at me. He had not shaved. His eyes were red around the edges, and he did not try to hide it.

“It’s Dad’s bed,” he said. “It should be where Dad is.”

I did not know what to say. So I came down the steps and took one end of the headboard.

We carried it in together. That oak is heavy, Dad built everything heavy. We had to tip it to get it through my front door and then through the bedroom door, with Garth walking backward, saying “Little more, little more,” the way Dad used to say it when the two of them carried drywall.