The Friday I Drove Dad to Rolla

What Bonita Did

I wish I could tell you Bonita turned into a different woman after that. She did not.

She is the same Bonita. She still hangs up on me sometimes. She still keeps things the way she likes them.

But a few days before Christmas, Dad put that newsletter picture in a frame from the drugstore, a plain black one, and set it on the living room shelf. He told me he was waiting for Bonita to move it.

She did not move it. She dusts around it. Dad says one morning he came in from the garage and found her standing in front of it with the dust rag in her hand, just looking.

In January a card came from Arkansas with a picture of Virgil’s wife’s pecan pie on the front and a note inside that said, “Gus, see you in October, tell your boy hello.” Bonita put it on the refrigerator herself.

And in March, when I came by to help Dad with the storm door, Bonita came out on the porch while I was working and stood there a minute, and then she said something I did not expect.

“I’ll put the gas money in the envelope for October,” she said. “Sixty dollars. You tell him it’s from me.”

I set my drill down. I looked at her a long time. She looked back at me, and she did not look away, which is not easy for a person who knows she was wrong.

“Gas is already paid, Bonita,” I said. “It’s paid as long as he wants to go.”

She nodded. She did not argue. “Then I’ll make the sandwiches,” she said, and she went back inside.

She did not say she would come. I did not ask her to.

Maybe one of these Octobers she will, and maybe she will sit in the hall and watch those old men go quiet, and understand something about my dad that I did not understand myself until last fall.

Or maybe she will just make the sandwiches. That is all right too. A person can start small.

The Board at the Co-op

Our foreman retired in the spring. The new one is younger than me.

The first week he was in charge, he went down the vacation board with a marker and asked each of us what we had coming up.

When he got to me, I told him I needed the first Friday in October. He looked at me like he was going to ask why, the way my old foreman almost had.

Before he could, one of the older guys on my crew spoke up from the back of the room. “His dad’s Army reunion,” he said. “He’s eighty-five this year. Put it down.”

The new foreman wrote it on the board. Then he wrote it on next year’s board, too, and the year after that, and he did not ask me a single question about it.

Dad turns eighty-five in August. Virgil turns eighty-four in June. Lyman’s daughter wrote to say Lyman is in a nursing home now, but he means to be in Rolla in October if she has to push him every one of those miles herself.

I believe she will. I believe all three of them will be there, as long as the Lord lets them.

And so will I. I have the reunion Friday off for as long as Dad wants to go.