The Friday I Drove Dad to Rolla

The Drive Home

Dad did not sleep on the way home. He sat up the whole two hundred and ten miles and watched the country go by, the cut fields and the hay bales and the cattle standing in the long light.

Around Jefferson City he said, “Thank you, son.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Dad.”

“Yes I do.” He was quiet for a mile. “I wasn’t going to ask. You know that.”

“I know.”

“Your mother would have driven me. She’d have driven me to the moon.” He laughed a little. “She’d have danced with Virgil again, too.”

I did not say anything to that. I just reached over and put my hand on his shoulder for a second, the way he used to do me in church when I was a boy and wiggling.

We got back to his place a little before six, with the sun still up over the tree line.

Bonita came to the door when she heard the truck and stood behind the screen with her arms folded.

“You’re late,” she said to Dad. To me she did not say anything at all.

“We stopped for pie in Vienna,” Dad said, which was true. He went up the steps slow and turned at the top. “Night, son. I had a real good time.”

“Night, Dad.”

Bonita shut the door. I sat in the drive a minute with the engine running, and then I went home to my wife and told her the whole thing at the kitchen table, and she cried at the part about the ten minutes, and so did I, a little.

The Newsletter

I did not think about the picture again. I went back to work Monday and we had a storm come through on Wednesday that put three thousand members out, and I was on a pole most of that week and the next.

It was the second week of November, a Thursday, a little after noon, when my phone rang in the truck. It was Dad’s house number. It was Bonita.

She did not say hello. She said, “Did you know about this?”

“About what, Bonita?”

“This newsletter. It came in the mail today. Your father is on page two.”

I pulled the truck over on the shoulder of a county road. One of the guys asked if we had a problem and I held up my hand.

“I knew they took a picture,” I said. “I didn’t know they’d use it.”

She was quiet on the line. I could hear the kitchen clock ticking. I had never in my life heard Bonita quiet that long.

“There’s a whole write-up,” she said. “It says he’s one of the last three from his squad. It says a man named Virgil Stamper saluted him when he came in the door. It says the whole room went quiet.”

“That’s right. It did.”

“Nobody told me that.”

“You didn’t ask, Bonita.”

I heard her breathe in. I thought she was going to hang up on me like always. She did not.

“He’s smiling in it,” she said, and her voice was different. “In the picture. He’s laughing, with those two old men. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him laugh like that.”