The Spare Key on Dad’s Hook

Doreen, the noon waitress, set my slice of pie down, then stood there holding the coffee pot like she had one more thing to put on the table and could not decide whether she ought to.

“Merilee, I’m going to say this once and then I’m going to mind my own business,” she said. “Your dad walks in here every morning. Every single morning since about the middle of August.”

I laughed, because it did not make sense yet. Dad was eighty-five, and he had driven himself to this cafe on Main Street in St. Elmo nearly every morning since he retired from hauling grain.

“Purvis picks him up,” I said. “Dad told me so. Purvis comes by at a quarter to seven and they ride in together, same as always.”

She looked over at the corner table, where Purvis Eckel, eighty-six, was working on a cinnamon roll with both hands. Then she looked back at me, and I felt my face go hot.

“Purvis gave up his license two winters ago, honey. His daughter brings him. Your dad walks. A mile in and a mile home, and Tuesday morning it was twenty-eight degrees with frost on every windshield on this street.”

I sat there with my fork in my hand and the pie going cold.

Out the front window, Main Street was bright and quiet, the way it gets on a weekday in November after the harvest is in and the combines are put away.

I had driven over from Vandalia on my lunch hour, between the morning bus routes and the afternoon ones.

I am a dispatcher for a rural school district, and I spend my days knowing where forty buses are at every minute.

I had not known where my own father was at a quarter to seven in the morning. That was the plain truth of it, and it sat in my stomach like a stone.

Purvis must have seen my face, because he got up slow, pushed his chair in the way his mother taught him eighty years ago, and came over to my booth with his coffee cup.

“He didn’t want you to know,” Purvis said. “Made me promise. I told him a promise like that isn’t worth much, and he said it was worth more than his pride, so I kept it.”

“Since August,” I said.

“Since August.” Purvis set his cup down and lowered himself onto the bench across from me. “And Merilee, he hasn’t been out to see your mother since then either. It’s too far to walk. He told me that like it was the weather.”

My mother is buried in the township cemetery four miles south of town, out where the gravel road bends past a stand of cedars.

Dad went out every Sunday after church for nine years. He took her flowers in summer and swept the leaves off her stone in the fall.

Four miles is nothing in a truck. It is a long way on foot for a man who will be eighty-six in the spring.

I paid for the pie I did not eat, left her too much of a tip, and drove the mile to Dad’s house with both hands tight on the wheel.