The Turkey Dad Carved One More Time

She wiped her face with a paper napkin. Then she looked at the gray box on the table beside his plate, with the knife wrapped up again in its towel.

“You went down the basement for that,” she said.

“He told me right where it was,” I said. “Gray box, top shelf. Didn’t even have to think about it.”

She laughed, a little wet laugh, and shook her head. “He never could remember my birthday,” she said. “But he knows where that knife is.”

At half past one Dad woke up, and he looked around the hall like he wasn’t sure for a second where he was.

Then he saw the windows and the paper tablecloths and Velda in her apron at the kitchen door, and his face settled.

“Tired now,” he said.

“That’s all right, Dad,” I said. “That’s a good tired.”

Bernadette stood up. She buttoned her coat. Then she held out her hand to me, palm up, the same way Dad had held out his hand for the knife box.

“Give me the van keys,” she said. “I’ll take him back. I know how they do the bed, and I know which aide is on today. You follow me in my car.”

I looked at her for a second. Then I took the keys out of my sweatshirt pocket and put them in her hand.

“Back left strap,” I said. “It likes to twist. Flatten it out before you tighten it.”

“Back left,” she said. “Okay.”

My husband walked us out to the van, and he helped her with the ramp, and I stood back and let her do the straps herself.

She did them right. She did the back left one twice. Then she gave the chair a bump with her hip and it did not move.

Velda came out on the side steps in her apron to wave. A few of the old men came out to stand by their trucks. The sun was still high and white on the snow in the field across the road.

Dad lifted his right hand to all of them through the van window. Then Bernadette pulled out of the lot slow, like she was hauling eggs, and I followed her in her old car with the heater that only blows on one side.

She had him back in his room by a quarter after two. Jadwiga signed him in and wrote “good day” in the margin of the leave book, and underlined it. Bernadette stayed with him until he fell asleep.

I drove the van back to Green Bay on Friday morning. The man with the limp checked it over and gave me my deposit back and asked how it went.

“He carved the turkey,” I said.

“Well, then,” he said, like that answered everything. Maybe it did.

He’s been all right. Some days are better than others. He still asks me who is carving at the next one.

I started an envelope for Christmas. A plain white envelope, in the drawer at the nurses’ station, with “Dad, Christmas van” written on the front. Casimir sent a hundred from a truck stop in Kansas. I put in a hundred of my own.

On the first Saturday in December, Jadwiga called me at home. She said my sister had come in that morning and asked for the envelope at the desk.

Bernadette drove him back herself that Thanksgiving, and the first Saturday of December she put three hundred dollars cash in that envelope for Christmas, all in twenties, with no note.