The Double Room for Mom and Dad

Nobody needed the story explained. Everly had known about the two homes since the middle of October, the way a small town knows everything.

A cousin from Sheldon leaned close to me by the coffee urn. “Where’s Mark?” she whispered. “He knew about today,” I said. She pressed her lips together, and that was all the answer she gave.

I saw the same look go around that room three or four times. Nobody said a word against my brother. They only looked at the empty folding chair at the end of the family table, the one with his name card on it.

Kara came in at ten past two, alone, in her gray coat, carrying a covered dish. She set it down on the end of the buffet and stood there as though she had walked into the wrong building.

I went over. She did not give me time to speak.

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” she said. “I told him I was going to my sister’s. I’m not here to make excuses, Patrice.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Because he’s been driving to Spencer on Sundays,” she said, very low. “He has sat in the Hy-Vee parking lot four times. Twice he got as far as your front walk.”

I did not say anything. She kept her eyes on the dish.

“When he was sixteen, he found Grandpa Ole on the barn floor after the stroke. Your dad told him a man keeps still and does the arithmetic. He has been doing arithmetic ever since, because numbers hold still.”

“I know it’s no excuse,” she said.

“It’s a reason,” I said. “That’s different.” I thought a moment. “Tell him there is a chair for him. That’s all I’ll say.”

It was all I had that was decent, and I gave it to her. She nodded and went and sat at the back by the door, with her purse in her lap.

At half past two, Hal Dykstra tapped a spoon against a water glass. The room went quiet the way a church goes quiet.

“Norm,” he said. “You want to say a word before we cut the cake?”

Dad put one hand on the arm of the recliner and one on Mom’s shoulder, and he stood up. He did not reach for his cane. Seventy-one people watched him do it.

“I’ll make it short,” Dad said. “I have a piece of cake waiting on me.”

Somebody laughed. He waited.

“In September my son put his mother and me in two houses, thirty miles apart. He had a column of figures that said it would save nine hundred dollars a month. I’m told the figures were right.”

You could have heard a pin hit the linoleum.

“I quit eating on the ninth day,” Dad said. “I was not making a point. I had no reason to chew.”

“My daughter runs a desk at the hospital and has never been paid what she’s worth. She made fourteen telephone calls on her lunch hour. Then she worked extra Saturdays to cover the difference, and she never told me. I found that out from the girl at the front desk.”

He turned and looked at me down the length of the room. I looked at the tablecloth.

“There will be no more extra Saturdays,” Dad said. “It is our money, and we will spend it on this room until it is gone. And Monday morning, Patrice’s name goes on the paper where Mark’s name was.”