The Coat on the Firehouse Hook

I did not tell anyone. Idella saw me the first time and said nothing. At noon, when the crew had gone, I poured it down the drain and washed the cup.

Two hundred and eight Sundays. I have counted. I did not know it was a count until the day I got to the end of it.

Idella never raised her voice at me about our son. What she did was drive to Hays every other Sunday afternoon, an hour and a half each way, and come home at dark and put the supper on.

She said nothing about where she had been. I knew. She knew I knew. We carried it between us like a pan of something hot that neither of us would set down.

In the second spring he married a schoolteacher from Hays named Darlene, in a Methodist church on Vine Street. I did not go.

I told myself I was not invited, and the truth is nobody should have had to invite me, because I was his father. I stayed home and fixed a gutter that did not need fixing.

Idella went alone in her blue dress and sat in the front pew on the groom’s side. She came home at nine that night and stood at the sink without turning on the light.

She said, “He asked about you. He had to stop and swallow in the middle of the question.”

I did not answer. She said, “Rex, I have been married to a stubborn man for forty-six years, and I have been proud of most of it. I am not proud of this.”

I told her the thing I am most ashamed of in this whole account. I said, “He knows where I am.”

She turned around. She said, “He knows exactly where you are. He has known for thirty years. You have never once moved.”

That is the sentence I should have heard. I put on my cap and went out to the shed and listened to the gutter.

In the third year Idella came home from the hospital and told me the baby had Colt’s chin. I did not ask her name.

And there were small things I should have read. Dallas Benning stood in my kitchen the second winter standing with his coffee going cold in his hand.

He said, “Rex, I’d leave that coat be a while longer. There’s more to that night than the pump panel gave you.”

I said, “I know what I saw, Dallas.” He looked at me as if I had handed him something heavy. He said, “I know you do.”

The first Sunday of every month we run the public pancake feed. The whole town comes after church or instead of it, and we serve a hundred and forty or fifty plates. Idella runs the register.

The first Sunday of November came in cold and clear, four years and two days since the barn. I was on the griddle at a quarter to eight with a line out the door and a spatula in each hand, thinking about nothing.

Idella came to the pass-through with her face wrong. She said, “There is a woman out here asking for you by name. She has Octavia Tuckett with her.”

I had not seen Octavia in four years. She had broken her hip that winter, sold the place, and gone to live with her daughter near Beatrice, Nebraska.