The Railroad Men Who Spoke For Harold

I was standing at the kitchen sink with my hands in warm water when I saw Kurt’s truck come up the gravel, four days after we buried his father, and I knew before he even opened the door that he had not driven ninety miles out to the high plains of Nebraska to see how I was holding up.

I dried my hands on the dish towel that still smelled like Harold’s coffee, the one he drank every morning for twenty six years at that same table, and I went to let his son in.

Kurt did not take his boots off at the door the way Harold had taught him, I suppose, back when he was a boy and his mother still lived in that house instead of me. He walked past me into the kitchen like he already owned it, and maybe in his head he already did.

“Arlene,” he said. “We need to talk about the railroad pension.”

I had not even moved Harold’s reading glasses off the counter yet. They were still sitting there next to the crossword he never finished, the one from the Sunday before he went into the hospital for the last time. I looked at those glasses instead of at Kurt, because I did not trust my own face just then.

“Sit down, Kurt,” I said. “I’ll make coffee.”

“I don’t want coffee.” He stood there in his canvas coat with his arms crossed, forty two years old and still built like the boy in the photograph on Harold’s dresser, the one from his Little League days, the one Harold used to take out of the drawer sometimes at night when he thought I was asleep. “I want to know what you’re planning to do about the survivor annuity.”

“I’m not planning anything,” I said. “Your father’s only been gone eleven days.”

“That’s exactly my point.” Kurt’s voice was already climbing, the way it does on men who have decided ahead of time that they are going to be loud, so they do not have to listen to anything that might slow them down. “That annuity should come to me. I’m his blood. I’m his son. You were his second wife, Arlene, no disrespect, but you’ve got the house, you’ve got whatever insurance he carried, you don’t need a railroad pension on top of it. I’ve got two kids in that house in Kearney and a transmission shop that didn’t make its note last month.”