The Recliner That Went to Town

Carla said it at the kitchen sink with her back to me, rinsing the supper plates under water hot enough to fog the window over the sink. “Nine hundred a month,” she said. “Starting the first.”

I was standing at the end of the table with Dad’s pill organizer in one hand and his evening blood pressure pill in the other.

The little plastic lid for Tuesday was still flipped open. I remember that because I forgot to close it.

“Nine hundred for what?” I asked her. I kept my voice low. Dad was in the living room in his recliner with the Vikings game on, and the farmhouse walls were never thick.

“For the room,” Carla said. She turned off the water and dried her hands on the towel that hung from the oven door. “For the heat and the groceries and the electric. It’s my house too now, Kelly. I think that’s fair.”

The room she meant was my old bedroom at the top of the stairs. The one with the slanted ceiling and the window that looked out over the grove and the grain bins.

I had slept in it as a girl, and I had been sleeping in it again most nights of the week for two years.

I set the pill on the counter by Dad’s water glass. I closed Tuesday’s lid.

Then I said the only thing I could think of that would not start a fight in a house where a man was trying to get well.

“I’ll think about it, Carla.”

I carried the water glass and the pill out to Dad. He took it the way he took everything now, slowly, with his right hand, the good one.

His left hand rested on the arm of the recliner like something he had borrowed and was afraid of dropping.

“You’re quiet,” he said. His words still came a little thick on the left side of his mouth, but they came. A year before that, they hadn’t come at all.

“Long day on the route,” I said. “The Hendricks boys were fighting over a seat again.”

He smiled at that, the half smile the stroke had left him, and turned back to the game.

I sat on the arm of the couch and watched it with him until the fourth quarter, and I didn’t hear a single play.