第14章 The Mending Hour

Blythe Yarrow's father lived three hours away, in a town she had grown up in and had not lived in since she was eighteen, and he was eighty-two and still driving, which was the whole problem and none of the solution. He had fallen in June. He had fallen in the driveway and lain there for forty minutes until a neighbor came out, and he had told Blythe on the phone that it was nothing, and had told her this in a voice she recognized, because it was the voice she used with families in the ER when she was about to say a thing she did not want to say and was saying something smaller to make room. So she had begun going up on her off weeks — three hours each way, six hours of driving for an afternoon — and had begun, without ever saying it out loud, to do the arithmetic of moving back. The arithmetic did not work. That was the first thing. The hospital in her hometown had closed two years ago and become a nursing home, and the nearest ER was forty minutes from the house, and the only jobs for a nurse with her years were in a system she had left with relief and did not want to rejoin. The second thing was that her father did not want her to come. He had said so, in his way, which was to talk about the garden and the roof for twenty minutes and then, at the end of the call, to say, "Your mother would have wanted you to have your own life," which was the closest he had ever come to saying *stay where you are, I'm fine, and I know I'm not fine.* The third thing was the circle. She did not know how to weigh it against the other two. It was two hours a month and it had no official existence and there was no line on any form where you could write *belongs to a book circle in a bakery with nine women and a retired mailman, four Sundays a year that decide whether the week has a floor.* And yet, driving home from the last August meeting, she understood that it did decide it; that she had kept two versions of herself, one for the hospital and one for outside, and that the circle was the only place where the two had ever been in the same room, because at the circle she could say she had lost a patient and nobody asked her for a theory. She wrote the three things on the back of a receipt and did not solve them. --- The field trip had been Annette's idea, which was why it went the way it went. "They're having the autumn book sale at the college in the county seat," Annette said, in July. "We could hire the church van. A Saturday. It would be good for us." "Good for us how?" Vernon said. "It would be an outing." "We're a reading circle," Junie said. "Our outings are chairs." But Annette had wanted it, and Annette so rarely wanted things that were not useful that the circle indulged her, and so on the second Saturday of August, seven of them rode to the county seat in a van driven by a retired farmer from the Lutheran church who had a rosary on the mirror and no radio. The book sale was in a gymnasium. There were folding tables and a smell of old paper and a cash box, and it was, in fact, wonderful, and everyone bought too much, and Blythe found a hardback of a novel she had loved at seventeen for fifty cents and stood in the gym holding it like something she had lost and found. Then the van did not start. Then it started. Then, four miles out of town, it began to rain in a way that made the farmer pull over and say a word Blythe had not heard from a Lutheran before. They sat in the van for an hour watching the rain. Annette, who had organized the outing and could not fix it, sat in the front passenger seat with her hands in her lap and her agenda unread. And then Junie brought out the bakery bag she had smuggled in — the coffee cake, the paper cups, the thermos of tea — and the seven of them ate coffee cake in a stationary van in a rainstorm on a county road, and told stories, and Katia told one about a bus that had broken down and a stranger who had sung, and Vernon told one about a mailbag that had been stolen by a dog in 1981, and Cassie's baby woke up and was passed from lap to lap, and it went on so long that when the rain stopped and the van started, nobody wanted to go. "That was a good outing," Vernon said. "You didn't buy a book," Annette said. "I bought four." "You know what I mean." "I do," Vernon said, "and you were right, and I'll say so in front of everyone. It was good for us. The chairs were good for us too. You don't have to choose." --- That was in August, and in the last week of August, Blythe drove up to her father's house and did the thing she had been avoiding. She sat him down at the kitchen table with the receipt in her pocket and said, "I'm not moving back." He looked at her. "I looked at the jobs and the drive and I ran it four ways," she said, "and moving back would be me taking care of you badly and me not having a floor of my own, and then when you need me for real I won't have anything left to bring. So here's what I'm offering instead. I'm coming up the first Saturday of every month, not the off weeks, the same Saturday, so you can write it on the calendar. And I'm putting a key under the planter and a list on the fridge, and I'm paying for the boy next door to cut the grass and I've already talked to him. And you're going to tell me the truth on the phone once a month, and if you lie to me I'll know, because I'm a nurse and lying is the only thing I do better than you." Her father sat with it. He had been a shop teacher for thirty years and had a way of looking at a thing before he said whether he liked it. "The first Saturday," he said. "The first Saturday." "Your mother would have liked that," he said. "She always said the problem with you was that you'd rather have a system than a feeling." "She was right." "She was right about most things and she made too much of a point of it," he said, and got up to put the kettle on, and Blythe sat at the table and understood that she had just moved home and left home in the same conversation, which was, she had begun to think, the actual condition of everyone at that table on the second Sunday, and had been all along. ---