262.🪑 THE TABLE MY SON BUILT FOR MY OLD AGE

Chapter 05 - A Room With a Door

I drove home from Pine Street with Dad's application folded on the passenger seat. I stopped twice at red lights that had already turned green, until somebody behind me sounded a horn.

Willow Court wanted twenty-four hundred dollars to reserve the apartment and cover the first month's rent. The monthly cost would fit Dad's pension if he sold the bungalow and used a small part of the proceeds to pay the remaining taxes and utilities. He'd calculated every expense in a yellow notepad, including two bus rides a week to the workshop and coffee with Irene on Fridays.

It was a modest plan. That was what hurt. He wasn't asking for a miracle, or even an apology. He wanted a door he could close without feeling that he had inconvenienced the people on the other side of it.

When I reached home, Paul was on the porch speaking into his phone. He ended the call at once. I could see that he had shaved and changed his shirt, as though the morning might still be repaired by looking respectable.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“The credit union.”

“Did you promise Dad money by this week?”

Paul went very still.

“He's been offered an apartment,” I said. “He needs the deposit by Monday. Did you know?”

“He mentioned it.”

“And you promised?”

“I thought I could sell the old service van. The buyer backed out.”

“You couldn't bring yourself to say so?”

“I was ashamed.”

I'd heard that word before. Dad had used it after he dropped the soup bowl. Paul had used it when he asked to borrow money. There was a whole family of men around me who treated shame as something they had to hide, then expected the women in their lives to clean up what secrecy left behind.

I took my coat off and put it on the wrong hook. “We're going to look at all the accounts tonight. Not the versions you think I can bear. All of them.”

“You think I'm stealing from him.”

“I think you've borrowed from him and made promises he believed. That's enough.”

Paul sat on the bottom porch step. His hair had gone gray at the temples over the last two years. We had met when he was twenty-three and working afternoons at his uncle's machine shop. I could still picture the dark curls and the shirts he washed himself and hung to dry over the shower rail.

“I thought I'd be able to fix it before anybody knew,” he said. “That's the sort of man I always thought I was.”

“You can still fix parts of it. But not by pretending the rest never happened.”

That afternoon I arranged for Daniel to stay with his friend Jonah and drove back to the workshop with a thermos of soup. It was ridiculous, arriving with soup after everything. I nearly turned around at the door.

Irene was sorting donated paintbrushes into jars. “He went to see Claire,” she said. “Left you a note.”

On the bench, beneath a wooden ruler, was a folded piece of brown paper. Dad had written: No need to come rushing every time you feel bad, Meg. Have a quiet evening. We'll talk tomorrow.

Irene watched me read it. “May I make you some tea?”

I sat down. She put on a kettle and let the silence settle. The workshop smelled of fresh sawdust and the orange peels someone had left in a bowl by the window.

“Your father's been helping us for seven weeks,” she said finally. “He found us when he walked in looking for a place to have a cup of coffee.”

“He never said.”

“He said you were busy. I imagine you are.”

I expected reproach. What I got was curiosity. Irene asked where I worked and whether Daniel still liked building things. She knew a great deal about him already, I realized. Dad had been talking about his grandson while I thought he spent most of his afternoons watching television.

“He told me about the table,” she said.

I swallowed. “The whole thing?”

“He told me Daniel made it with four braces when two would've done. He was proud of that. Said the boy likes anything with an extra measure of care.”

“He didn't tell you why.”

Irene turned off the kettle. “You can tell me if you want. Or we can have tea and talk about the weather.”

Perhaps that was what made me speak. She was offering me a choice without pretending I didn't have one.

I told her about Dad's place by the pantry. I told her about the lists and the appointments, the nights he called because he couldn't find his glasses, the morning I discovered his best dress shirt in the laundry after he'd tried to wash it by hand. I admitted how relieved I'd felt when he started eating before us. One fewer thing to manage. One fewer moment in which I might be called away from my own supper.

Irene listened without nodding gravely or telling me I was a good daughter. When I finished, she refilled my cup.

“My husband had Parkinson's,” she said. “I cared for him for eleven years. Sometimes I was kind. Sometimes I wasn't. Sometimes I resented the man I loved for needing me at the very hour I needed to be left alone.”

I looked up.

“It doesn't make us monsters,” she continued. “But exhaustion doesn't give us permission to stop seeing the person in front of us.”

Outside, a gust lifted brown leaves into the courtyard. I felt for a moment that I was sitting with an older version of myself, one who had made some of the same mistakes and had survived hearing their names.

Before I left, Irene showed me the long table near the back window. Dad had built it with two teenage volunteers. The edges were rounded for trembling hands, and the surface was low enough for someone in a wheelchair to reach. Each chair around it was different, gathered from donations and repaired.

“Arthur insisted every chair had to fit,” she said. “Nobody sits at the little table here unless they want to.”

It was such an ordinary sentence that I carried it home like a reprimand.

Before supper I called Willow Court. Dad had paid a small holding fee, and the manager had agreed to keep the apartment available until the end of the month. The remaining deposit was still due, but at least we had a little room to make a sensible decision.

At six, Claire called. She sounded tired. Dad was staying in the guest room of a woman named Martha Green, an old friend from church. He'd had a good afternoon and wanted Daniel to visit on Saturday, provided I didn't use the visit to persuade him to return.

Then Claire said, “There's another reason I wanted him out of your house before the weekend.”

I pressed the phone to my ear. “What reason?”

“Paul spoke to a real estate agent about Dad's bungalow. The agent called me because my name is on the property file.”