In Care Of

A love story.

Photo by cottonbro studio

I pull into the gravel drive at eight sharp. Park behind a rusted out car that ain’t moved in a long time. Grass grown up around the tires so it looks like the ground’s tryin’ to swallow it.

Inside, I hang my coat on the hook and start the percolator. Open the curtains, check the thermostat. He keeps turnin’ it down to sixty-two. I push it back to sixty-eight.

He’s still in bed. Mumbling from the television drifts down the hall. Another farm report. He watches them every mornin’, even though he ain’t farmed in thirty years. I think it’s the sound he likes. Familiar voices talkin’ about familiar things.

I knock twice. “Coffee’s on.”

“I’m up.”

He ain’t up. He says this every mornin’ and every mornin’ I come back ten minutes later and he’s still under the blankets, watchin’ a man in a polo shirt talk about soybean prices.

“Frank. Coffee.”

He grumbles. Sits up slow, feet searchin’ for his slippers. I set ‘em closer to the bed last night, right where he can reach.

“Didn’t ask you to make coffee,” he says.

“Didn’t ask if you asked.”

He makes a sound. Not a laugh. More like a laugh that got lost on the way out and came through his nose. He shuffles past me to the kitchen.

I make eggs while he sits at the table. Over easy, runny yolk. He tears off a piece of white bread and drags it through the yellow. Eats without talkin’. I lean against the counter and drink my coffee and let the quiet be.

After breakfast I do a few things around the house. Bathroom faucet’s drippin’ again so I tighten it with the crescent wrench I keep under the sink. The second from the top step on the porch is soft and I need to get some wood to repair it. I write it down in the notebook I keep in my back pocket, same notebook where I track his prescriptions, his appointments, what he ate and when.

“You don’t need to do all that,” he says from his recliner.

“Do all what?”

“Fussin’. I been takin’ care of this house since before you was born.”

“I know.”

“I don’t need help.”

“I know that too.”

He looks out the window. Hands on the armrests, knuckles swollen, skin thin as receipt paper.

“Then why you keep comin’ back?” he asks.

I take a sip of coffee. “Nothin’ better to do.”

He snorts. Turns back to the window.

Folks in town talk about it some. Brenda at the post office asked me once why I bother. Paul Haggerty, who I’ve known since we was kids, sat me down at the diner in Woodsfield and laid it out plain.

“West. What you’re doin’ out there… it ain’t your job.”

“I know whose job it ain’t.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, Paul.”

His doctor in Barnesville pulled me aside after his last appointment. “We should discuss options. You’re not family, Mr. Bowen. There are limits–”

“I’m what he’s got.”

She held my eyes a second. Nodded. Wrote somethin’ on her chart. He hates when I force him there. Sits in the passenger seat with his arms folded like a kid bein’ dragged to the dentist.

“I don’t need no doctor,” he says.

“Your hip says different.”

“My hip’s fine.”

“You fell gettin’ out of the bathtub.”

“That was the mat. Mat was slippery.”

“Frank.”

“I’m just sayin’, it was the mat.”

I got about four inches and forty pounds on him, but he’s got a stubbornness more than makes up the difference.

I take him to get his hair cut. I fix what breaks in the house. I make his lunch, grilled cheese, Campbell’s tomato soup, the one with the red label because he won’t touch the store brand. He eats half. I wrap the rest and put it in the fridge next to yesterday’s half and the day before’s half that I’ll throw away when he ain’t watchin’.

It’s been months of this.

I don’t do it for him. I want to be clear about that.

I do it for Reed.

Reed had this thing he did when he was nervous. He’d take whatever was in his hands, a napkin, a tissue, a label on a bottle, a thread on his jeans, and tear it into smaller and smaller pieces ‘til there was nothin’ left. First time I seen him do it was the day we met, standin’ outside a gas station in Caldwell in the rain.

I was inside payin’ for diesel. He was under the overhang, rippin’ a cigarette pack into confetti. Just some kid in a ball cap and a drywall-dusted sweatshirt.

“You need a ride somewhere?” I asked. I don’t know why. I ain’t the type.

He looked up. “Depends on where you’re goin’.”

“Woodsfield.”

“That’ll work. Thanks.”

He got in my truck and brushed the cigarette pieces off his hands onto his jeans. Didn’t buckle his seatbelt. I pulled onto 78 and didn’t say nothin’ for two miles.

“Reed,” he said, like I’d asked.

“West.”

“Thanks for the ride, West.”

“You already said thanks.”

He grinned. “I’m polite like that.”

He was twenty-two. I was twenty-nine. He had a gap between his front teeth and a burn scar across the back of his right hand he told me six different stories about before I quit askin’. He was workin’ drywall out of Cambridge, temporary, they paid cash at the end of each week.

I dropped him at a house on Lewisville Road where he was rentin’ a room from an old woman named Dot.

“You wanna get a beer sometime?” he said, one foot out the door.

“I don’t drink.”

“Coffee then.”

“I don’t really do that either.”

He grinned. “You don’t drink and you don’t do coffee. What do you do?”

“I fix things.”

“Well, my truck’s got a busted alternator and I can’t afford a shop. How about you fix that and I’ll buy you whatever you do drink.”

“Water.”

“I’ll buy you a water, West.”

Two days later I was elbow-deep in his engine while he sat on Dot’s porch and handed me wrong tools in the wrong order and talked nonstop about everything and nothing, his crew, the time he saw a bear on Route 26, how much he missed his dead mama, how Dot made biscuits every morning and they were terrible but he ate ‘em because she watched from the kitchen and he couldn’t break her heart.

I’d known him seventy-two hours.

I already knew I was in trouble.

We got coffee, I lied, I do drink coffee, at the diner in Woodsfield, the one with cracked vinyl booths and the waitress who called everyone sweetie, or honey, or sweetheart, or darlin’. We drove around. Sat in my truck in parkin’ lots and talked ‘til the windows fogged. Five weeks in, we were on the tailgate at the overlook above the Muskingum when he kissed me. Or I kissed him. His hat fell off. I picked it up and put it back on his head.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

He moved in three months later. My little place on Ridgewood Road, with vinyl siding, bad insulation, a furnace that growled when it kicked on. One bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen big enough for two if one of ‘em was Reed, who was built like a fence rail.

We fit.

I’d come home from a job and he’d be on the couch with his boots still on, watchin’ somethin’ dumb, and he’d look up and his whole face would rearrange. I don’t know how else to say it. Like I was the answer to a question he’d been sittin’ with all day.

He cooked one night a week. This was his rule. He made exactly three things, chili, spaghetti with meat sauce, and a chicken stir-fry that involved so much soy sauce the smoke detector went off every time.

“Maybe less soy sauce,” I said once.

“Maybe mind your business.”

He sang in the truck. Bad. Loud. Knew sixty percent of the words and made up the rest. I’d be drivin’ and he’d be beltin’ out somethin’ half-right and fully committed and I’d grip the wheel and try not to laugh because if I laughed he got louder.

I should’ve laughed more.

Sundays we drove. No plan. Just picked a direction. He liked the roads south toward the river, the ones that wind through hollows where the trees close over the pavement. He’d roll the window down even in the cold and lean his arm out and shut his eyes and he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

He talked about his parents more than he realized. Dropped them into conversation without even thinkin’ about it.

“Daddy used to take me fishin’ at the pond behind the house.”

“Daddy built that porch hisself. Took him two summers.”

“Mama poured the batter in and it’d sizzle. And the whole house smelled like it. The whole house.”

Each one a door he kept pushin’ against that refused to open.

He was twenty-five the first time he told me the whole of it. We were in bed, late. He’d been quiet all evening, which for Reed was like a power outage.

“Daddy caught me with a boy when I was sixteen,” he said to the ceiling. “In the back of his Buick, which, lookin’ back, was not my smartest move.”

I didn’t say nothin’. Just stroked my hand through his hair the way I liked to do.

“He didn’t hit me. I almost wish he had. He went quiet for two days. Then my bag was on the porch and the front door was locked.”

“Where’d you go?”

“My aunt’s over in Guernsey County. She’s good people.” He was pickin’ at the edge of the pillowcase, tearin’ tiny pieces off the seam. “He’s called me twice since. Once to say Mama died. Once on accident I think, ‘cause he hung up when he heard my voice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I got a life. I got you.”

But he carried it. Not all the time, and it sure weren’t obvious, but still… I think the pain sat deep in his belly.

He started writin’ letters to his daddy. I’d come home and find him at the kitchen table, tongue between his teeth, focused the way he got when somethin’ mattered too much to do casual.

Letter after letter, month after month. And not one answered. Not one returned, which was almost worse. At least a returned letter means somebody picked it up.

One night I found him at the table with a blank page.

“You don’t have to keep doin’ this,” I said.

“Yeah. I do.”

“He ain’t gonna write back.”

“Maybe not.” He set the pen down. “But if I stop, he’s right. About me. About what I am. If I stop reachin’ out, it means I agree with him that I ain’t worth reachin’ back for.”

I sat across from him. Took his hand.

“You know that ain’t true,” I said.

“I know. But I need him to know.”

He picked up the pen. I went to bed. When I woke up the letter was sealed on the counter and he was asleep on the couch with his boots on.

Reed died October twelfth. A Sunday.

He’d gone out early for parts. Out on Route 78, on the bend past the Seneca Fork bridge, a kid in a Dodge crossed the center line, and slammed into his driver’s side.

The hospital called and a woman said his name and I said yes and she said there’d been an accident and I hung up and drove there. I don’t remember the drive. I remember the parking lot, standing in it, my legs not workin’ right.

They gave me his things in a plastic bag. Wallet, watch, fourteen dollars. His boots weren’t in the bag. I asked about them and the nurse looked at me like I was crazy and I said he always leaves them by the door I need to know where they are and she said they’d been cut off in the ambulance.

I drove home. Stared at his mug in the drying rack. The faucet drippin’. On the table, a half-finished letter to his father, pen on top.

I sat in the kitchen ‘til dark.

Then I picked up the pen.

Your son died this morning. His name was Reed and he was the best man I ever knew. He wanted you to know him. I’m sorry you chose not to.

Sealed it. Mailed it.

Three weeks later the envelope came back. My handwriting on the front. Below it, in shaky blue ink it said I know who my son was.

I read it at the mailbox. Read it again in the house. And a burn moved through my chest so hot and tight I couldn’t breathe right.

I know who my son was.

You didn’t know him at all. Didn’t know he sang off-key in the truck. Didn’t love the gap in his teeth or the way he looked at me when I walked through the door. Didn’t know he ate an old woman’s terrible biscuits because he couldn’t break her heart. Didn’t know he held every letter tight before he dropped it in the box and let it go because he was hopin’ this time, this time, the door might open.

You didn’t know your son and you wrote those words like that settled it.

I kept the envelope. Drove around with it for weeks on the passenger seat next to me. Some nights I’d sit in the driveway and take it out and read it and feel my hands shake the way Reed’s did when he was nervous, except I wasn’t nervous.

Two months after the funeral, I drove to Sandhill Road.

Fifteen minutes past Woodsfield, down through the cuts where the road narrows. I had the envelope on the passenger seat. I’d rehearsed what I was gonna say. Every word. Out loud, like a man losin’ his mind, which maybe I was, I don’t know.

But I was gonna let him have it.

I was gonna stand in Frank Bowen’s kitchen and unload eight years of Reed into his lap and make him choke on it.

The house sat back off the road. Car in the yard. Porch saggin’. The whole place looked like it had been holdin’ its breath a long time and finally quit.

I knocked and the front door swung open.

Inside smelled like filth and sour milk. Dishes in the sink with green on ‘em. Empty cans on the counter. Thermostat said fifty-four. Calendar turned to six months prior.

He was in the recliner, the farm report on loud. And he was smaller than I’d built him in my head. I’d imagined a big man, the kind who could fill a doorway, block it, lock it behind him, kick his son out. The man in the recliner was thin. Hollowed.

He looked at me. Eyes milky at the edges.

“Who are you?” he said.

I stood there with the envelope in my hand and my speech hot in my throat and I looked at Frank Bowen, the man who put his son’s bag on the porch and locked the door, and there was nothin’ to fight. Just an old man in a cold house who didn’t know what month it was.

I opened my mouth. “Your dishes need done,” is what came out.

“Didn’t ask for help.”

“I know.”

I went to the kitchen. Turned on the water. Started scrapin’ plates.

I came back the next morning. And the next. Made his coffee, made his eggs, fixed what needed fixin’. Every mornin’ he asked my name and every mornin’ I told him.

Some days the anger still comes. I’ll be at his sink, washin’ his mug, and I’ll think about Reed at our table with his pen and his letters and that stubborn, stupid hope, and my hands go tight on the porcelain and I have to breathe through it. The man in the recliner ain’t the man who locked the door. He’s what’s left after time and disease scraped that man out, and there ain’t no satisfaction in yellin’ at a shell.

But I want to. Some days I want to.

It’s late in January a year later when it happens.

I’m in the kitchen makin’ cornbread. His mama’s recipe, the bacon grease in the cast iron, then the batter. Reed described it once on the tailgate at that overlook, his voice gone soft the way it did when he got close to that house in his memory and had to decide whether to go inside.

Frank’s in the recliner. TV off. Just sittin’.

“Somethin’ smells good,” he calls.

“Cornbread.”

Quiet. The recliner creaks.

“Reed?”

I stop.

“Reed, is that cornbread?”

I set the bowl down. Wipe my hands. Walk to the doorway.

He’s lookin’ at me. Not the flat, half-gone way. His eyes are wide and wet and his lip is shakin’ and he looks more present than I’ve seen him in months.

“Reed.” His voice splits down the center. “I thought you wasn’t comin’ back.”

My hands start shakin’.

“I waited,” he says. “I waited and you didn’t come.”

The speech is right there. Every word I rehearsed in the truck. I could say it. Could tell him I ain’t Reed, his boy is dead, how he died on a regular Sunday. I could make it hurt. Make him feel all the pain I carry every single day. Right now, while his eyes are clear.

“I’m sorry,” Frank says. He lifts his hand, skin so thin the veins poke through blue and ugly. “I’m sorry, son. I shoulda opened that door. I shoulda let you in.”

I look at his hand he’s holdin’ out to me.

I think about my Reed, cold and alone in the ground. I think about my Reed and eight years of letters. I think about this man’s words in blue ink on an envelope I carried like a grenade I couldn’t throw.

And this hand. Reachin’.

I cross the room. Take it.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” I say. “I’m here.”

He grips so hard I feel the bones shift. He pulls me down and I kneel on the carpet and he puts his other hand on top of my head, gentle.

“Look at you,” he whispers. “All grown up.”

“Yes sir.”

“You stayin’?”

“Yeah. I’m stayin’.”

His hand on my head. Trembling. I close my eyes and Reed’s so close I feel his arms around me. That gap-toothed grin, his voice sayin’ took you long enough. Right here in this room, in the bacon grease and cast iron, in his daddy’s hand on my head, in the apology he waited his whole life to hear, given to the wrong man.

It ain’t enough. Ain’t close. But it’s all there is.

Frank’s cryin’ slows. His grip loosens. He falls asleep the way he does every afternoon, sudden, head back, mouth open. I stay on the floor, knees achin’, his hand still restin’ on my head.

Then I get up. Pour the batter into the hot skillet. It sizzles, just like Reed said.

The whole house smells like it.

I sit at the table and put my face in my hands.

He’ll wake in an hour. He’ll shuffle in and squint at me and ask who I am. And I’ll say West, same as always.

But for thirty seconds in that recliner, Frank Bowen held his son’s hand and said he was sorry. It wasn’t real. Wasn’t me he was talkin’ to. Wasn’t a sorry that counts, not the kind you give with clear eyes and a full weight of what you done.

But it’s the only one there’s ever gonna be.

I took it. For Reed. And on Sunday, same as every Sunday, I’ll sit at that plot in the Quaker City cemetery and tell him about it.

Your daddy said he’s sorry. He reached for you. His hand was shakin’ and his voice broke and he meant it, Reed, he meant every word, even if it was me kneeling there. Even if he won’t remember tomorrow.

And if that’s a lie, it’s the kindest one I know.

The cornbread comes out right. I cut it into squares. Frank shuffles in around four. Squints at the cornbread. Squints at me.

“Who are you?” he says.

“West. Same as yesterday.”

He sits. Picks up a piece. Chews slow.

“This is good,” he says. “Tastes like my–” He stops. Frowns. Reaches for somethin’ gone. “Somebody used to make this.”

“Your wife.”

“That right?”

“Yeah. Reed told me about it.”

“Reed.” He turns the name over. “I know that name.”

“You should.”

He chews. Swallows. Don’t ask nothin’ else.

I wash the skillet. Check the thermostat. Lock the door on my way out.

In the truck, I open the glovebox. The envelope’s still there, soft and worn along the creases. I know who my son was. I take it out. Hold it.

Then I tear it. Once, twice, smaller and smaller, the way Reed used to do ‘til the pieces are too small to read and I’m sittin’ there with a handful of confetti that used to mean somethin’ and don’t no more.

I open the window and let ‘em go. They scatter across the gravel, across the yard where the car sits with its tires half-buried, across the porch I fixed last month. I let ‘em go.

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Thanks for reading!

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