But Thanksgiving morning, I got up, put the turkey in at six like always, set two pies to cool on the rack, and stood in my own kitchen not knowing what on earth I was going to do with any of it.
I was going to run it over to the community dinner at Emmanuel. Then at nine-forty my phone rang and it was Daddy’s number, and it was not Daddy.
It was Miss Etta Ford, who has lived next door since 1988. She had found him on the carport. Darla had gone to her sister’s in Temple on Wednesday.
Hillcrest, emergency room, systolic over two hundred. They told me later he was a couple of hours from a stroke and maybe less than that.
He had not taken a blood pressure pill since the second week of September.
Eleven weeks. The doctor pulled up his fill history and turned the monitor toward me, because I was the one in the chair. Every thirty days for four years, regular as church. Then nothing after the eighth of September.
I asked how a man just stops. The doctor did not answer that, because it was not a medical question.
Ravi Pillai runs the pharmacy counter at the Brazos Drug on Bosque. He came to the hospital that evening, still in his smock, with a folded piece of paper in his hand.
My father walked to that pharmacy on the fourteenth of October. Two and a half miles, seventy-nine years old, because his keys were on a hook he was not using anymore. He had no money on him and he did not ask for the medication. He asked Ravi to put a note in the computer.
Ravi typed it exactly the way he said it, and it has been sitting in that file since:
Patient request, note to file: if my daughter Renee ever calls about my prescriptions, tell her I never said those things about her. Tell her I am not able to call her right now. Tell her every pie I ever took to that church was hers and I told everybody so.
I read that standing in a hallway on Thanksgiving night with a nurse pretending to chart four feet away.
He came home with me on the second of December and stayed nine weeks. The first Sunday he could get out of a chair on his own he asked what was for supper, and I said pot roast, and he cried, which I had seen my father do exactly twice in my life.
I never called Darla. Not once. Never went by that house, never put a word of it online. My brothers wanted to and I told them no, and I meant it.
She filed in February. Took the truck and the good television, and I have not laid eyes on her since. A woman like that does not stay once the easy part is over.
The locks are changed back. I have a key on my ring again. Sunday suppers are Sundays again.
Those two pies got eaten by the night shift at Hillcrest, every crumb.
Somebody will stand on a porch and tell you what your own father thinks of you. Go find out where he wrote it down himself. He almost always did.