By my estimation, a solid hour is spent prognosticating at each one of the stores, but apparently three hours isn’t enough. Because after predicting the outcomes of all the day’s unknowables, the assembly of elders will retire to McCafferty’s Tavern, where they can opine for two hours more in the company of bottles of beer.
My father is nothing if not a creature of habit so, as I say, this has been going on for as long as I remember. Then suddenly about six months ago, when my father finished his lunch and pushed back his chair, rather than heading straight out the door to his truck, he went upstairs to change into a clean white shirt.
It didn’t take long for me to figure that a woman had somehow worked her way into my father’s routine. Especially since she was partial to perfume, and I’m the one who has to wash his clothes. But the questions remained: Who was this woman? And where on earth did he meet her?
She wasn’t someone in the congregation, I was pretty sure of that. Because on Sunday mornings when we filed out of the service onto the little patch of grass in front of the chapel, there wasn’t a woman—married or unmarried—who gave him a measured greeting or an awkward glance. And it wasn’t Esther who keeps the books at the feedstore, because she wouldn’t’ve recognized a bottle of perfume if it fell from the heavens and hit her on the head. I might have thought it was one of the women who are known, upon occasion, to stop in at McCafferty’s, but once my father started changing his shirt, he stopped coming home with the smell of beer on his breath.
Well, if he didn’t meet her at church, the stores, or the bar, I just couldn’t figure it. So I had no choice but to follow him.
On the first Friday in March, I made a pot of chili so I wouldn’t have to worry about cooking dinner. After serving my father lunch, I watched out of the corner of my eye as he went out the door in his clean white shirt, climbed in his truck, and pulled out of the drive. Once he was half a mile down the road, I grabbed a wide-brimmed hat from the closet, hopped into Betty, and set off on my own.
Just like always, he made his first stop at the hardware store, where he did a bit of business and whiled away an hour in the company of like-minded men. Next it was off to the feedstore and then the pharmacy, where there was a little more business and a lot more whiling. At each of these stops a few women made an appearance in order to do a little business of their own, but if he exchanged more than a word with them, it wasn’t so’s you’d notice.
But then at five o’clock, when he came out of the pharmacy and climbed in his truck, he didn’t head down Jefferson on his way to McCafferty’s. Instead, after passing the library, he took a right on Cypress, a left on Adams, and pulled over across from the little white house with blue shutters. After sitting for a minute, he got out of his truck, crossed the street, and rapped on the screen door.
He didn’t have to wait more than a minute for his rap to be answered. And standing there in the doorframe was Alice Thompson.
By my reckoning, Alice couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight years old. She was three grades ahead of my sister in school and a Methodist, so I didn’t have cause to know her very well. But I knew what everyone else knew: that she had graduated from Kansas State and then married a fellow from Topeka who got himself killed in Korea. A widow without children, Alice had returned to Morgen in the fall of ’53 and taken a job as a teller at the Savings and Loan.
That’s where it must have happened. While going to the bank was not a part of my father’s Friday routine, he did stop in every other Thursday in order to pick up the payroll for the boys. One week he must have ended up at her window and been taken by her mournful look. The following week I could just imagine him carefully picking his place in line so that he’d end up at her window instead of Ed Fowler’s, and then doing his damnedest to make a little conversation while she was trying to count the cash.
As I was sitting in Betty staring at the house, maybe you’d imagine that I was unsettled, or angry, or indignant that my father should be casting off memories of my mother in order to romance a woman who was half his age. Well, imagine all you like. It won’t cost you nothing, and it’ll cost me less. But later that night, after I’d served the chili, cleaned the kitchen, and switched off the lights, I knelt at the side of my bed, clasped my hands together, and prayed. Dear Lord, I said, please give my father the wisdom to be gracious, the heart to be generous, and the courage to ask for this woman’s hand in holy matrimony—so that someone else can do his cooking and cleaning for a change.