“Otis,” I said to the recording. “They’re moving Dad to Lexington. Somebody let the air out of my tires.” I hesitated, then said it out loud for the first time. “I think it was Bert. Call me when you can.”
There is no ride to call around Morehead at that hour on a Saturday. There’s no Uber, no Lyft, and the only taxi in Rowan County is an old Crown Victoria driven by a man named Floyd who doesn’t start until ten. My cousin works nights at the Walmart distribution center and would be sound asleep. My friend Darlene from the road department lives forty minutes out in the hills. I stood there scrolling through every name in my phone and finding nobody, while the clock in the corner of the screen kept moving.
So I called Percy Hamm, because Percy is the only tow driver in the county who answers before eight on a Saturday. He runs Hamm’s Towing and Recovery out on US 60, and he’s hauled more than one broken grader off a back road for me over the years. He picked up on the second ring, and when I told him who it was, he laughed and asked if one of my machines had died on the weekend again.
“It’s my car,” I said. “At St. Claire. Both back tires are flat, and I have to be in Lexington by eight-thirty.”
He was there in nineteen minutes, in a big red flatbed wrecker with his name stenciled on the doors. He’s somewhere past sixty, with a gray beard down to the middle of his chest and a Kentucky Wildcats cap he’s worn since the 1996 championship. He walked around my car once, crouched beside the left rear tire, and peered into the empty valve stem. Then he looked up at me, and I could see him working it out. He didn’t ask who. He only nodded slowly, like a man who had seen a thing or two in forty years of hauling people’s troubles.
He had a compressor on the truck and could have filled both tires in two minutes, but air does nothing through an empty stem. Without a core to hold it, the air goes in one second and comes right back out the next. Nobody carries valve cores, not tow drivers, not anybody, because they cost about fifty cents and you just buy them at the tire shop when you need them.
“I can run you to Clark’s Tire on Main when they open at eight,” Percy said. “They’ll have you rolling in ten minutes. Or I can haul you and the car both to Lexington.” He scratched his beard. “That’d run you about six hundred.”
I did the math because I couldn’t stop myself. If the shop opened at eight and took ten minutes, and I pushed it on the interstate, I would walk into the hospital around 9:10. The meeting was at 8:30. I fix county equipment for a living, and I know exactly what a long tow costs on a Saturday morning, the hookup fee and the loaded miles and the empty ride home. Six hundred dollars was fair, maybe even generous. It was also more than I had sitting in checking, and I would have to put it on a credit card.
“Go,” I said.
Percy didn’t waste a word. He backed the wrecker up to my bumper, tilted the bed, and winched my Accord up onto it with its flat tires dragging. He chained it down at all four corners and ran ratchet straps over the wheels, fast and careful, the way he does everything. At 8:04 we pulled out of the hospital lot and turned left onto Flemingsburg Road, the same way the ambulance had gone.
I rode up front with my phone in my lap, watching the numbers in the corner change. Percy drove exactly the speed limit, seventy on the interstate, because you can’t push a loaded wrecker, and he kept the radio low on a gospel station out of Mount Sterling. Somewhere around Owingsville he glanced over at me and asked if my daddy was Delmar Sizemore from Christy Creek. When I said yes, he smiled into his beard.
“I pulled his old Ford out of the creek in eighty-nine,” he said. “Flood took it right off the bank. He stood there in his overalls laughing so hard I thought he’d fall in after it. I never met a man who could laugh at losing a truck like that.”
I couldn’t answer him. My throat had closed up. I looked down at my phone, and it said 8:30, and we were just coming up on the Winchester exit with twenty miles still to go. At 8:50 we were stuck behind a church bus on New Circle Road. At 9:10 we were crawling down Rose Street through the University of Kentucky campus, where students in blue were already streaming toward the stadium for an afternoon game.
We pulled up in front of UK Chandler Hospital at 9:16. Percy couldn’t take the wrecker into the parking garage, so he stopped in the loading zone by the main entrance and told me to go on, that he’d unload my car in the surface lot across the street and leave the keys under the mat. When I started to say something about the money, he waved me off.
“Later,” he said. “Go see your daddy.”
Chapter Four: 9:16
Bert was waiting outside.
He was standing beside the big glass doors in jeans and a gray Carhartt hoodie, and his hair was still damp from the shower he’d gone home to take. He was smoking a cigarette. Bert quit smoking eleven years ago, the week his daughter was born, and I hadn’t seen one in his hand since. He watched me climb down out of Percy’s wrecker, and what I remember most is that he didn’t look surprised. Not at the wrecker, not at the time, not at me. He only looked tired, and much older than forty-six.
He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it as I walked toward him. I stopped a few feet away, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.
“It’s done,” he said finally. “They take him back at eleven.”
“Which one did you pick?”
He looked at the sidewalk. “The small one. Two holes to drain it.”
“The doctor in Morehead said the big one gets all of it,” I said. “He drew it for us. You were sitting right there.”
“The doctor said a lot of things, Greta.”
I had a hundred things I wanted to say to him. I’d been rehearsing them for two hours, kneeling in the lot at St. Claire and riding in Percy’s cab and watching the miles crawl past on I-64. How could you, and who do you think you are, and he’s my father too. They were all lined up in my mouth, ready. But standing there on the sidewalk in front of the hospital where our mother died, I found I only had the strength for one of them.
“Did you take my valve cores, Bert?”
He looked at the ground for a long time. He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. His hands were jammed deep in the front pocket of his hoodie, and I could see the shape of something small inside it, pressed between his knuckles. He didn’t take his hands out.
“Go see Dad,” he said quietly. “He’s asking for Mom.”
I walked past him through the glass doors and didn’t look back.
Chapter Five: Pre-Op
They had Dad in a curtained cubicle in pre-operative holding on the fourth floor. A row of beds stretched down the long room behind pale blue curtains, with monitors chirping and nurses moving quietly back and forth. Dad was lying on a gurney in his hospital gown with a blue paper cap on his head, and when I came around the curtain I could see the two small patches they had shaved above his right ear, each one about the size of a nickel. He still had on the brown wool socks.
He opened his eyes and reached for me. “Inez,” he said, squeezing my hand. “There you are. I thought you went to your mother’s.”
His hand was cold, but his grip was as strong as ever. I didn’t correct him. I sat down on the little rolling stool beside the gurney and held his hand in both of mine, and when he asked if the calves were fed, I told him Marty Lewis had them. He closed his eyes and said Marty was a good boy. Marty is fifty-eight years old.
A nurse came through, and then the anesthesiologist, a young man with a beard who asked Dad whether he had any allergies. Dad said he was allergic to Democrats and the young man laughed so hard he had to steady himself on the bed rail. Then the curtain moved again, and a small woman in navy scrubs stepped inside. She was perhaps fifty, with dark hair pulled into a tight knot and reading glasses pushed up on top of her head. She looked at me sitting on the stool.
“You must be the daughter,” she said. “I’m Dr. Farouk. Your brother said you might come. He mentioned car trouble.”
I asked her, as calmly as I could manage, to tell me what had been decided. She pulled the curtain closed behind her and sat down on the other side of the gurney, and she explained that they would be doing a burr hole evacuation, two holes and a drain left in for a day or two. When I told her what the Morehead doctor had said about the craniotomy, she nodded and didn’t argue.
“It’s true that it gets more,” she said. “In your father’s case, I think either approach is reasonable. I’ll be honest with you. If your brother had left the decision entirely to me, I might have leaned slightly toward the craniotomy.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
She looked down at Dad, who had drifted off again and was breathing slow and deep. “Because your brother told me your father’s wishes,” she said. “He said that after your mother died, your father told him that if anything ever happened to him, he didn’t want the big surgery. He wanted the smallest thing that would work. He didn’t want to go the way she did.” She paused. “He said your father made him promise.”
I couldn’t speak. Dr. Farouk reached across the gurney and touched my shoulder gently. She explained that when a patient can’t speak for himself, the doctors listen to the person he chose to speak for him, and that Kentucky law and good medicine both required it. She told me burr holes were a good surgery, that she had done hundreds of them, and that she thought my father would do well. Then she slipped back out through the curtain and left me alone with him.
He made Bert promise. After Mom died. I sat on that rolling stool and tried to remember those weeks, the weeks when Dad was driving to the lawyer’s office and signing papers. I’d hardly been out to the house at all. I couldn’t stand to be in that kitchen without my mother in it, and I couldn’t stand to look at Dad, because every time I did I heard him saying, “All right, Greta, we’ll do it your way.”
At eleven o’clock two nurses came to unlock the wheels of the gurney. Dad woke up as they started to move him and found me again with his eyes.
“Inez,” he said. “I’ll be back directly. Don’t let Bert eat all the pie.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it, even with tears running down my face. I promised him I wouldn’t, and I watched them wheel him down the hall and through a pair of double doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, and I listened to the doors swing shut behind him.
Chapter Six: The Long Night
I sat through the whole surgery and the whole night after it. The operation took an hour and forty minutes, and at 12:55 Dr. Farouk came out to the surgical waiting room, found me in the corner, and told me it had gone well. They had drained the blood, and he was in recovery, and he would spend the night in the neuro ICU. It might be hours before he woke up and cleared, she said, or it might be tomorrow. Then she asked whether my brother was here.
“He’s outside,” I said.
Bert never came back inside. Not to the waiting room, not to the ICU, not once all that day or that night. At two o’clock I went down to the lobby and looked out through the glass doors, and he wasn’t on the sidewalk anymore. At five I walked across the street to the surface lot where Percy had left my car, still sitting crooked on its two flat tires with the keys under the floor mat. Two rows over, I saw Bert’s white Silverado with the Morehead State sticker in the back window. He was sitting behind the wheel with the engine off, staring at nothing. I stood at the edge of the lot and watched him for a long time. He didn’t see me, or he pretended not to, and after a while I went back inside.
The neuro ICU is on the sixth floor, dim and hushed, every room with a glass wall facing the nurses’ station. Dad was in 6114 with a white bandage wound around his head and a thin plastic tube running out from under it into a bag clipped to the bed. The nurse said I could stay, and there was a vinyl recliner in the corner, so I sat in it. I never did lean it back.
Otis called at six from a motel in Jackson, Tennessee, after thirteen hours on the poles. I told him all of it, from the flat tires to the sidewalk to what Dr. Farouk said about Dad’s wishes. He listened without interrupting, the way he does, and when I finished he was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped. Then he said he would talk to his foreman and drive up that night. I told him no. I told him those people in Tennessee needed their lights back more than I needed him in a hospital chair, and that Dad was all right and I was all right. He asked me if that was true, and I didn’t answer him.
Marty called at seven to tell me he had fed Dad’s forty head that morning before he even knew about the transfer, and that he would feed them again that night and every morning and evening after that for as long as it took. When I started to say something about paying him, he hushed me. “Your daddy pulled my truck out of the creek in ninety-seven with his tractor in the middle of a thunderstorm,” he said. “We look after each other out here, Greta. You know that.”
Around midnight I went down for coffee, and the cafeteria was closed, so I bought a cup from the machine in the lobby and stood at the glass doors drinking it. Across the street in the orange glow of the parking lot lights, Bert’s truck was still there, and through the windshield I could see the small red coal of a cigarette brighten and fade.
I went back upstairs and sat beside Dad’s bed and let myself remember the seventh floor six years ago. The cardiologist with his charts. Bert saying quietly that maybe we should try the stents first, and me saying no, the bypass fixes everything, she’s strong, she can handle it. Dad turning his hat around and around in his hands, and then looking at me. In six years I had never forgiven myself for that look, or for what came after it. Every time I drove past this hospital on I-75, I looked the other way. Every Christmas I sat across the table from Bert and couldn’t meet his eyes, because he’d been right and I’d been wrong, and our mother was in the ground.
Bert never once said he told me so. He just grew quieter, and came to see Dad more, and took over the bills and the farm and the doctor’s appointments one piece at a time, and I let him. I let him because I had stopped trusting myself.
Chapter Seven: Before Dawn
Just before dawn on Sunday, the monitor changed its rhythm and woke me. It was 5:42. Dad’s heart rate was climbing, and when I sat up in the recliner I saw that his eyes were open and he was turning his head carefully on the pillow, mindful of the bandage and the drain, until he found me.
“Greta,” he said.
My real name. I got up out of that chair so fast my knees cracked, and I took his hand, and it was warm now, not cold the way it had been in pre-op.
“Hi, Daddy,” I said.
He studied my face for a long moment, and his eyes were clear. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Where am I?”
I told him he was in Lexington, at the UK hospital, that he’d fallen in the barn lot on Friday and hit his head on a gate post. He frowned and thought about it, and then he nodded slowly. “The calving pen gate,” he said. “That latch sticks. I’ve been meaning to fix it for two years.” Then he saw that I was crying, and he squeezed my fingers. “Now don’t do that,” he said. “I’ve got a hard head. Your mother always said so.”
The night nurse, a young woman named Brittany, came in and shined a light in his eyes and asked him questions. He told her his name and the year and who the president was, along with exactly what he thought of him. When she pointed at me and asked who I was, he said, “That’s my girl, Greta. She fixes road graders for the county.” Brittany smiled and told me quietly that he was clearing, that it was a very good sign, and that she would page Dr. Farouk.
Then Dad looked past me at the empty recliner and the closed door and the glass wall, searching. “Where’s Bert?” he asked. “Is my boy here?”
“He’s here,” I said. “He’s outside.”
“Outside?” Dad frowned. “What on earth is he doing outside?”
I told him I’d be right back. I rode the elevator down to the lobby and walked out through the glass doors into a cold gray morning, across Rose Street and into the surface lot, while the sky behind the parking garage began to go pale. Birds were starting up in the trees along the street. I stood at the edge of the lot with my phone in my hand.
I could have called Otis first. He’d been texting me every hour all night from Tennessee, asking for news. I could have called Aunt Pearl, Dad’s last living sister, who was eighty-three and in a nursing home in Morehead and had been calling the hospital since Friday. I could have called the prayer chain at Christy Creek Baptist, forty women with their phones charged, waiting to pass it on. I scrolled past every one of them.
I called my brother.
He picked up on the first ring. Across two rows of cars I could see him through his windshield, sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat with the phone pressed to his ear and his other hand gripping the wheel. He had never left the lot. He had sat there the whole night through.
“Is he…” His voice broke on the second word, and he couldn’t finish.
I took a breath. “He’s awake, Bert,” I said. “He knows me. He said my name.” I watched his face through the glass. “And he’s asking for you. He wants to know where his boy is.”
My brother lowered the phone into his lap. He covered his face with both hands and bent forward until his forehead rested on the steering wheel, and even from where I stood, I could see his shoulders shaking.
Chapter Eight: What Bert Carried
I walked over to his truck and knocked on the window. He jerked upright and stared at me through the glass. He hadn’t shaved since Friday, and his eyes were red and swollen in a way I had not seen since we stood together at Mom’s graveside. After a moment he rolled the window down, and for a while neither of us said anything while the birds got louder and a garbage truck beeped somewhere down Rose Street.
Then he reached into the front pocket of his hoodie, the same pocket his hands had been buried in on the sidewalk, and held his fist out the window. When he opened it, two tiny brass valve cores lay in his palm, a little grimy from the stems, their springs glinting in the gray light. He had carried them in his pocket for twenty-four hours.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was barely there. “I’m so sorry, Greta. I wasn’t thinking.”
I didn’t take them. “Why?” I asked.
He looked down at the cores in his hand. “Because of Mom,” he said. “Because I knew what you’d want. I knew you’d sit in that room with the surgeon and say the big one gets everything, he’s strong, he can take it. The same as you did with her. And Dad would have listened to you, even with my name on the paper. Dad’s not even awake to say no, and you’d look at me, and I’d fold. Like I folded last time.”
“Bert.”
“I said the stents once,” he went on, wiping his face with the back of his wrist. “One time. And you said bypass, and Dad looked at you, and I shut my mouth. I shut my mouth, and she died. And I’ve been shutting my mouth ever since.”
I told him what Dr. Farouk had said, about Dad’s wishes and the promise. Bert nodded slowly and said it was true. A month after the funeral, Dad had come home from the lawyer’s office and sat him down at the kitchen table and said, “Bert, if it’s ever me, don’t let them cut me wide open. I want the smallest thing that’ll work, and if it doesn’t work, that’s the Lord’s business.” Bert looked up at me then, and I could see he didn’t want to say the rest.
“And then he said, don’t let Greta talk you into it,” Bert told me. “He said, she’ll want to fix everything, she’ll want to get it all, that’s how she is and that’s how her mother was. And then he said, don’t you ever tell her I said that. It’ll break her heart. She’s already carrying her mother.”
I stood beside his truck in the cold with my hand on the door, and something in my chest that had been clenched for six years didn’t let go so much as crack. I opened his door. He didn’t stop me.
“Get out of the truck, Bert,” I said. “Daddy wants his boy.”
We walked across the street together and through the glass doors and into the elevator, and neither of us spoke as the floors ticked by. Somewhere between five and six, Bert reached over and took my hand. He hadn’t held my hand since I was nine years old and he walked me across Highway 32 to catch the school bus. I let him.
Chapter Nine: Dad’s Words
When we came into room 6114, the nurse had raised the head of Dad’s bed and he was working on a cup of ice chips while Dr. Farouk studied his chart at the foot of the bed. Dad looked up and saw Bert standing in the doorway, and his whole face changed.
“Bert,” he said. “There’s my boy.”
Bert crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, careful of the drain, and Dad reached up and laid his hand against his son’s unshaven cheek. “You look terrible,” Dad told him. Bert managed a laugh and said he ought to see himself, he had a tube sticking out of his head, and Dad laughed too and then winced and begged him not to make him laugh because it pulled.
Dr. Farouk came around to me and said quietly that the morning scan looked good, that most of the blood was gone, and that he was remarkably clear. “He asked me where I went to medical school,” she said, “and whether they taught us how to use a level.” I told her that sounded exactly like him. She smiled and left the three of us alone.
Dad looked from one of us to the other, and his eyes narrowed. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “What’s the matter with you two?”
Bert reached into his pocket and held out his open hand with the two brass cores in it. “These came out of Greta’s back tires,” he said. “Yesterday morning, in the lot at St. Claire. I took them out so she couldn’t make the meeting with the surgeon.” He swallowed. “With the tool you gave me.”
The room went quiet except for the monitors. Dad stared at the cores for a long moment, and then he turned to me and asked how I’d gotten to Lexington. When I told him Percy Hamm had hauled me and the car on his wrecker for six hundred dollars, Dad closed his eyes and said, “Percy Hamm. Lord have mercy.”
When he opened them again, he asked Bert why, and Bert told him everything, the kitchen table and the promise and the seventh floor and how scared he’d been of shutting his mouth again. “It’s the worst thing I ever did,” he finished. “I sat in that truck all night. I couldn’t come in. I couldn’t look at her.”
Dad was quiet for a long time. Then he turned his head on the pillow and looked at me. “Did Bert tell you what I said about you?” he asked. “At the kitchen table?”
“He told me.”
“I shouldn’t have said it,” Dad said. “Not like that, and not behind your back, and not to him.” He took a slow breath. “Greta, you didn’t kill your mother. I know you think you did. I’ve watched you think it for six years. You won’t drive past this place. You can’t look your brother in the eye at Christmas.” He shook his head against the pillow. “Your mother’s heart was bad. It was going to quit one way or another. The bypass was a good choice. The doctor said so, and if she’d come through it, you’d have been right. She just didn’t come through it. That isn’t on you, honey. It isn’t on anybody.”
I asked him, barely able to get the words out, why he had told Bert not to let me talk him into anything. He was quiet for a while before he answered.
“Because I was grieving, and I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t want to go out on a table the way she did. And I knew you’d fight for me the way you fought for her. That’s not a bad thing, Greta. That’s love. That’s your mother in you. She’d have fought a bear for any one of us.” He reached for my hand. “But I should have told you myself. I never should have made your brother carry it, or made him choose between you and me.”
Chapter Ten: Square
Dad stayed at UK for six days. They took the drain out on Monday, and on Tuesday he walked to the bathroom with a nurse at his elbow, and by Wednesday he was complaining about the food and asking when he could go home and look at his cows. On Thursday they moved him across town to Cardinal Hill, the rehabilitation hospital, to work on his balance and make sure he could manage his house and his barn lot safely. A social worker named Donna walked me through the paperwork and explained that Medicare would pay in full for the first twenty days in a skilled rehab facility after a hospital stay of three nights or more. Dad had stayed six, so he qualified, and he ended up needing eighteen.
Bert and I took turns. He came in the mornings and I came in the evenings after work, and on weekends we overlapped. We didn’t talk about the valve cores. But on the second Saturday, when I came into Dad’s room at noon, Bert stood up and handed me an envelope with six hundred and forty dollars in it. He said it was for Percy and for the tire shop, and that he’d called Clark’s on Main to ask what they would have charged for the cores and the labor. When I hesitated, he said it wasn’t enough but it was what he owed, and so I took it.
Percy wouldn’t. I drove out to his garage on US 60 the following Monday, in my Accord with two new four-dollar valve cores in the back tires, and found him underneath a wrecker on a creeper. He rolled out, asked how my daddy was doing, and when I told him Dad would be home soon, he rolled right back under. I held out Bert’s envelope and told him it was six hundred dollars, and he answered from beneath the truck without even looking.
“Delmar Sizemore stood on a creek bank in eighty-nine and laughed at me the whole time I pulled his truck out of the water,” he said. “Then he paid me twice what I asked. Said I’d earned it for having to listen to him.” He rolled back out and pointed a wrench at me. “We’re square, Greta. Tell your brother to keep his money.”
I didn’t tell Bert that. I took the envelope to Christy Creek Baptist the next Sunday and dropped it in the offering plate for the benevolence fund, the one that helps people around here when trouble comes. On the outside I wrote, For whoever needs a tow.
Otis came home that same week after nine days in Tennessee and drove straight to Cardinal Hill without stopping at the house. He walked into Dad’s room at eight o’clock at night in his Clark Energy shirt, still smelling of creosote and road dust, and found Dad sitting up by the window eating a cup of chocolate pudding. Dad asked him whether he’d gotten those people their lights back, and Otis said every last one of them, and Dad nodded and called him a good boy.
We brought Dad home to Christy Creek on the second Friday in November. Bert drove him, and I followed with the back seat full of get-well cards and a potted plant from the church and a teddy bear holding a heart that Aunt Pearl had sent from the nursing home. Marty was leaning on the fence by the barn when we pulled in, after twenty-four days of feeding cattle that weren’t his. Dad climbed out of Bert’s truck with his cane and stood a while in his own yard, looking at the barn and the pasture and the black baldies grazing beyond it. “Marty,” he said finally. “You still here?” Marty said somebody had to keep those cows fat.
Dad walked across the yard with Bert on one side of him and me on the other, slowly, all the way to the barn lot and the calving pen gate. He stood in front of the thick old creosote post beside it and looked at the dark stain on one side for a long time. “That’s the one,” he said.
Chapter Eleven: The Papers
On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Dad asked us both to drive him into Morehead to see Grady Fannin, the lawyer who has practiced on Main Street since 1979 and who had drawn up Dad’s papers six years before. He said he needed to fix something, and he wanted both of us in the same room at the same time while he did it.
Grady’s office is on the second floor above a jewelry store, all wood paneling and law books and a framed photograph of Grady shaking hands with a governor. He pulled two chairs up to his big oak desk for Bert and me, and Dad sat in a third with his cane across his knees and laid it out plainly. He wanted Bert to keep his financial power of attorney, because Bert had handled the bills for six years without a single mistake. But he wanted the health care surrogate changed so that both of us would hold it together, so that no doctor could ever talk to one of his children without the other one in the room.
“And I want a living will,” he said. “The real thing, written down, so nobody ever has to carry what I said at a kitchen table.”
Grady took out the Kentucky Living Will Directive form and went through it line by line, what treatments Dad would want and which ones he wouldn’t, feeding tubes and breathing machines and all the rest. When they came to the part about surgery, Dad put his hand flat on the desk.
“Write this,” he said. “The smallest thing that’ll work. That’s what I want. And if the smallest thing won’t work, then my two kids decide it together, in the same room, and whatever they settle on together, that’s what I want.”
He signed it in front of Grady’s secretary and the jeweler from downstairs, who served as his witnesses, and Grady notarized it. Then Dad pushed the surrogate form across the desk to Bert, and Bert signed his part and slid the pen to me, and I signed my name, Greta Sizemore Caudill, right underneath my brother’s.
In the parking lot afterward, Dad stopped beside the truck and dug in his coat pocket and brought out two small red valve core tools, brand new from the Tractor Supply, with the cardboard tags still on them. He and Bert had stopped for them on the way home from Cardinal Hill, he said. He pressed one into each of our hands.
“When Greta turned sixteen, I gave you each one of these and said it was so you’d never get stuck,” he told us. “I should have said something else. I should have said it was so you’d always help each other get unstuck.” He looked at Bert and then at me. “Put those on your key rings next to the old ones. That way you’ve each got two, and if one of you ever loses a valve core, the other one’s got the tool.”
Chapter Twelve: The New Post
In March, before calving season, we replaced the gate post. Dad said he wasn’t going to look at that post every morning for the rest of his life, so on a Saturday Bert and Otis and Marty and I gathered in the barn lot with a post-hole digger and a tamping bar and a new creosote post Bert had bought at the lumberyard. Dad sat in a lawn chair by the barn door in his barn boots and brown wool socks, with his cane across his knees, and supervised every move we made.
The old post fought us. Dad had set it himself in 1971, the year he and Mom bought their first cattle, and it took Bert and Otis twenty minutes of working a pry bar back and forth while Marty dug around the base before it finally tipped and came free. Bert carried it over and laid it on the ground in front of Dad’s chair, and Dad looked down at it for a long while, at the dark stain on its side.
“Well,” he said. “That’s the one that almost got me.”
Bert asked if he wanted it burned, and Dad thought about it and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Cut it up. Make something out of it.”
We set the new post. Bert held it plumb with a level while I tamped and Marty filled the hole a shovelful at a time, and Otis hung the gate back on its hinges. Then Bert took the sticky old latch off, the one Dad had been meaning to fix for years, and cleaned it with a wire brush and oiled it and bolted it back on. He swung the gate closed, and the latch caught with a clean, sharp click.
Dad pushed himself up out of the lawn chair and walked across the lot with his cane. He laid his hand on the gate and swung it open and closed, open and closed, listening to that click each time. “That’s a good gate,” he said. Then he turned around and looked at the four of us standing there in the March mud.
“I don’t remember much of those two days after I fell,” he said. “I know I called Greta by her mother’s name, and I called the nurses by my sisters’ names. But I remember waking up in that room in Lexington in the dark. The first thing I saw was my girl in that chair, and the first thing I thought was, where’s my boy?” His voice caught, and he waited until it steadied. “And then my girl walked out to that parking lot, and of everybody she could have called, she called my boy first. Before anybody.” He looked at me. “Why’d you do that, Greta? After what he did?”
I thought about standing at the edge of that lot at dawn with my phone in my hand, scrolling past my husband and my aunt and the whole prayer chain, and looking two rows over at my brother behind his windshield where he’d sat all night long. “Because he’d been sitting out there all night not knowing,” I said. “The same as I’d been sitting inside not knowing. And because he’s my brother, and you were asking for him.”
Bert didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he pulled his keys from his jeans pocket and held them up. Two red valve core tools hung side by side on the ring, one worn smooth and one still bright, and between them, on a little split ring of their own, were two tiny brass valve cores, a bit grimy, with their springs still in them.
“I kept them,” he said quietly. “The ones from your tires. I didn’t know if you’d want them back.”
I looked at them for a long moment, those two small brass pieces that cost fifty cents apiece and had kept me sixty-five miles from my father for an hour and forty-six minutes. Then I reached out and slid the little split ring off his key ring and held it in my palm, and after a while I threaded it onto my own, between my old tool and my new one.
“Keep those,” Dad said. “Both of you. Remember.”
“Remember what?” Bert asked.
Dad looked around him then, at the new post and the gate swinging shut in the spring wind, at his forty head grazing in the pasture beyond it, at the barn his own father built, and at his two grown children standing in the mud with matching key rings. “Remember that the air goes out quick,” he said. “Thirty seconds and you’re flat. But it goes back in just as quick, if somebody’s got the part.”
That night Bert cut the old post into pieces with his chainsaw, and over the next week he sanded two of them smooth and coated them in clear varnish so the dark stain still showed through the grain. One became a small shelf that he hung beside Dad’s back door, right where Dad keeps his keys. The other became a key hook with two brass hooks screwed into it, and he gave that one to me. It hangs beside my front door now.
My keys go on it every night, the two red tools and the little split ring between them with my brother’s two brass valve cores. Every morning when I take them down to go to work, I hold them in my palm for a moment before I walk out to the car. Out of habit now, I bend down and check my back tires, and they are always full.