We gave Roger coffee. He sat there turning the cup around and around in his hands. He couldn’t look at either one of us.
“She did it for me,” he said. “That’s the part I can’t stand. She did it so I wouldn’t worry. And I laid in that bed and let her handle everything, and I never once asked her how.”
“You were sick, Roger,” I said.
“I was sick,” he said. “I’m not sick now.”
He set the cup down.
“I’m going back to the lumberyard part time in January. Dispatch desk. No lifting. And the first five hundred is coming out of my check. Not hers. I want you to know that. That money’s coming from me.”
Doug looked at him a long time. Then he reached over and squeezed Roger’s shoulder. Just once. For Doug, that’s a whole sermon.
The first check from Sherry came on the first of December.
Five hundred dollars, in a plain white envelope. Inside was a note in her round handwriting.
“One of 152. I am so sorry. Love, Sissy.”
One hundred and fifty-two checks. That’s twelve and a half years, a little over. She’d done the arithmetic on every dollar I’d paid and divided it out. Sherry always was good with paperwork.
I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like the state of Kentucky.
But that’s getting ahead of things. The part I really want to tell you about is the first of November.
I went to see Daddy that morning, the way I’d promised, to go over his statement with him.
When I got to his room, he was sitting up in his recliner with his good green cardigan on and his reading glasses on the end of his nose. He had an envelope in his lap.
It was from Bobby Whitt. Nancy had addressed it in her neat, careful hand.
Clayton Akers. Room 14. And the name of the home and the street.
“Came in the mail yesterday,” Daddy said. “Bobby’s always been right on time. Twenty-two years, and he’s never been late once.”
He didn’t open it right away. He just sat with it in his lap and looked out the window, toward the road that runs out of town toward the farm.
“I’ve been thinking about that corner post,” he said.
“What about it, Daddy?”
“About my daddy saying a corner post is the one you don’t cut corners on. He meant everything else on the line leans on it. If the corner goes, the whole fence goes with it.”
He was quiet a minute.
“I let myself get to thinking I wasn’t anybody’s corner post anymore. That I was just something that leaned.”
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
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