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.”
“You were never that,” I said.
“I was getting there,” he said. “You girls were going to let me. And I was going to let you.”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses.
“Thank you for driving me out there. Thank you for not doing it all yourself.”
“I almost did,” I said. “I had the phone in my hand in that parking lot. I almost called her.”
“I know you did,” he said. “You’re your mama’s daughter. She’d have had it on the phone too. And then she’d have hung up and come and got me.”
Then he opened the envelope.
He did it slowly, with his thumbnail, the way he’s always opened everything, so he wouldn’t tear what was inside.
He took out the check and held it up to the window light and looked at it for a long while.
Thirteen thousand dollars. Pay to the order of Clayton Akers. In the memo line, Nancy had written “fall rent,” the same as she had every November for twenty-two years.
“Get me a pen, Teresa,” he said.
I got one out of my purse.
He turned the check over on his tray table and held it flat with his left hand. His right hand shook. It’s shaken for about two years now. A little worse in the mornings. Some days he has trouble with his shirt buttons, and Kayla has to help him.
“You want me to write it, Daddy? You could just sign it, and I’ll fill in the rest.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll write it. It’s my rent.”
So I sat on my hands and let him.
Out in the hall, somebody was pushing the lunch cart, and one of the wheels squeaked. Down the way, somebody’s radio was playing old gospel music, low.
He wrote it slowly. One letter at a time. Pressing down hard so the pen wouldn’t skip.
Pay to the order of the home. The whole long name of the place, spelled out, every single word. It took him a good while. He didn’t ask for help. And I didn’t give it.
Then, underneath, his own name.
Clayton Akers.
The C was big and shaky, and the rest of it went uphill a little. The way his signature has always gone uphill, ever since I can remember. On my report cards. On feed bills. On the back of every rent check Bobby Whitt ever wrote him.
He looked at it a long time when he was done.
Then he held it out to me, his hand still trembling.
“Take that down to the business office,” he said. “Tell them it’s from Clayton Akers in fourteen. Tell them it’s my rent, from my land, for my keep.”
He took off his glasses and folded them.
“And tell them to quit sending my daughter a bill.”
I walked down that long hallway with the check in my hand. Past the nurses’ station. Past the dayroom where the old men were watching a ball game with the sound off.
The woman in the business office was named Pam. She’d sent me a statement every month for three years. She took the check, turned it over, and read the back.
“Well, look at that,” she said softly. “He wrote it out himself.”
“He did,” I said.
She pulled up his account on her computer and typed for a minute. Then she printed something and handed it to me across the desk.
It was a new billing form. Under “Responsible Party,” where my name and my address had been typed for thirty-six months, it now said one name.
Clayton Akers.
I folded it up and put it in my purse, and I kept it. I’ve still got it.
That spring, Doug and I got the new roof. Eleven thousand dollars, metal, a dark green that matches the shutters. When the first hard rain came in April, I lay in bed and listened to it drum on that roof, and there wasn’t one pan set out anywhere in the house.
Doug rolled over in the dark and said, “Gatlinburg in October, or Cherokee in September?”
I laughed so hard I had to sit up.
We went in October. We rented a little cabin with a porch that looked out over the whole valley. Every morning, I sat out there with my coffee and watched the fog lift off the mountains. And every morning, I thought about that corner post on the north pasture fence, gray as a ghost, still standing after sixty-five years.
Sherry has never missed a payment. Not one. Some months, the envelope has a note in it about Roger, how he’s doing at the dispatch desk, how he walked two miles on the treadmill at the hospital wellness center. Some months, the note just says, “Thinking of you, Sissy.”
Last Christmas, she came over on Christmas Eve with a pan of her sausage balls and stood in my kitchen doorway, not sure if she should come all the way in.
I walked over and hugged her. First time in more than a year.
She cried on my shoulder. Then she reached up and tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear, the way she used to every morning before the school bus.
“You still can’t do anything with this mess,” she said.
“Never could,” I said.
On the first of every month, I drive the forty miles to the home. Daddy and I sit at his tray table with his reading glasses and mine, and we go over his statement from Farmers National, line by line.
Social Security on the third. Long-term care on the tenth. The home on the fifteenth.
And twice a year, in March and November, one more line. A deposit from the Whitt Farm. Fall rent. Spring rent.
Every time he sees it, Daddy puts his finger right on it. He holds it there a second, flat on the paper, the way he held his hand on that corner post.
“That’s mine,” he says.
And every time, I tell him the same thing.
“Yes, Daddy. It always was.”
THE END..!
