My stepson told a judge he’d sat beside his dying father every night for nine weeks, and the judge thanked him from the bench. Then he turned toward me and said, “Somebody had to, since she was always at her sister’s.” The farmhouse was worth $286,000. Eddie’s dog tag was in my coat pocket, and I hadn’t said a word yet.
Eddie signed a new will in March, two months before the hospice people rolled a bed into our front room, and it put the farmhouse outside Ottumwa in my name.
If Kurt got that will thrown out, I had until January to be gone.
His lawyer, Mr. Prescott, walked him through it slow, like a eulogy.
“Every night, Your Honor,” Kurt said. “I’d get there around nine and leave when the sun came up.”
Judge Ortega wrote something down.
“That’s a great deal to give,” she said. “Thank you for doing it.”
Kurt lived two hours away.
He came to the farm FOUR times in nine weeks.
I knew, because I made a pot of coffee every time and he never drank any of it.
Anand Pagano, my lawyer, put two fingers on my wrist under the table.
“Not yet,” he said.
He didn’t have to tell me.
Eddie already had.
The bailiff had a bandage on his thumb with little green dinosaurs on it.
Mr. Prescott held up a photograph next.
Kurt in the brown recliner by the hospital bed, Eddie asleep, the clock over the window reading 2:10.
“You took this yourself?” the judge said.
“Yes ma’am. I wanted something to remember those nights by.”
I remembered that night too.
He showed up at one in the morning and asked me where his dad kept the deed.
Then he sat in my recliner for forty minutes while I put my head down on the kitchen table, and that’s when he took the picture.
He slept in his truck in our driveway and was gone before I got up to change Eddie’s sheets.
Gwen sat behind him in the first row with her purse on her knees, nodding at every word.
She’d been to the farm once. The funeral lunch. She took the leftover ham home in my good dish.
Then Kurt got to the part he’d practiced in the car.
“By the end, Dad didn’t even know who she was,” he said.
“He kept calling her the nurse. He’d look at me and say, ‘When’s the nurse going home?'”
Somebody in the back laughed. Not loud.
My face went hot all the way down my neck.
Twelve years.
I’d learned to roll him on a draw sheet so his bad hip wouldn’t take his weight. I’d slept sitting up in that recliner SIXTY-THREE nights.
I knew which cough meant water and which one meant he was scared.
The nurse.
Riley, the actual nurse, came Tuesdays and Fridays and signed a sheet every visit. Anand had copies of every one in a blue folder.
But the sheets only covered the daytime.
Nobody signs anything at three in the morning.
“Dad told me the house was mine,” Kurt said. “Out of his own mouth, in that room, while SHE was asleep in the kitchen.”
He pointed at me when he said it.
Judge Ortega looked at me over her glasses for a long second.
Then back at him.
“Mr. Szabo, I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “It’s clear you were THERE for him.”
Kurt nodded and wiped one eye with his knuckle.
It was dry. I was close enough to see.
“Mrs. Szabo,” the judge said. “Is there anything you’d like the court to hear before I rule?”
Anand started to stand.
I put my hand on his arm and got up first.
My knees cracked. Everybody heard.
On Eddie’s last night it rained so hard I couldn’t hear his oxygen machine.
He’d been quiet two days. I thought he was past talking.
Around four he found my hand and pushed something into it, still warm from under his pillow.
His dog tag. From 1968. He never once took it off, not even in the shower.
The back of it was scratched all over.
He’d done it with the pin off my church pantry name badge. I found the pin on his tray table that morning, bent nearly in half.
“Let him talk first, Pearlie,” Eddie said. “Let him say ALL of it.”
That was the last whole sentence I ever got.
So I let him.
I walked to the front rail with the chain wound around my fingers.
“My husband gave me this nine hours before he died,” I said. “Kurt wasn’t there that night. HE WASN’T THERE ANY NIGHT.”
Kurt laughed. “Oh, come ON.”
“Your Honor, it’s a piece of jewelry,” Mr. Prescott said.
“It’s his dog tag,” I said. “His blood type’s on the front. Read the back.”
The bailiff carried it up to the bench.
Judge Ortega held it under her lamp and turned it over.
She read it once.
Then she tipped it toward the light and read it again, slower, her lips moving.
Gwen stopped nodding.
The judge set the tag down on a tissue, very carefully, like it was something that could spill.
“Mr. Szabo,” she said. “Come up here and read the back of this out loud for me.”
Kurt didn’t get up.
The tissue on the bench
Mr. Prescott stood up for him.
“Your Honor, my client isn’t going to read something he’s never been allowed to look at.”
“Then I’ll read it,” Judge Ortega said.
She picked the tag up by the chain and held it under the lamp.
“Pearlie sat every nite. K 4 times. Asked for deed. Not his. E.S.”
She spelled out nite for the court reporter. N-I-T-E.
Kurt’s ears went red. Just the ears. Eddie told me once that’s how he knew Kurt had been in the till at the feed store, back when Kurt was eleven.
Mr. Prescott didn’t sit down.
“Your Honor, that pin came off Mrs. Szabo’s own badge. By her own account it was in her kitchen the morning he died. Anybody with a pin can scratch a piece of tin.”
“It’s not tin,” I said.
That was all I said.
Judge Ortega folded the tissue over the tag.
“I’m going to hold this,” she said. “We’ll continue in two weeks. Mr. Pagano, I’ll need more than a widow’s word for who did that scratching.”
The bailiff put Eddie’s tag in a yellow envelope and wrote a number on it with a marker.
It was the first time since July it hadn’t been on me.
In the hallway Kurt walked past close enough that I smelled his aftershave.
“Dad couldn’t hold a fork in July, Pearl,” he said. “You fed him with a baby spoon. I saw that much.”
The Kraus Feed calendar
Eddie wrote everything on the calendar by the kitchen phone.
Kraus Feed gave them out free every December, a different tractor every month, and Eddie filled the squares in block capitals with a carpenter’s pencil. Vet. Seed corn. Pearl’s sister b-day. Church supper, bring rolls.
He wrote left-handed and his S’s came out backward. A teacher in a one-room school in Wapello County made him switch hands in 1953 and slapped his knuckles till he did, and when he switched back at fourteen the S stayed turned around for good.
He didn’t care. He signed his checks that way.
I met him at the church pantry in 2013. He came in with the back of his truck full of sweet corn he couldn’t sell and asked who was in charge. I was wearing my badge with the pin on it. He read my name off it and said, “Pearl. That’s an old lady name.” I was fifty-five.
We were married the next fall. Kurt didn’t come. He sent a card with forty dollars in it and his name signed for Gwen too.
Kurt was good in public. He gave the eulogy. He called his dad his best friend and brought a framed picture of the two of them holding a catfish, and set it on an easel by the casket. At the funeral lunch he told the pastor he’d been out every night at the end.
I heard him say it. I was carrying the ham.
There were four K’s on the calendar. May 30, June 14, July 3, July 19. Eddie made those. By July 19 the K was so shaky it looked like a fence post with a wire down.
In June the pin went missing off my badge. I blamed the dryer and stuck the badge on with a safety pin the rest of the summer.
The night after the hearing I sat at the kitchen table with the calendar open to July.
I didn’t have the tag anymore. I didn’t need it.
I’d read it so many times I could see it with my eyes shut. The last two letters. E, period.
And a backward S.
Twenty thousand dollars
Anand’s office is over the insurance place on Main Street and smells like their copier.
I put the calendar on his desk, and a canceled check of Eddie’s, and I showed him the S.
He looked at it a long time. Then he pushed it back across to me.
“You were married to him twelve years,” he said. “Prescott’s going to stand up and say you’ve seen that S a thousand times. That calendar hangs in your kitchen. Every single thing you’ve got is something you could have made yourself.”
“I didn’t make it.”
“I know that. I need the judge to know it.”
Then he took a letter out of the blue folder.
Prescott’s offer. Twenty thousand dollars. I’d be out of the house by January 15, I’d drop any claim on the farm, and they’d drop “any matter regarding the item.”
The item.
“He’s calling it tampering,” Anand said. “He hasn’t filed anything. He wants you to think he could.”
I drove to Fairfield that afternoon. I hadn’t been to Julie’s since Easter.
She made tuna sandwiches and cut them corner to corner like our mother did.
“He told a judge you were always HERE?” Julie said. “You missed my birthday. I was mad at you for a month.”
“I know.”
“Take the twenty thousand, Pearl. Come live with me. You’ve got the spare room, you’ve got the cat. You don’t need a farmhouse at sixty-eight.”
“Eddie wanted me in it.”
“Eddie’s not paying the lawyer.”
She wasn’t wrong. Anand was charging me two hundred and ten dollars an hour and I’d stopped opening the envelopes.
I drove home with the radio off.
Thursday after supper somebody knocked on the front door, and nobody ever uses our front door.
My good dish
It was Gwen.
She was holding my blue casserole dish with both hands, washed, a dish towel folded over the top.
“I meant to bring this back in August,” she said.
I didn’t ask her in. She came in anyway, just past the mat, and looked at the front room. The hospital bed was gone. The square where it stood was still lighter on the rug.
“He was home,” she said.
“What?”
“Kurt. Every night but four. I’m the one he snores next to. I know where he was.”
I set the dish on the hall table.
“Then say that in court.”
“I’m not saying anything in court. I’m married to him.”
“So why are you in my house, Gwen?”
She was quiet so long the furnace kicked on.
“Eddie called him in April,” she said. “Told him about the will. Kurt got off the phone and called Dave Prescott that same night. I heard him on the deck.”
April. Eddie was still walking to the mailbox in April.
“That picture of him in the chair,” Gwen said. “He showed it to me at breakfast the next morning. He’d already sent it to Dave.”
“Why?”
She put her hand on the doorknob.
“He said, ‘Look how far gone he is. That’ll do it.'”
Eddie’s magnifier
Anand had given me copies of everything in that blue folder. Kurt’s photograph was Exhibit 4, printed on regular paper, a little gray.
I’d looked at it once and put it face down. I didn’t want to see Kurt in my chair.
That night I got Eddie’s magnifier out of the rolltop desk. He used it for the small print on seed tags and the tiny numbers in the phone book. It has a light in the handle that hasn’t worked since about 2019.
I turned on the lamp over the table and looked at the picture square by square.
Kurt, grinning up at his own phone.
The clock over the window. 2:10.
Eddie with his eyes shut and his mouth open, the way it went at the end.
His left hand out on top of the blanket.
The chain was pulled out of his pajama top. The tag lay flat on his chest, back side up.
And his left thumb and finger were pinched around something small and bright, right up against it.
I moved the magnifier closer till the dots in the paper showed.
My pin. You can see the little bar at the end of it.
Past Kurt’s shoulder there’s the kitchen doorway, and in the doorway, at the very edge of the picture, the back of a gray head on a table, and one elbow in a blue cardigan.
Mine. Where Kurt swore I was.
I called Anand at eleven at night. He picked up on the fifth ring, sounding like he’d been asleep.
“Get out Exhibit 4,” I said. “Look at Eddie’s left hand.”
I heard him go to find it. Then nothing for a while.
“Pearl,” he said. “Kurt took the only picture of your husband writing that tag.”
Exhibit four
They put it up on the screen at the continuation, so big Eddie’s hand was the size of a pie plate.
Anand asked to call Kurt back up. Mr. Prescott objected. The judge let him.
“Mr. Szabo, two weeks ago you told this court your father couldn’t hold a fork in July.”
“He couldn’t.”
“This photograph is from July 3. Your phone says so. What’s in your father’s left hand?”
Kurt looked at the screen like it was somebody else’s.
“I don’t know. He picked at stuff at the end. His blanket, his buttons. The hospice lady said that’s normal. It could be anything.”
“It’s a pin,” Anand said. “With a bar on the end. Mrs. Szabo’s pin went missing in June.”
“Then she PUT it there. She probably stuck it in his hand to—”
“You testified she was asleep in the kitchen at that time.”
“She was.”
“Is that her? In the doorway?”
Kurt leaned forward. Then he sat back.
“I didn’t see him doing anything,” he said. “I was there to sit with him. I took one picture so Dave could see what shape he was in, that’s all, so he’d know Dad wasn’t—”
“Kurt,” Mr. Prescott said.
Judge Ortega took her glasses off.
“You sent this photograph to your attorney, Mr. Szabo?”
“I sent it to Dave, yeah. That week.”
“Your father was alive that week.”
Kurt didn’t answer that one.
Then she turned to me. Anand had told me she would, and that I had to answer it straight.
“Mrs. Szabo. Were you asleep that night?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“For how long?”
“Forty minutes. It’s the only time I put my head down all summer.” I had more to say and I didn’t say it. “I’m sorry I did.”
It’s in the transcript now. Anybody can read it.
She ruled from the bench. The March will stands. The contest is denied. The tag stays with the clerk thirty days, until the time for an appeal runs out, and then it comes back to me.
Thirty more days. It had already been gone fourteen.
Mr. Prescott put his papers in his bag one at a time and didn’t look at his client.
Kurt stood up so fast the chair banged the rail.
“Keep the house,” he said to me. “Keep all of it. You were never his family. You were the help. He SAID so.”
Nobody laughed this time.
He turned around for Gwen.
She wasn’t in the first row. She was in the back, on the aisle, with her purse on her knees.
“Get the truck,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
“You’ve got the keys,” Gwen said.
The clerk’s window
January 15 came on a Friday. It’s the day I’d have had to be gone.
The clerk slid the yellow envelope under the glass and had me sign for it twice. The bailiff with the dinosaur bandage was at the next window eating a granola bar. His thumb was fine now.
“Thank you, Mrs. Szabo,” the clerk said, for signing.
There was a white evidence sticker on the chain I couldn’t get off with my nail. It’s still there. It’s the kind that peels in little pieces.
I drove home and came in the back like always.
The recliner’s still in the front room. I sleep in the bedroom again but I sit in that chair to read. The calendar by the phone is a new one from Kraus Feed with a blue Ford on it. I haven’t written anything in it yet.
I made a pot of coffee out of habit. Too much, for one person.
Then I got my pantry badge off the hook. I’d bought a new pin for it at the craft store in Ottumwa, a dollar nineteen.
I turned the tag over once under the kitchen light and ran my thumb over the backward S.
Then I put the chain over my head and dropped the tag down inside my collar, where he kept it.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to someone who’s sat up nights in a chair beside somebody they love.
Family secrets and long-kept truths surface in “For Nine Years, My Son Never Knew What Was in My Coat” and “My Son Laughed at the Year on the Deed I Kept in Donna’s Freezer”; for another story of someone being underestimated, read “Sixty-One Kids Owed the Cafeteria $3,140. She Pushed My Pie Back Across the Table.”
