Nine days after my back surgery I called my husband from the pull-out couch six feet from his father’s hospice bed, and a woman answered and said, “He’s asleep, Leslie. He told me you’re dead weight now, you and the old man both.” My father-in-law hadn’t said a word in two days. That night his hand found mine.
We’d moved Ron into our den in February so he wouldn’t have to die at the county place.
I was the one who turned him every two hours, nights too, until a disc in my lower back gave out in April.
Shawn was gone four nights a week selling grain dryers across three states.
He called every evening at eight.
And every call that spring ended the same way.
“Did you ask Dad about the key yet?”
The key was for a safe deposit box at the credit union in Fergus Falls. Ron had kept it since before Shawn was born.
Nobody had seen it since the stroke.
“He doesn’t know where it is, Shawn.”
“He knows. He’s stalling. Ask him again.”
So I asked. Ron would close his eyes and turn his face to the window.
Shawn had a buyer lined up for his dad’s 160 acres. A solar company out of Fargo, $1.3 million, and they wanted it signed by fall.
“Once that box is open, we’re set,” he said. “No more of this.”
I didn’t ask what this was.
The surgeon fused two vertebrae on a Tuesday.
I came home that Friday with a walker, a bottle of pills and orders not to lift anything heavier than a coffee cup.
So I slept on the pull-out in the den, across from Ron.
Araceli, the hospice nurse, came at seven every morning and checked on us both. Her two patients, she called us.
She had a laminated picture of a beagle clipped to her badge. I never did ask whose dog it was.
Ron had stopped eating by then.
He’d stopped talking too.
The oxygen machine hummed all night, and some nights that hum was the only way I knew he was still with me.
Shawn’s calls got shorter.
Then one Thursday the call didn’t come.
At 11:40 I called him.
It rang out.
I tried again. Voicemail.
The third time, somebody picked up on the first ring.
“Shawn’s phone.”
A woman. Young. Chewing something.
“Who is this?” I said.
“This is Cassie.” She laughed a little. “You must be Leslie.”
“Put my husband on.”
“He’s asleep. He drove five hours today, give the man a break.”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
“Look, honey, I’m not trying to be mean,” she said. “But he told me everything. You flat on your back, his dad dying in your living room. He said you’re DEAD WEIGHT now. You and the old man both.”
“He said that.”
“He said once the old man’s gone and the land sells, he’s DONE CARRYING ANYBODY.”
Then she hung up.
The screen went dark on my chest.
I’d had it on speaker. I always did, because holding a phone to my ear pulled at the incision.
I looked across the den.
Ron’s eyes were open.
He was looking straight at me.
Two days he hadn’t opened them for Araceli. Not once.
His right hand was moving under the quilt. Slow, like it weighed fifty pounds.
“Ron?”
He worked the hand out from under the blanket and held it over the bed rail, toward me.
I couldn’t stand without the walker. So I slid off the couch onto my knees and crawled the six feet.
It took me almost a minute. My back screamed the whole way.
When I got there he opened his fingers.
A small brass key. A green plastic tag on it with the credit union’s name rubbed half off.
He’d had it the WHOLE TIME.
He pressed it into my palm and closed my fingers over it with his own.
Then he tapped the back of my hand. Twice.
“Ron. What’s in the box?”
He didn’t answer.
He kept his hand on mine until the grip went loose.
I stayed on that floor until Araceli let herself in at seven and found us.
She called it at 7:12.
I didn’t phone Shawn.
Araceli did.
He was home by noon.
He didn’t go to his father first. He went to the bed and ran his hands under the pillow, under the mattress, through the nightstand drawer.
“WHERE IS IT?” he said.
Araceli looked at me.
I was back on the couch. The key was in the pocket of my sweatpants, and my hand was flat over it.
“Les. Dad’s key. Did he give you anything?”
“Cassie says hi,” I said.
His face went gray.
Then he came around the bed and stood over me with his hand out, palm up.
“Give it to me, Leslie. You have no idea what’s in that box.”
He was right. I didn’t.
But Ron knew. And he’d come up out of two days of silence to hand it to me, not to his son.
I closed my fingers tighter.
Shawn bent down until his face was a few inches from mine.
“The credit union opens at nine,” he said. “And you can’t even walk.”
12:20
Through the den window the van from the funeral home was backing up to the porch, its beeper going.
I didn’t open my hand.
The key stayed in my pocket under my palm, and I said the only thing I had.
“Then you’ll have to carry me.”
His hand stayed out. In February he’d carried his father in from the truck in his arms, in front of half the road, and people still talked about it at church. Now he looked at me like I’d spit on his boots.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you do that.”
Araceli had her coat on already. She didn’t take it off. She stood at the foot of Ron’s bed with her phone in her hand.
“Shawn,” she said. “They’re at the door.”
He looked at the window. He looked at me. Then he went out to meet the men from the funeral home, and the storm door banged twice behind him the way it always does.
Araceli zipped her bag. She didn’t leave.
“Tuesday he asked me something,” she said. “It was the last thing he said to me.”
“What did he ask?”
“If you could still go to town. I said not for a while, she’s fused, she can’t sit in a car. And he said, ‘She can sign.'”
“Sign what?”
She looked at Ron, and then at me.
“I figured you’d know.”
March 11
Ron taught me cribbage the second week of February, his first week in the den.
He’d made the board himself, years back, out of a walnut plank off his own woodlot. It had a little drawer in the bottom that slid out, where the pegs lived, red and blue, and one broken white one he’d never thrown away.
The stroke took most of his right hand and most of his words. So he pegged with his left. And when he couldn’t play a card, he didn’t say “go” like you’re supposed to.
He tapped the table twice.
Tap tap. Your go, Les.
He beat me every night for a month and never once let me win.
Shawn didn’t sit in. He said cribbage was for old Norwegians and he’d be one soon enough.
From the bed Ron could see the north field. Jeff Kowalski from down the road had cash-rented the 160 since 2009, corn one year and beans the next, same handshake every March. When Jeff’s planter came across that spring, Ron watched it from one end of the row to the other and didn’t want the TV on.
At church people told Shawn what a good son he was, taking his dad in. Shawn would shake their hands and say, “It’s what you do.”
I was usually out in the car with the heater running, because I’d been up at two and again at four.
On March 11 Shawn was in Mitchell, South Dakota, and Ron wanted a haircut.
That’s what he said. “Haircut.” It took him a while to get it out.
I got him into my Impala and the wheelchair into the trunk and drove the forty minutes to Fergus Falls. He didn’t point me to the barber. He pointed me to the credit union.
The woman at the front desk came around and hugged him before I had the brakes on the chair. Dolores. She’d known him forty years, she said, since his first tractor loan. She kept a dish of root beer barrels on her desk and pushed it at me.
She took us into a side office and slid a card across with a pen on a little bead chain.
“Sign here, hon. And here.”
“What is it?”
Ron said, “In case my hand quits.”
I thought it was for his checking. I signed where her fingernail was. Ron signed under me with his left hand, in capital letters, and it took him most of a minute.
Then he went in the back with Dolores for twenty minutes, and I sat in the lobby beside a popcorn machine nobody was using.
On the way home he said one more thing.
“Don’t tell Shawn I came to town. He’ll think I bought a truck.”
I laughed. And I didn’t tell.
Out the window now the funeral men were bringing the cot up the porch steps.
White card. Blue lines. Two places to sign.
The cribbage board
They took Ron at a quarter to one. Shawn walked beside the cot the whole way to the van with his hand flat on the sheet. Our neighbor’s wife had stopped her car at the end of the drive to watch.
When he came back in he was a different man.
He brought me a pill and a glass of water and sat on the edge of the pull-out, careful of my back.
“About last night,” he said. “Cassie’s nobody. She works the parts counter at the dealer in Watertown. She’d had a few, she grabbed my phone, she’s a kid, she says stuff. I never said any of that, Les. You know I didn’t.”
I drank the water.
“Let me handle Dad’s box. You’ve got enough on you. You just rest.”
“I’ll go myself.”
He smiled at me like I was being cute.
“With what legs?”
He went into the kitchen to make calls. The pastor. The funeral home again. Somebody about the obituary. He said “my dad” in every one of them, in a voice I hadn’t heard him use with his dad in a year.
I called the credit union on the cordless. Fridays they close at noon. A recording told me Saturday hours were nine to twelve. I left my name and asked for Dolores to call me back.
She didn’t.
So I called my sister.
Trudy lives in Pelican Rapids and drives a school bus, and she has never once in her life asked me why.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Eight-fifteen. I need to get to Fergus Falls and I can’t sit up straight.”
“I’ll bring Dad’s Mercury. The bench seat goes all the way back.”
“He’ll be here.”
“Good,” she said. “I never liked how he says Dad.”
That night Shawn slept upstairs. I can’t do stairs. Before he came through to turn off the lamp, I slid the drawer out of the bottom of Ron’s cribbage board, put the key under the pegs, and pushed it shut. Then I set the board on the tray table by my head where it had sat all spring.
Shawn had never picked that board up in his life.
At 2:10 I woke to a light.
He was on his knees beside the pull-out with his phone’s flashlight on. He’d been through the basket on my walker. My pill bag was open on the rug and the bottles were lined up in a row. His hand was under my pillow, under my head, moving.
“It’s not there, Shawn.”
He took his hand out. He didn’t get up.
“Where’d you put it, Les?”
The cribbage board sat on the tray table eighteen inches from his elbow.
Paige from Fargo
At seven the shower went on upstairs. Shawn takes long showers. He always has.
I got the walker, got up, got the drawer open and the key back in my pocket. It took four minutes and I had to sit down twice.
At 7:20 the cordless rang on the end table. I let it go to the machine. We’d done that since hospice started, because half the calls were the pharmacy.
A woman’s voice. Bright. Morning bright.
“Hi, Shawn, it’s Paige Herrera with the solar group in Fargo, sorry to call the house, your cell keeps going to voicemail. I heard about your dad and I’m so sorry. I just want you to have this before Monday. The option payment we wired you in May, the forty thousand, that comes back to us if we don’t have the abstract and the deed by September 30. We’ve got your dad’s signature on the option, so legal says his estate’s bound to it. Call me when you can.”
She said her number twice.
I wrote it on the back of my pill schedule with the pen from the hospice binder.
In May, Ron couldn’t hold a spoon.
I know because I held it. I’d pull a kitchen chair up to his rail with a pillow behind my back and feed him oatmeal, one spoon for him and one breath for me. The March card had taken him most of a minute with his left hand. By May the left hand had quit too. It just lay on the quilt.
And forty thousand dollars had never touched our checking account. I pay the bills. I’d have seen it.
The shower went off.
Shawn came down with his hair wet and his shirt open. The light on the machine was blinking. He looked at it, and then at me, and then he pushed the button and stood there with his back to me while Paige said it all again.
He pushed delete.
“Business,” he said.
At 8:15 Trudy’s Mercury came up the drive with the gravel spitting.
He went to the hook by the door and took his keys.
“I’ll meet you there,” he said.
He was out the door ahead of us, still buttoning his shirt.
Box 114
Trudy pushed the bench seat back as far as it went and I lay across it on two pillows with the walker in the trunk. Every bump in the township road went straight up my spine. Shawn’s truck stayed a quarter mile in front of us the whole way in.
When Trudy got me through the front door at 9:04, he was already at Dolores’s desk.
“I’m his son,” he was saying. “He passed yesterday morning. I need into his box today.”
“I heard, Shawn. I’m so sorry. I’ve known your dad since before you were born.”
“So.”
Dolores had a card out on the desk in front of her. White. Blue lines. She turned it around so he could read it.
“Box 114 has two names on it,” she said. “Yours isn’t one of them, hon.”
His father’s name in left-handed capitals. Under it, mine. March 11.
Shawn read it standing up.
“She tricked him,” he said. “He’d had a stroke. He didn’t know what day it was.”
“He sat in that chair,” Dolores said, “and told me what day it was.”
Then she looked over his shoulder at me.
“Leslie. You have the key?”
I took it out of my pocket. Green tag, the name rubbed half off. Shawn looked at it in my hand the way he used to look at a dryer order.
He didn’t reach. Not in front of Dolores.
She took me back to the vault on the walker. She turned the credit union’s key and I turned Ron’s, and the little door came open. She carried the box into a side room with one chair and a table.
Shawn tried to come in behind us.
“Renters only,” Dolores said, and shut the door on him.
The box was mostly one thing. A brown folder with a rubber band around it, the abstract of title to the 160, thick as a church directory.
Under it, a long envelope from a law office on Lincoln Avenue.
His will. Dated March 11. Witnessed by Dolores Castro and a name I didn’t know.
The land went to me. All of it. “To my daughter-in-law, Leslie Bjornstad.” To his son, Shawn Ronald Bjornstad, ten thousand dollars.
And under the will, one index card, in the same left-handed capitals that took him most of a minute.
LES
YOUR GO
Lincoln Avenue
Trudy got me back across the bench seat. Shawn came out of the credit union and put both hands on the roof of the Mercury and leaned down to my window.
“Read it to me.”
I gave him the will. He read it with his lips moving.
“This won’t hold,” he said. “He was out of his head. You had him alone four nights a week, Les. Four nights. Any lawyer in this state is going to see that the second he opens the file.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Ten thousand dollars. My grandpa broke that ground with horses. And he leaves me ten thousand like I’m the kid who mows the cemetery.”
“Shawn,” Trudy said.
“You were his nurse. That’s all you were. You were the help.”
“She was the help for four months,” Trudy said, “while you were in Watertown.”
He didn’t look at her. He’d never once looked at Trudy when she talked.
“Paige called the house,” I said.
He folded the will in half. Then in half again.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So you heard.”
He let out a laugh with nothing in it.
“He couldn’t hold a pen, so I held it for him. I put it in his hand and I held his hand and we wrote his name. It’s his name. It’s the same thing as him signing.”
“Was he awake?”
“The forty’s gone, Les. The truck, the hotels, some other stuff. It’s gone. If that land’s not in Fargo by the thirtieth they come after me for it, and then they come after me for the rest. Is that what you want? Your husband in front of a judge in Otter Tail County?”
He was breathing hard. His hands were still on the roof.
“Yeah, I said it. To Cassie. Dead weight. I said it because I was tired. I’ve been tired since February. You don’t know what it’s like, the driving, the calls, coming home to a hospital in my own living room.”
He pushed the folded will back through the window into my lap.
“So you sell it. You sign the paper, we pay them, and it’s over. Nobody ever has to know about May.”
He leaned in closer.
“And if you don’t, I’m done. I’m in Watertown. And who’s going to turn you every two hours, Les? Trudy? Trudy drives a bus.”
I turned my pill schedule over.
I dialed the number on the back of it, put the phone on speaker, and laid it on my chest.
“Paige Herrera.”
“This is Leslie Bjornstad. Ron’s daughter-in-law. I’m the other name on his box.”
“Oh. Hi. I’m so sorry about—”
“The land’s not for sale,” I said. “And Ron didn’t sign anything in May. He couldn’t hold a spoon. I was the one holding it.”
Shawn took his hands off the roof.
For a while nobody on either end said anything.
“Mrs. Bjornstad,” Paige said. “Is your husband with you right now?”
October
The hospice company came for the bed the week after the funeral. It left four dents in the rug where the legs had been. I haven’t moved the rug.
I’m on a cane now. Some nights I still sleep on the pull-out, when my back won’t do the stairs.
Shawn lives in Watertown. He has a lawyer in Sioux Falls and I have one on Lincoln Avenue, and Fargo has one of its own that writes to him and not to me. Twenty-six years, and the letters come in three different envelopes.
Trudy sleeps over Tuesdays. She can’t play cribbage worth a damn.
At eight o’clock, the time Shawn used to call, I lay down on the pull-out with the phone on my chest and called Jeff Kowalski on speaker.
I could hear the combine in the north field behind his voice.
“Same rent next year?” he said.
“Same as Ron’s.”
I hung up and opened the drawer on the bottom of the board and gave Trudy the blue pegs. She laid down a six and called twenty-nine. I had nothing but face cards.
I tapped the tray table twice.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s been the one getting up at two and again at four.
For more family secrets that surface at the worst possible moment, read the bank slips hidden in a sister’s hem and the pants a husband cruelly judged. And for another story of betrayal just after surgery, see the husband who left only sixty dollars.
