Every Saturday for five years, my daddy took my little sister to town and left me home with the chores. “Somebody’s got to mind the hens,” he’d say, and off they went in the truck. I never forgave him for it.
I was nine the first time. My sister, Jeanette, was five. Daddy lifted her into the cab of the green Chevy and buckled her in himself. I stood in the gravel and watched the dust until I couldn’t see it anymore.
They came home after dark. Jeanette brought back stories about the lake, the fair, the big store, or the man who guessed your weight. Once she had a balloon. Another time she had a Dairy Queen cup with a red spoon. Daddy usually had a peppermint stick poking out of his shirt pocket. He never offered me one.
I gathered eggs, hung the wash, and burned the trash. The chores weren’t hard enough to explain why I was the one left behind. I knew that, even at nine. I just didn’t have a better explanation.
When I was twelve, I asked why I couldn’t go. I said it at supper, angry and tired of hearing about their trips.
“Don’t you start,” Mama said, slapping her hand flat on the table hard enough to make the gravy jump.
I looked at Daddy. He kept his eyes on his plate.
“Fine,” I said. “I won’t.”
And I didn’t ask again.
When Jeanette was ten, the doctors found a little hole in her heart and fixed it.
That was how Mama explained it to me: a little hole, like a flat tire, and the doctors patched it. Jeanette spent a while in the hospital in Indianapolis. I stayed with the neighbors.
After that, the Saturdays stopped. I figured Jeanette had gotten too old for Daddy to bother with, too.
I grew up and carried the mail on a county route for thirty-one years. I count things without meaning to: stairs, eggs, mailboxes. Daddy teased me about it. I married a good man and buried him. I visited Daddy every week, the way you’re supposed to.
Every week, I looked at his refrigerator. Jeanette’s school pictures were all over it, from kindergarten on. Mine weren’t. Not one. I checked for fifty years, like a sore tooth I couldn’t leave alone.
I never told anybody how much that bothered me. It sounds small beside the things people usually save up, but it was the truth I kept to myself.
Daddy was ninety and living with Jeanette in town after his fall the winter before. Jeanette and I got along fine, in the way people do when they’ve decided not to say the real thing to each other.
That October, I turned sixty-six and had them over for supper. I made meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and bought a sheet cake from Kroger. The Meijer ad was still folded beside my phone.
Daddy came in slowly with his walker. Jeanette’s husband held the door. A blue Christmas cookie tin sat in the walker basket, its lid dented and masking tape wrapped around the edge.
“Pop brought you a cookie tin, Diane,” Jeanette’s husband said. “Big spender.”
Daddy didn’t laugh. He didn’t sit down right away, either. He held on to his walker and looked at me like he was afraid I’d send him back out the door.
“Daddy, sit,” I said. “You’ll fall.”
He sat and put the tin beside my plate. Then he covered his face with his hands and started crying.
“Pop,” Jeanette said quietly. “You said you wanted to do this.”
I looked at her. She was staring at the tablecloth.
“Do what?” I said. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”
Daddy wiped his face on his sleeve. “I promised your mother I’d tell you when you were old enough.”
“I’m sixty-six, Daddy.”
“I know.” His voice broke. “I kept thinking, next year. Then last month I called you Mama on the phone, and you went quiet.”
I had. I’d ended the call and sat in my car without turning the key.
“Jeanette says I better tell you while I still can,” he said.
My sister nodded without looking up.
“You deserve to know where we went,” Daddy said. “All those Saturdays.”
I wish I could say I answered kindly. I didn’t. Fifty-seven years of hens came up in my throat.
“I know where you went,” I said. “The fair and the lake and the Dairy Queen. You took the cute one and left me home. Well, isn’t that just dandy.”
Jeanette made a small sound. Daddy only nodded, like he’d been expecting me to say it.
“Open it,” he said. “Please, Diane.”
For a minute I didn’t. If I opened it, I’d have to stop being mad at him.
Being mad at him was the only thing of his I’d ever had all to myself.
I picked at the tape. It came off in brittle pieces. The lid stuck, then gave with a pop.
Inside were hundreds of small paper stubs, faded blue and pink, bundled with rubber bands. Numbers had been punched into them. On top lay a peppermint stick wrapped in wax paper, gone soft and gray. Under that was a folded piece of Mama’s good blue stationery.
I knew her handwriting before I opened it. My fingers weren’t working right, so Jeanette reached across and held one corner of the paper.
The last line said, “Don’t let her think for one more day that she was left behind because we loved her less.”
I read it twice. The first time, I heard the words. The second time, I understood what my mother had been trying to tell me.
Daddy’s eyes were wet. “We didn’t go to town for the reasons I let you think.”
“Then where did you go?” I asked. “Not the fair?”
“Some Saturdays, after,” he said. “But the first place was the doctor.”
Jeanette looked at him. “You never told her that part.”
“I know.” He looked back at me. “I should have.”
The stubs in the tin were from those visits. Daddy explained that when Jeanette was little, the doctor wanted to keep an eye on her heart. He took her in on Saturdays, and when they were done, he tried to make the rest of the day feel like an ordinary trip to town. The heart problem wasn’t found and fixed until she was ten. He had kept taking her for those checkups in the years before.
I glanced down at the stubs. All those colors and punched numbers had looked like proof that my sister had collected a life while I minded the hens. They were records of the trips Daddy had built around worrying about her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
Daddy folded his hands on the table. “Your mother thought you were too young to carry it. We didn’t know what the doctors would find. I thought I could keep it from making you afraid.”
“By making me think you liked her better?”
He nodded once. “Yes.”
That was not the answer I wanted. It was the answer he had.
Jeanette spoke before I could. “I thought you knew some of it. I was little. Dad called them our Saturdays, and I thought you were busy at home.”
“Busy with the hens,” I said.
She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the tablecloth. “I should’ve asked you.”
“You were five.”
“I still should’ve noticed when I got older.”
I looked at her. “You were the one getting taken. I wasn’t angry at you.”
“I know. But I let the stories go on. I liked having him to myself.” She paused. “I didn’t think about what it looked like from your side.”
Her admission didn’t make the old Saturdays feel better. It did make the room feel more honest than it had been five minutes earlier.
Daddy pointed to the peppermint stick in the tin. “I always had one for you, too. I’d put it in my pocket and bring it home. Then I’d forget to give it to you.”
I looked at the gray wrapper. “You forgot for five years?”
He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t know what to say to you.”
“So you said nothing.”
“Yes.”
The table went quiet. The cake sat untouched. I could hear the ordinary sounds of my sister’s husband shifting in his chair, then settling again.
Daddy looked at the letter. “Your mother knew you thought we loved Jeanette more. She wanted me to tell you the truth. I kept putting it off.”
“You promised her.”
“I did.”
“Then you waited until you were ninety.”
“I did that, too.”
There wasn’t a clever way to soften it. He had meant to protect me, but I had spent years believing there was something about me that made it easy to leave me behind. His explanation could tell me why he went. It couldn’t give me those Saturdays back.
I pressed the letter flat beside the tin. “I need you to hear this. I was a kid. I didn’t know about the doctor. I knew you took her and left me.”
“I know.”
“No, Daddy. You know now because I’m saying it. You let me think it for years.”
He looked at me, then nodded. “You’re right.”
Jeanette reached for the letter, then stopped before touching it. “Mama wrote that because she knew you’d blame yourself.”
“I didn’t blame myself,” I said. “I thought I mattered less.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t tell her it was all right. It wasn’t. But I took her hand for a moment, and she held on.
Daddy asked if I could forgive him. I looked at him sitting there with his walker beside him, no longer able to pretend he had time to explain it next year.
“I can stop guessing,” I said. “I can hear what you meant. But I’m not going to tell you it didn’t hurt.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
That was the first thing he’d said all evening that made me feel he understood the difference.
I put the letter back beneath the stubs and set the lid on the tin. Then I moved it closer to Daddy.
“You keep it here,” I said. “I want to see it when I come over.”
He nodded. “All right.”
After that, we still had supper. Nobody tried to make the conversation cheerful. Daddy ate some meatloaf. Jeanette asked if I wanted to save him a piece of cake, and I said yes.
When I visited him the next week, I asked him to tell me one of the Saturday stories again. He did. I let him get to the end.
I still count the hens when I see them. I don’t count those Saturdays anymore.
