Dad’s hands stopped shelling peas.
“Fridays,” I said. “That’s what he’s talking about, isn’t it? You’ve been leaving every Friday since Mom died. I always figured you just couldn’t sleep.”
Dad didn’t answer. He went back to shelling peas.
“Where do you go, Dad?”
He snapped open a pod with his thumb. The peas rolled into the bowl. Plink, plink, plink.
“You’ll see,” he said.
“I want to know now.”
“You’ll see Saturday,” he said. “Everybody will.”
I slept in my old bedroom that night. The one with the faded yellow wallpaper and the twin bed and the shelf of horse figurines I collected when I was ten.
At four-fifteen in the morning, I woke up to the sound of a truck engine.
I went to the window.
It was still dark. But the porch light was on, and in its glow, I saw my father loading boxes into the back of his old green pickup. Cardboard boxes. Banana boxes, the kind you get from the back of the grocery store. He was carrying them out from the shed one at a time and setting them in the truck bed. They were full of vegetables. Tomatoes and beans and potatoes and squash.
