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Dad’s Meatloaf
Episode 2 of 3 of Exactly As Written by Renee Dufresne · free to read
Our father’s card was for meatloaf, and Arlo wanted it on the table the very next Sunday.
He brought it over Wednesday night in a sandwich bag, zipped shut. Gretchen came straight from her shift in her scrubs. I made a pot of decaf that nobody drank.
“He doesn’t get a chair,” Gretchen said. “Not at this table.”
“He’s dead, Gretch. He doesn’t get anything. I’m the one who gets it.”
“He left. Mom raised three kids on a school cafeteria paycheck, and he mailed birthday cards.”
“He mailed me birthday cards,” Arlo said. “He mailed you some too. You threw yours out without opening them.”
Mom was alive and remarried, two hours away. None of us had told her about the box.
Noreen had asked everyone in the family for their best card, even him. She was the only one who kept writing to him after the divorce.
I remembered the meatloaf. Dad made it on Sundays before the divorce, a big one, so there was enough for cold sandwiches on Monday. He let me press the cracker crumbs flat with the bottom of a glass.
“Gran first,” Gretchen said. “Then we can talk about him.”
“Gran already had her Sunday,” Arlo said. “Dad never had one.”
“Dad had twenty years of Sundays and didn’t use any of them.”
They both looked at me. It was my box. That was the only reason anybody asked me anything.
“I was eleven when he moved out,” Arlo said. “I never saw him again. When he died, I heard it from a cousin a week after the funeral. You two at least got to be mad at him in person.”
Dad died two winters ago. I found out the same way Arlo did, a day sooner.
“Dad’s this Sunday,” I said. “Gran’s the Sunday after. I’m sorry, Gretchen.”
I expected her to fight. Gretchen always fought. Instead she went pale and set her mug down very carefully.
“Fine,” she said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
On Sunday I cooked from the card. Dad wrote recipes like work orders.
2 LB GROUND CHUCK. 1 CUP SALTINES CRUSHED. 2 EGGS. 1 ONION GRATED NOT CHOPPED. SPLASH MILK. GLAZE 1/2 CUP KETCHUP 2 T BROWN SUGAR 1 T VINEGAR. 350 ONE HOUR TEN. REST IT OR IT FALLS APART.
I spent an hour worrying about how much a splash was. I rested the loaf fifteen minutes by the stove clock, sliced it, and carried it in.
He was in the chair at the end, in a gray work shirt with a name patch over the pocket. He was thinner than I remembered. His hair had gone white.
“You rested it,” he said. “Nobody rests it.”
Nobody answered him. He looked at Arlo and kept looking.
“Look at you. You got tall.”
“I was tall at fifteen,” Arlo said. “You’d have known.”
“That’s fair.” Dad took a slice and a spoonful of green beans. “That’s more than fair.”
For a while it went better than I’d hoped. Dad asked Arlo about the garage and actually listened. He knew engines. They talked about a transmission for ten minutes, and I watched my brother’s shoulders come down from around his ears.
Gretchen didn’t eat. She cut her meatloaf into small squares and moved them around the plate.
Dad noticed. He turned to her, kind, trying to say a good thing.
“I never thanked you for the drives,” he said. “Every other Friday for eight months. And that parking garage at the cancer center was a nightmare.”
Gretchen’s knife stopped.
“What drives,” Arlo said.
Dad looked from him to her. “She didn’t tell you?”
“You asked me not to,” Gretchen said.
“I asked you not to tell them I was sick. I didn’t mean forever.”
“You knew,” Arlo said to her. “You knew he was dying, and you sat with him, and you let me find out from a cousin. A week after.”
I hadn’t known either. I sat there holding the serving spoon and understood that I had been left out too, and that Gretchen had carried this by herself for two years.
“Arlo,” Dad said. “Sit down. Let me finish.”
Arlo stood. He picked up his own plate and then Dad’s, still half full, stacked them, and walked them into the kitchen.
Dad was gone before the plates hit the counter. His chair was pushed back like he’d only stepped outside.
The card was on the counter by the tin box. It was blank on both sides.
Arlo stood at the sink with his hands on the edge of it.
“He was ninety pounds at the end,” Gretchen said from the doorway. “He didn’t want you to see him like that.”
“That wasn’t his call. And it sure wasn’t yours.”
“He made me promise, Arlo.”
“Next Sunday I’m cooking Gran’s card,” he said. “And I’m going to ask her what else you kept from us.”
Gretchen looked at the tin box. Then she walked over, flipped toward the back, and took out the chicken and dumplings.
“Gretchen,” I said.
“She was my grandmother too. I’m not going on trial at her table.”
“I’ll cook it myself,” she said. “At my house. Alone.”