My husband of forty-one years took his pillow up to the loft over our garage and blamed my SNORING.
A yard of wet lawn between us, eleven to five.
“I love you, Di. I just can’t live on three hours anymore,” Glen said.
I laughed. I gave it a week.
It lasted ALL SUMMER.
By August it had a name.
“My bunk,” he said, like he paid rent on it.
I bought the nose strips.
I drank the chamomile that tastes like cut hay.
I slept propped up till my neck quit.
He never said if any of it helped.
“Don’t make me a project, hon. I need my sleep,” he said.
Then he put a lock on the loft door.
Then he started using it.
His phone and his laptop went up with him every night.
He quit our shower for the little one up there.
I asked once what kept his light on past two.
“Sleeping,” he said. “The room’s for sleeping.”
I could see that light from my pillow.
My sister said snoring can be the heart, so I booked the sleep clinic in La Crosse.
The night before, I stood my old tablet on the dresser to record.
I listened to it with my morning coffee.
Seven hours of the furnace kicking on and off. The neighbor’s beagle, once.
I didn’t snore one time.
HE HAD PICKED THE ONE THING I can’t hear myself do.
The spare loft key hangs on a nail in our pantry. He forgot it years ago.
I set the clock radio for 1:50 and slept in my jeans.
The dew soaked my socks before I was halfway across.
The loft window was lit and quiet.
I turned the key slow and eased the door two inches.
Glen sat at the card table in his undershirt, the phone on speaker.
A young man was crying out of it so hard his words came apart.
The laptop beside him showed rows of numbers.
“Stay on with me, Curtis,” Glen said. “Read me the next line.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. I got all night.”
I didn’t know any Curtis.
I didn’t understand one bit of what I was seeing.
I pulled the door to without a sound and went back to bed.
Over breakfast he ate his eggs. I poured his coffee.
Neither of us said a word about it, that day or that night.
The doorbell went at ten to seven the next morning.
I opened the door and couldn’t get out of it.
Coffee cans.
The big ones, up every step, down the walk, out into the wet grass.
Rusted ones. Red ones. One wrapped in duct tape. One with a kid’s crayon cow on it.
I counted forty-three, twice.
I looked for a card. I looked for a note.
A sheriff’s car idled at the curb.
And my daughter’s husband was coming up the walk in uniform, holding one in both hands.
Brent has been telling my daughter all summer that her father is slipping.
He didn’t say good morning.
“Diane, I need the lid off this one before I do anything else,” he said.
“Brent, what’s in it?”
He looked past me at the loft window.
“His wife called us at four,” he said. “She said to look on your step.”
He put it in my hands. It was too heavy for coffee.
CURTIS was printed across the lid in black marker.
I got my thumbnail under the rim.
The bolt out of a deer rifle
The lid came up with a pop.
A rifle bolt lay on top, rolled in a red shop rag. Beneath it sat a box of deer shells with the flap taped shut, and beneath that, a page out of a feed-store notebook folded in four.
Brent had the page out before I got my fingers on it.
He read it standing on my step. Then he keyed the radio on his shoulder and read it again, slower, in a voice I had never once heard him use at my house.
“Walking it off. Truck’s in the yard. Home by chores. Tell Glen I kept my word.”
The radio crackled back. A woman at dispatch said something I couldn’t follow.
“Copy,” Brent said. “He’s on foot. He’s not carrying anything that works.”
He went back down my walk sideways, setting his boots between the cans, and stopped with one hand on the car door.
“Diane. Where’s Glen?”
I looked up at the loft.
The window was dark. That light had still been burning every morning since May when I came out to start the coffee, and today it was off.
My husband was asleep. A doorbell, a yard full of coffee cans and a sheriff’s car running at the curb, and Glen Pagel was sleeping through the whole business like a man who’d earned it.
Brent sat in the car with the door open and the radio turned up loud enough for the block. I stayed on the step with the can held against my stomach.
It was 7:25 when the radio came back.
A county plow driver on his way in to the shop had picked up a young man walking the shoulder of County Road ET in a barn coat and chore boots, three miles from the Mulder place.
He was cold and he was fine. He wanted a ride home before milking.
Brent put his forehead down on the steering wheel for about two seconds. I saw it. He didn’t know I saw it.
Then he shut the door and backed out, and the car went off up the road with the light bar dark.
I stood there a while longer.
The other forty-two lids down my walk were still beaded from the night, clear out to the mailbox, each one pushed down tight by somebody’s thumb.
And how did forty-three men know which garage my husband slept above?
The nail behind the flashlight
Glen built the loft the summer our daughter Tammy turned ten.
He hauled bulk milk out of Tomah for twenty-nine years, fifty-eight farms strung across Monroe and Juneau counties, and he needed somewhere to keep his route books that wasn’t my kitchen table.
He kept one book a year. The stops, the tank temperatures, the farmers who were short with him that day and why.
They sit up there on a plank shelf over the card table, twenty-nine of them, the spines gone soft as dish rags.
The spare key he hung on a nail in our pantry, behind the big yellow flashlight.
“It’ll be where the light is,” he said.
That was 1996. I don’t believe he touched that nail again.
People forget that milk starts in the middle of the night. Glen was out of the house by three and home by noon smelling like the inside of a stainless tank, and he never once set an alarm to do it.
He penciled our phone number on the milk-house wall at every stop, next to the light switch, in case a tank acted up.
A lot of those milk houses are still standing. A lot of those farms are gone.
Ron Kasper’s is one of them.
Ron milked sixty head on the ridge past Oakdale until 2019. Then he sold, moved into a duplex in town, and started showing up at our grandkids’ ball games in a clean jacket.
He is Brent’s father. Glen is the one who introduced Tammy and Brent, at a barn dance in the Kaspers’ haymow, when she was nineteen.
Brent has said one thing about his dad’s herd going, and I’ve heard him say it a dozen times.
“Dad took it fine. Dad’s a realist.”
The grandkids are Tyler, who is fifteen and set up Glen’s laptop, and Macy, who is eight. Macy draws cows. Macy’s cows all have five legs, and she will argue with you about it. My fridge has eleven of them.
The first week of June, Tammy set a manila folder on my counter and tapped it twice with one finger.
Inside was a brochure for Maple Terrace, the senior apartments behind the clinic in town, and a realtor’s card. Below those was a sheet of graph paper.
Somebody had drawn our acre and a half on it in pencil. The house, the driveway, the garage. And a line ruled straight across the lot, cutting off the back half.
“The two of you rattle around in here,” Tammy said. “Look at it when you’ve got a minute.”
Brent was leaning in the doorway with his thumbs hooked in his belt.
“Old man’s bunk comes down with the rest of it anyway,” he said, and laughed like it was a joke we were all in on.
Glen was up in the loft that evening. He didn’t come down for supper.
I put the folder in the drawer with the phone book and shut it.
I hadn’t looked close enough yet to see that the ruled line ran straight through the garage.
The waiting list at Maple Terrace
I canceled La Crosse the same morning I listened to the tablet.
The girl on the phone wanted to know if I’d like to reschedule. I said no. I said I’d found out what I needed.
Tammy called that afternoon.
“Brent drove by on patrol at three,” she said. “Daddy’s light was on again.”
“It’s on every night.”
“I know. I’m saying.”
I could hear the television behind her, and Macy wanting something, and Brent’s voice under all of it.
“He’s seventy-one,” Tammy said. “He’s locking himself in a garage. Brent says that’s how it started with his grandpa. The locking.”
“Tammy, your father isn’t confused.”
“I didn’t say confused.”
She said she’d made him an appointment in town, to get checked.
“Does he know that?”
“He’ll go if you tell him to go.”
I didn’t answer, and she took that for a yes. She always has.
Then she said the other thing, in the voice she’d use for the weather.
“And we got you two on the list at Maple Terrace. Number six now. It moved fast.”
“The list.”
“We did it in May. Brent’s cousin does their books.”
“May.”
“The week he went out there to sleep. I figured it was a sign, honestly.”
I stood at my kitchen window with the phone and looked out at the garage. His truck was parked beside it. The loft window had a towel hung over half of it from the inside.
“A sign of what,” I said.
“That you two are done with all that house.”
Brent said something behind her. She laughed a little, at him, the way she has laughed at him for twenty-two years.
“He says tell you the unit’s got a walk-in tub.”
I said I had to get supper started. She said love you. I said it back, and we hung up.
I stood at the window until the pan on the stove started to smoke.
She had put our names down the same week he carried his pillow out.
Harold Mulder’s milk house
Glen came down the loft stairs at 8:10 in his stocking feet.
He stopped on the bottom step and looked out at the driveway for a long time.
Then he went and got the wheelbarrow.
We brought them in together, a load at a time, without a word. He set them on the kitchen counter in rows, lids up, the way I line up pint jars in August. He didn’t open one.
I put the CURTIS can at the end of the row with its lid pushed back down.
He looked at it and sat down hard in his chair.
“Curtis Mulder,” I said.
He told it to the cans instead of to me.
Curtis is twenty-nine, with a wife named Kelsey and a baby that was due in June. His dad, Harold, was Glen’s second stop every morning for eighteen years. Harold died two winters back, and Curtis took over sixty head, his father’s loan and a milk price that didn’t cover the feed.
One night in March, at 2:10 in the morning, Curtis was standing in his dad’s milk house with the light on, and the number penciled by the switch was ours.
“He didn’t know who I was,” Glen said. “He dialed it because it was there.”
“And you picked up.”
“I’ve been up at two since 1981, Di. I picked up.”
Curtis called the next night, and the one after. Then a man over by Wilton who’d heard it from Curtis. Then one out past Kendall. Come May it was every night, some nights three of them, one after the other.
He’d moved out to the loft the week it got to be every night.
“They asked me to keep it to myself,” Glen said. “Every one of them asked. I gave my word.”
“You could have told me you weren’t sleeping.”
“Di, you’d have come up.” He looked at me then. “You’d have sat on that cot and listened to what a man says at three in the morning about his gun cabinet. I didn’t want that in your head.”
“And you gave me snoring instead.”
“I needed a thing you couldn’t check.”
I almost laughed. I didn’t.
The laptop, he said, was for milk checks and feed bills. Half the men who called couldn’t sleep over numbers, and it helped them to read the numbers out loud to somebody, line by line, till they were only numbers again.
“And the cans,” I said.
He turned the nearest one a quarter turn on the counter.
“I told them I was done. Two nights ago. Every man who called, I told him.”
“Done.”
“Tammy says Maple Terrace by the first of November. Walls like a cracker box. A man can’t take a call like that through a wall that thin.”
“Glen. Where did you hear we were going?”
“Tammy.” He kept his eyes on the can. “She said it was what you wanted. She said you’d been after it since spring and were too proud to say so to me.”
I had never once said the words Maple Terrace out loud, to Tammy or to anybody else.
“Curtis must have called them all back,” Glen said. “Every man on that list has seen my garage. I parked the tanker in front of it for twenty-nine years.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“She said you wanted it, Di,” he said. “I told them goodbye on the phone.”
The route book on the plank shelf
Glen drove out to the Mulder place after dinner to sit with Curtis a while.
I watched his truck go up the county road until it was over the hill.
Then I went into the pantry and took the key down off the nail behind the flashlight.
It was broad daylight, and I still turned it slow.
The loft smelled like coffee and his aftershave. The cot was made tight enough to bounce a quarter. The card table sat under the window with the phone charger and a yellow pad of milk prices in his square printing.
The route books were on the plank shelf where they have always been, twenty-nine of them in a row.
The thirtieth was newer, a green feed-store book with a pencil clipped to the cover.
I sat down on the cot and opened it.
He’d kept it the way he kept the route. A date, a first name, the time, and one line.
“Mar 9. Curtis M. 2:10 to 4:40. Read me his dad’s feed bill, whole thing. Stayed on till chores.”
“Mar 11. Curtis M. again. Better.”
“Mar 20. Lyle, Wilton. Bank letter. Promised to call back. Did.”
Page after page of it. Men I’d known at church. Men I’d bought sweet corn from off a tailgate. A name I had seen in the obituaries in July, and after it a blank space, and after the blank space a line in Glen’s hand: “Should have driven over.”
That one stopped me for a while.
I turned the pages until I got to May.
“May 14. Ron K. 2:40 to 5:05. Sold the herd in ’19 and never once told his boy what it did to him. Wants the deer rifle out of the house before the grandkids come for the summer.”
“May 15. Ron K. Took the rifle to Curtis’s. Curtis will hold it.”
“May 16. Ron K. Slept.”
The grandkids who came to Ron’s for the summer were Tyler and Macy. They are my grandkids too.
I sat with the book open on my knees and looked at the date. May 14. The week Glen took his pillow up those stairs. The week Tammy put our names on a list.
Then I went down to the kitchen and walked the rows of cans until I found the one with the crayon cow on its side.
It had five legs.
I didn’t open it. I set it by itself on the kitchen table.
I got Tammy’s manila folder out of the drawer with the phone book and set it beside the can, and the route book beside that.
Then I called my daughter.
“Supper’s at six,” I said. “Bring Brent.”
The pot roast at six
They came at ten after. Brent was still in uniform. Tammy had a pan of bars nobody had asked for.
Glen was home by then. He sat at his end of the table with his hands in his lap. He hadn’t touched the cans since morning.
Brent talked first, and Brent talked most.
“Diane, I saw the cans. Okay? I get it. It’s a nice thing the guys did.” He cut his roast into squares. “But you’ve got to look at this from where I sit.”
“Brent,” Tammy said.
“A retired milk hauler up every night on the phone with guys who’ve got loaded guns in the house and nothing left to lose. Call it a hobby if you want. I call it a liability.”
He pointed his fork at Glen, not at me.
“If one of those calls goes bad, the county comes asking me. The son-in-law in the uniform. And my name’s on the report.”
“He kept a man walking this morning,” I said.
“He got lucky this morning. Curtis Mulder out on the ET in the dark with his wife on the phone to us, bawling. Some guy in a plow finding him is luck, Glen. Luck runs out.”
Glen said nothing.
“And the apartment’s a good place. Tammy’s worked hard on that. Walk-in tub. People your own age. Somebody checks on you.”
He went on about the back lot. How it made sense, the two of them handy, the ground sitting there doing nothing, an old man going up and down those stairs at his age.
Tammy was looking at the table. At the folder.
“I never asked for Maple Terrace, Tammy,” I said.
She didn’t look up.
“I thought if Daddy believed you wanted it, he’d come down out of that garage,” she said. “I thought I was helping.”
I opened the route book to May, turned it around and slid it across the tablecloth to Brent.
I didn’t say anything.
He read it with his fork still in his hand.
Then he put the fork down.
He read it again. I watched his eyes go over “never once told his boy” twice.
“He told me he took it fine,” Brent said. “He always said he took it fine.”
Tammy leaned over to see. He put his hand flat on the page, and she let him.
I got up, took the can with the cow on it off the counter and set it by his plate.
He knew that cow. Anybody in that family would.
“Macy did that at your dad’s,” Tammy said, very quiet. “At the duplex. On his coffee.”
Brent worked the lid off with both thumbs.
Inside, wrapped in a bread bag, was a square of old barn board about the size of his hand. One side was painted the pale green they used in milk houses in the seventies. Beside two screw holes where a light switch plate had been, somebody had penciled our phone number. I’d know those sevens anywhere. It was Glen’s hand from 1996.
Ron must have pried it off the wall before the new people painted.
Brent turned it over in his hands for a long time.
“He took this with him,” he said. “When he sold out. He took this.”
The table was quiet.
“Glen. Does he still call you?”
Glen looked at the square of board and not at Brent.
“He called two nights ago,” Glen said. “When I told them all goodbye, he was the one who didn’t hang up.”
The second card-table chair
Brent left the board on the table. Tammy took the folder with her.
I called Maple Terrace the next morning and had them take our names off the list. The woman said we’d lose our place. I said I understood that.
I tore the graph paper in half along the ruled line and put both halves in the burn barrel.
Then I carried my own pillow across the wet grass and up the loft stairs, and the second card-table chair after it.
Glen was sitting on the cot when I came in with the chair. He looked at the chair, and then at me.
“Di, you’ll be tired,” he said.
“I’m tired now,” I said.
That was the whole of it.
The loft cost me my bed. I slept forty-one years on the left side of a good mattress, and now I’m sixty-seven and sleep on a camp cot with a foam pad Tyler ordered for me, and my back reports on it every morning.
It cost me five weeks of Tammy. She didn’t call and didn’t come by, and I heard about Macy’s ball games from Ron, who started stopping in with doughnuts.
Five weeks. I counted those too.
Curtis came by one afternoon after the first hard frost, with Kelsey and the baby in the truck. He stood in the driveway where his can had been and asked Glen to hold onto the bolt till after deer season.
“Maybe after that too,” he said.
I wanted to know how forty-three men had found my steps in the dark.
“I called them back,” Curtis said. “Every one I had a number for, and they called the rest. I said leave him the thing he talked you out of. Leave it on his step.”
The cans are on the plank shelf now, under the route books. Glen hasn’t opened any but the two. He says they aren’t his to open.
The phone went at 2:15 last night.
Glen was asleep on the cot with his mouth open. He’d been up the night before with a man out past Kendall until the school buses ran.
I picked up before the second ring.
“Pagels’,” I said. “I’m up.”
A man was breathing on the other end. Young. Trying to get a word out and not getting there.
I pulled the yellow pad over and uncapped a pen.
“Sure you can,” I said. “I’ve got all night. Read me the next line.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who’s up at two in the morning for a reason they haven’t told anyone.
For more tales of marital bliss and unexpected living arrangements, check out My husband carried my sewing machine out to the garage before I got home, or read about what happened when Sandra Held That Folder on Her Lap the Whole Rehearsal Dinner.
