I take him to dialysis

Kulwant's chair time is six fifteen, so I'm out the door at half past five. Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays.

Miss it by five minutes and they give the chair to somebody else and he's on the ten thirty run, and the ten thirty is everybody who hasn't got a ride, so it drags. He'd be in that building till the middle of the afternoon and he's no use to himself after. So we go early.

Colusa down to the bridge and then up behind the hospital once you're over the river. Eleven minutes. Thirteen if the light at B Street catches me, which it does. January to about the middle of March I go around by Bogue instead, because there's a dip past the packing shed that takes water and at that hour you can't tell what you're driving into. I put a truck in there in 2009. Two thousand nine or ten. Paid a man four hundred dollars to pull me out and he took his time about it.

Four hours he's in the chair. I don't go in. I went in the first two times and it's freezing in there and there's a TV on nobody watches, so now I sit in the lot. There's the Punjabi program out of Sacramento till seven and then I put the market on, because we haul rice out of the mill at Nicolaus down to Oakland and almonds over to the hullers in Turlock, and what rice is doing in Japan tells me what my trucks are doing come November. Manjit takes one. Gurpreet's boy has the other one now. I do the loads off a laptop at the kitchen table. My son set it up. I complained about that thing for a year.

They put a fistula in his left arm four years back. You can feel it humming if you lay two fingers on it. When it was new he'd make me feel it every single time.

His wife made a mango pickle that would take the roof of your mouth off. Surinder. She'd bring a jar out to the yard while I was loading and stand there till I ate some so she could watch my face. I told her every year it was too hot. Took the jar home anyway.

Harjit sends food. Second Sunday of the month she runs the langar at the gurdwara, which means she's up at four with eleven women in that kitchen, and she'll come home at three in the afternoon and start on dinner like nothing happened. She's been feeding people since before I married her and that's thirty-eight years in June. Fridays she puts a container in my hand on the way out the door. Saag in the winter. Karela sometimes. He likes it. I won't touch it.

I've known him since 1984. We rode down to Modesto together in a truck with no air and no radio either, and that's eight hours.

She never learned to drive. Fifty years in this country. He took her everywhere and she'd have him stop at the store on Lincoln for the flour she liked, and if he came home with the wrong one he went back out.

He comes out at ten fifteen. Ten twenty, or later if they've had trouble getting him off. He's cold. His pressure's on the floor and they've given him crackers and a little juice. Some days his legs cramp. I walk him in because of the step at his front door, which is a high step and I've told him about it more than once, and I get his shoes off because he can't reach his feet when he's like that. Then I put the kettle on and we sit.

End of August the year before last, when they were shaking almonds, which is how I can put a week on it. I'd got his shoes off and I stood up and he had hold of my wrist. He kissed me. I kissed him back and we ended up on that couch with the television going, golf, the sound down.

Sixty-one years old. He's the first.

The tent people wanted three thousand and I got them down to twenty-five hundred by telling them my brother-in-law has a tent, which he doesn't. Simran gets married on the eleventh of April. Four hundred and ten on the list right now and it'll be four fifty by then because it always is. Kulwant's on the second page of that list.

Harjit asked me in the spring why the Fridays run so long. I said the traffic coming back over the bridge.

On the way home it's the light at B Street, and whether Manjit's boy is taking his test again in October, and whether they'll get the almonds off before it rains. He'll tell me the same thing twice and I let him, because what am I going to do, correct a man at six in the morning.

She sold the pickle at the mela out of a booth with her sister. Four dollars a jar, five for the big ones, and she'd not come down for anybody. She called his truck the blue one for years after he'd sold the blue one and got the white.

The first winter I did this I brought a thermos and drank the whole thing by eight and then had to find somewhere to go, and there's nowhere, so now I don't. I have it after. He keeps the tea bags Surinder bought in the cupboard over the stove and they must be five years old.

He's quieter than he was. That started before the kidneys.

She went in eleven days. Pancreas.

I wrestled from fourteen until I was twenty-six and there's a photograph of me at nineteen with my arm around a fellow I'd just put on his back, both of us covered in dirt. My knees went in 2018, one and then the other. The surgeon in Roseville says they'll want doing again in about ten years, and he said that in 2019 as well.

I'm on the committee at the gurdwara, which mostly means I take phone calls about the parking lot. Second Sunday everybody's down on the floor in the rows and me on a chair at the back. There's a fellow been leaving a boat trailer across two spaces since Easter and the committee's decided it's mine to deal with because I know his brother from the mill. I'm going over there Tuesday.