The Route My Father Never Missed
The Notebook
It was small, spiral bound, swollen soft from years of humidity, its cover long since worn away to nothing. I nearly set it aside as trash. Then I opened it, and my father’s handwriting stopped me cold, the same blocky print he used on every invoice and delivery slip I had ever watched him fill out at the store counter.
But this was not invoices.
Page after page carried addresses. County roads I recognized and some I did not, each one followed by a short list written in shorthand only my father would have understood at a glance. Hay. Firewood. Fence wire. A sack of feed corn. Beside each entry, a date, checked off in pencil. Then, below it, another date. Checked off again. Then another, and another, running down the page in a column that did not stop.
Every single week.
I flipped back toward the beginning of the notebook and found a date nearly twenty years old, faded almost past reading. I flipped forward and found an entry from six weeks before he died, when his hands had gone shaky enough that the pencil marks wobbled across the page.
Most addresses appeared for a season, maybe two, then stopped, as though whatever need had brought them there had eventually been met and closed out. A young couple two counties over who’d lost a barn to lightning. An elderly man out past the county line whose entries stopped abruptly the same month, I would later learn, that he passed. But one address ran the entire length of the notebook, unbroken, twenty years of checked boxes without a single gap, a small country road I did not recognize at all, out past the eastern edge of Millhaven township.
Beside it, instead of a name, my father had written only two letters and a dash, the way you might label a supplier account you did not need spelled out because you carried the whole story of it in your head already.
I sat in that truck a long time with the notebook open on my knee.
I told myself it was nothing. An old customer he still served the way he served everyone, on credit, in pencil, in a truck that predated my marriage. I told myself that for almost a full day before I stopped believing it.