The Name On Every Truck

Here is what happened over the next twenty-five years, and it happened so slowly that I did not see it happening, the way you do not see your own kids get tall.

Dale liked the front of the business. He liked standing at the counter and shaking hands and telling the farmers about the ball game. He liked driving the newest truck and he liked people seeing him drive it. And I liked, or I thought I liked, or I had been raised to like, the back of the business. The dispatch board. The books. The phone. The part my father had actually taught me, which was the part nobody sees.

When my father’s heart gave out, three years ago, in the cab of his own truck in the elevator line on a Tuesday morning, the whole town came to the funeral and half of them came to the scale house after and nobody knew what would happen to Hollis Freight and Feed. And what happened was that Dale stepped out front, and I stepped into the back, and from the outside it looked like Dale Rourke was now running Hollis Freight and Feed.

From the inside it was me. I want to be careful here, because I am not going to stand up and tell you I did everything, that would be a lie, Dale worked and Dale drove and Dale could charm a nervous young farmer into signing a hauling agreement better than anybody. But the nervous system of the business, the part my father put in me on that stool, that was mine. I did the dispatch. I did the books. I knew where every truck was and who was running late and why. And, which is the whole point of this story, I was the one who sat on the tailgate behind the elevator every October with Ray Dvorak.

My father died in March. That first October after, I drove out to the co-op with a casserole for Ray’s wife, who had just had her knee done, and I stayed and had coffee with Ray in his office, and before I left he walked me out to his pickup and we stood by the tailgate and he said, “Maren, you still want it?” And I understood exactly what he was asking me, and I understood that he was asking me and not Dale, and I said, “Ray, you still got it?” And he said he did, and we shook hands, and that was the contract for the year. Ray Dvorak shook my hand, not my husband’s. He had known my father forty years. He had held me at my christening. He was not going to hand my father’s company to a man he did not fully trust on the strength of a loud voice at the counter.