The Name On Every Truck

And then Dale stood up and picked up the microphone.

He was lit up. Not falling-down drunk, but shined up, loose, pleased with himself, the way he got when a room was his. He thanked everybody for coming. He told a joke about the price of diesel that got a laugh. And then he said he wanted to talk about the future of the company, because a company that does not look to the future is a company with its parking brake on, which was a line I knew he had gotten off a podcast he listened to in the truck.

“When Walt handed me this company,” he said, and I heard the word handed and I felt table nine go still around me, because every driver at that dinner knew my father had not handed Dale anything, my father had died in a truck in the elevator line, “when Walt handed me this company, it was a good little operation. But the world’s changing. And I’ve been lucky enough to find somebody who gets that. Somebody young, somebody sharp, somebody who’s gonna take Hollis Freight and Feed into the next twenty-five years.”

And he put his hand on Kayla’s shoulder.

“I want everybody to raise a glass,” he said, “to the new office manager of Hollis Freight and Feed. Kayla Prine.”

He had not told her he was going to do it. I could see that on her face. She went red and she half-stood and she did not know what to do with her hands. And Dale was grinning out at the room with his beer held up, waiting for two hundred people to drink to it.

And then, because he could not leave it alone, because the ice in him had to find me across that room, he looked right at table nine, right at me by the kitchen door, and he said into the microphone, “And don’t worry about Maren, folks. Maren’s gonna keep doing what Maren does best. Staying out of the way.”

He laughed. He thought it was a joke. A few people laughed with him, the ones who did not know, the newer wives, Sheryl beside me laughed before she caught herself.

Staying out of the way.

I have turned that moment over so many times since. I have wondered what I would have done if the room had laughed. If two hundred people had raised their glasses and drunk to Kayla Prine and laughed at the woman at table nine, I honestly do not know who I would be right now. I think I might have gotten in my car and driven out of Red Elm and not come back. I think that is how close it was.