The Application My Father In Law Kept
So I never told Walt. It was that simple and that stubborn. For eleven years one sentence would have ended it, and I would not say the sentence, because where I come from you do not lay your check stub on another man’s table.
And Kelly loved her father. I was not going to make her pick a side of the table.
I should say what the job is, since that is what the whole business was about.
I drive a rear-loader for the city. It is a white truck with a hopper on the back, and it holds about twelve tons when it is packed tight. I have a helper named Rick who rides the step and tips the carts. On a heavy day we trade off, so yes, I do ride a garbage truck. Walt had that part right.
We leave the shop at six. I have had the same northeast route for nine years, about eight hundred and fifty stops between the creek and the fairgrounds. Tuesday is my longest day.
You learn a route the way you learn a hymn. You stop reading it. I know which houses put two carts out the week after a graduation. I know who has a new baby by the diaper boxes, and who has lost a husband by the day the second car stops moving. I know the man on North Carolina Avenue who salutes the truck, and I know he was at Chosin, because one August he told me so over a glass of lemonade he made me stand and drink.
And I know Mrs. Petersen on North Delaware.
Edna Petersen was eighty-four that winter. Little white house, green shutters, attached one-car garage. Her husband Harold had been gone since before I got the route, and she had never once in nine years been late to the curb. Her cart was out by half past six, square to the street, lid shut. When we came by at ten after seven she was at the kitchen window with her coffee, and she waved, and I gave her two taps on the horn.
Every December there was a coffee can on top of that cart lid with a rubber band around it. Molasses cookies, a dozen for me and a dozen for Rick, and a note that said the same thing every year. For my Tuesday men.
December went by cold and polite.
Walt and Jean came for Christmas Eve like always. Walt shook my hand at the door and said the ham was good and helped Ben put the batteries in a truck. He did not mention the paper. Neither did I. I had said my piece once and I did not intend to say it twice. I had seen what a man looks like when he repeats his own number, and I did not care to look like that.
But he was not himself. He checked his phone at the table, which he had never done, and he left before the kids opened their one present.
“Is your dad all right?” I asked Kelly.
“He’s proud,” she said. “It takes him a while.”
It was not pride. I found that out the second Saturday in January, when Josh pulled into my driveway.
I was in the garage with the hood up on my pickup, changing the oil. It is a 2014 Silverado with a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it, and I do my own because I like to see what comes out.