The Last Stop on My Book Route

The six houses

Thelma Sevenker was first. She is ninety-two now, and she still bakes kolaches on Wednesdays for a church that no longer asks her to, and she reads a cozy mystery every four days. She keeps a ceramic cat on the table beside her recliner, and in twenty-five years I have never once seen the cat moved.

Ruby Ann Pesek was second. She is sixty-six and has had multiple sclerosis since she was thirty-four, and she moves around her little house on Elm Street in a wheelchair she calls her Cadillac. She reads two police mysteries a week and writes to the authors when they get the procedure wrong. She has had four answers. She keeps them in a drawer.

Delmer Bonne was third, eighty-four, out on the Burwell road with an oxygen machine that hissed in the corner like a kettle that never quite boiled. He was a rancher. He reads westerns and he claims he does not believe in them. He told me once that the only reason he wanted the horse to live was that he had buried too many of the real ones.

Mim Vodehnal was fourth, at noon, which meant lunch. Mim is seventy-nine. She has not been off her own front porch since her husband’s funeral in 2009. She is not sick. She went out to the cemetery that day, came home, took off her good shoes, and never went out again, and nobody has ever made her. Mim knows everyone in Valley County by name and by phone number, and she has never forgotten either one.

Wendell Lorenz was fifth. He is the youngest of my riders, fifty-eight, and he has been in a chair since a tractor rolled on him in 2011. He read history, mostly, and he read seed catalogs the way other men read the sports page, with a pencil, circling things he would not be planting. I think it comforted him to keep up with the tomatoes.

And Emil Kusek was last.