The Last Stop on My Book Route

Every Thursday after that, for the last twenty minutes of the day, at the oilcloth with the cherries worn off, I read to Emil Kusek with my finger under the line.

We went through every western Delmer Bonne ever sent back. We went through a book about the dust bowl and a book about bees. We went through three of Willa Cather’s novels, because Emil’s grandmother Barbora had come from Bohemia to a sod house not forty miles from where we were sitting, and he liked to hear about people who had done it.

This past August he asked for My Ántonia again. We had read it once, years ago. He said he wanted to hear it a second time while he still could. Golda found me the large-print copy from the back room, and I read it to him at the rate of five or six pages a Thursday, with my finger under the line, and when I went home I left the book on his table with the bookmark in it, which was a church bulletin from a Sunday in 2016. He liked to have it there. He said it kept him company.

What my eyes did

I was sixty-six when the first spot came.

It was in my left eye, a small gray smudge the size of a dime in the center of everything, as if someone had pressed a thumb into the picture. The eye doctor in Kearney, a quiet young woman named Dr. Amundsen with a laminated chart of the inside of the eye on her wall, called it wet macular degeneration. She said it as gently as the doctors say these things. Then she explained that there is no cure but that there is a shot, a needle straight into the eye, once every six weeks, that slows it down.

I took the shots for four years. I drove myself to Kearney and had Lori drive me home, and I will say there is not much that makes a person pray like a needle going toward her eyeball. It held. It held longer than she had promised it would.

I told no one on the route. Not Thelma, not Mim. They had troubles enough of their own, and a person likes the woman with the books to be the one with nothing wrong.

This spring the right eye went.

It went quicker than the left. By June I could not read a book spine. By July I couldn’t read a face across the table unless it was leaning toward me, and I had begun to know people by their voices before I looked up, which is not a thing I recommend to a woman who works in people’s kitchens. Print became a wavy ripple, then a fog. I switched to the talking books from the state library, which I recommend to anybody and which I think about a good deal, because there is a joke in it somewhere. For twenty-five years I handed out books, and now they hand them to me.

The route I could still drive. A person who has driven the same seventy-one miles every Thursday for twenty-five years does not need eyes, or not as many as you would think. She has a map in her hands. I knew the washboard on the Elyria road by the buzz in the steering wheel. I knew the Burwell turnoff by the smell of the feedlot. I took the curves by the feel of the Buick leaning.