The Last Stop on My Book Route

“Good,” she said, and then, more quietly, “Verna, you drove up to my porch every Thursday for seventeen years, and not once did you ask me to come down off of it. The least I could do was pick up a telephone.” And she hung up, which is the way we do it out here.

I sat down on a kitchen chair then.

At twenty past one, Wendell Lorenz read me the tomato section of the seed catalog. All of it. He read it in the voice of a man delivering the Gettysburg Address, every variety, every number of days to maturity, with long pauses in places where the catalog did not seem to call for one. He read me the whole page on a pink heirloom that grows to a pound and a half. When he finished, he said, “I’m not going to plant any of them, ma’am,” and I put my apron over my face.

By then it was nearly half past one, and I had been read to by five people, in five kitchens, between sunrise and lunch, which is more than had happened to me in my seventy years.

I wiped my face, washed my cup, and sat down in the chair by the phone.

Here is what I was thinking. I was thinking that Emil Kusek does not use the telephone. In twenty-two years he had called my house twice: once when his furnace quit in a January blizzard, and once to tell me his brother had died, which he did in four words. He kept his phone on the kitchen wall and answered it as if it were an animal he did not trust. He had never telephoned anyone for pleasure in his life.

I did not expect him to call. I sat there to be fair to the others, so that if their plan went as far as Emil, I would be at the table, and if it did not, nobody would have to say so.

At two-thirty, which is exactly when I always turned in at his lane, the phone rang.

What Emil did

“Verna,” he said. “It’s Emil.”

“I know it’s you.”

“Stay there.”

Then there was a sound I knew. It was a chair scraping a linoleum floor, and then the small, flat click of a lamp’s pull chain, and then a pause. Then a sound that I couldn’t place at first, and then did. It was a page, turning stiffly. Large-print library paper, a little heavy, with the cough it makes when it comes up off the one before.

I put my free hand over my mouth.

He cleared his throat. He cleared it twice.

Then Emil Kusek began to read.

I want to tell you exactly how it sounded, and I am not sure I can. He read the way a man sets fence posts. One word, and then he would stand and look at it, and then the next. Not a word was missing. He didn’t skip. It took him a moment to find “Shimerda,” and when he found it he said it right, the way you say the name of somebody’s family, with the weight on the front. He stopped at a long word, said the first half of it twice, went around it, and I heard him come back for it and take it out whole.

He was reading from where the church bulletin sat in the book. The bookmark I had left there on the last Thursday I read to him, the day of the lane. He started on the last two lines of the page I had read him, and then he went on to the ones I had not.