The Route They Gave His Nephew

Kyle at the wash bay

I had one more thing happen before I made my drive, and it is the part Joyce would want me to tell, because it is the tender one.

Thursday was my thirty-year day. I still did not have the vesting in hand, understand. Service date is one thing and the company signing off is another, and I knew Dennis could still try to foul it. But Thursday morning I came in and swept my lot, and about ten o’clock Kyle brought his truck back in.

He should not have been back at ten. He should have been out on the far end of the route. He pulled the truck crooked into the wash bay and he sat in the cab a minute before he got down, and when he got down his eyes were red.

“I can’t find half the stops,” he said. He was talking to me but looking at the ground. “The app sends me down roads that aren’t roads. There was a lady today waiting on a thing for her husband, some medical thing, and I couldn’t find the turn, and she stood out at the end of her drive just watching me go by the wrong way.” His voice cracked on it. “Uncle Dennis said I’d pick it up. I’m not picking it up.”

I stood there with the broom. Nineteen years old. He was not the one who did this to me. He was a boy his uncle had used, same as the broom, and he was out there failing in front of my people on my road, and some part of me wanted to let him drown in it.

I did not.

“Get your route sheet,” I said.

He got it. I spread it on the hood of his truck and I went down it with my finger, stop by stop, and I told him the reservoir route the way you tell somebody the way to a house they are going to live in. The Hadley place, mailbox leans left, go slow or you’ll miss the gravel. The turn by the church that is not on the map because the county never signed it. The widow on Route 9 who needs you to carry it to the porch because of her hip, and it will cost you four minutes and it is worth it.

He wrote it all down in a little notebook, fast, his tongue in the corner of his mouth.

“Why are you helping me,” he said when we finished. “He took your route. For me.”

“Because there’s a lady on Route 9 who didn’t take anything from anybody,” I said, “and she still needs her box on the porch. The route’s not about you and me, son. The route’s about them.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he said, quiet, “This isn’t right, what he did. I told him that. He didn’t listen.”

“I know you did,” I said, though I had not known it until he said it. “Go on. You’ll make the afternoon if you leave now.”

He went. I watched his truck pull out of the yard and swing north toward the reservoir road, and I thought, the boy will be all right, which surprised me, because a week before I would not have cared whether he was all right or not.

And I got in my own truck at the end of my shift and I drove to Toledo.