The Last Run of Route 7

The money

Here is how it happened, as plainly as I can tell it.

In the spring of 2022 my brother’s used-car lot in Sioux Center was going under. Interest rates were climbing, his floor plan payments had come due, and he had a bank note on the building that he was two months behind on.

Neal is four years older than I am. He was the boy who could sell anything, the one who ran the concession stand at the county fair at fourteen and came home with a cigar box full of dollar bills. He opened that lot in 2009 and made it work for a long time.

When it started to go, he went to Dad. I didn’t know about it until afterward. Neither did Kent, my husband, and Kent would tell you he wishes somebody had asked him.

Dad had sold the last of his farm ground when Mom got sick, and after the hospital bills and the funeral, what was left was a little over sixty thousand dollars in a savings account and a couple of CDs at the bank in Hull. That was his retirement. That was everything.

He gave Neal thirty-eight thousand of it.

Neal wrote him a note on a yellow legal pad. I have seen it. It says he will pay it back in two years, with interest, and it is signed and dated, and Dad keeps it in the drawer of the kitchen table with the church directory and the rubber bands.

Two years came and went. Then three. Not one payment. Not a hundred dollars at Christmas, not a fifty slipped into a birthday card, nothing.

In the fall of 2023, Dad walked into the district office and asked the transportation director if they still needed drivers. They always need drivers. He renewed his license, passed his physical, and took Route 7 back that October.

I am the secretary at the elementary school. I didn’t see his bank account, but I knew what a route driver makes, and I knew what his propane bill looked like in February, because I’d seen it on his counter.

Kent and I went to him that first winter. We sat at his kitchen table with our coats still on, and Kent laid it out the way Kent lays things out, plain and short.

“Hal, we’d like to cover what Neal owes you,” he said. “We had a decent year. You can call it whatever you want to call it. We just don’t want you out there on the roads.”

Dad looked at him for a long time. Then he reached over and patted Kent’s hand, twice, the way you pat a good dog.

“That’s a kind thing,” he said. “But I don’t need it, and it isn’t yours to pay. It’s between me and my boy.”

“Dad,” I said.

“And I want you to promise me something, Jill.” He turned and looked at me over the top of his glasses. “I want you to promise you won’t go after your brother about it. Not you, not Kent. I lent that money with my eyes open. It was mine to lend.”

I didn’t want to promise. I sat there with my hands around a cup of his terrible coffee and I didn’t want to say the words.

“Your mother would’ve wanted you two to stay brother and sister,” he said quietly. “That’s worth more to me than thirty-eight thousand dollars. Promise me.”

So I promised. And for two and a half years, except for that one phone call in January, I kept it.