Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

We had Cal’s pickup. My brother had a trailer, but he lived in Missouri and his wife was expecting. Cal’s folks were both gone. We’d have needed a week, and we had a Saturday.

On Sunday, after church, I did the only thing I could think of.

Our church keeps a prayer list on a clipboard on a little table in the narthex. People write down whatever they want prayed over, and Pastor Ray reads it out loud during the prayers, and on Monday it goes out to the prayer chain by phone.

I stood at that table a long time with the pen in my hand. I didn’t want to write Leland’s name. He was sitting fifteen feet away, putting on his coat, and whatever he’d done, I didn’t want his name read out in that sanctuary next to the sick and the dying.

So I wrote: “Kroeger family moving the last Saturday in October. Could use boxes.”

That was all. I hung the pen back on its string and went out to the car.

The boxes started showing up on Tuesday.

They were on the porch when I came home from the afternoon bus route. Banana boxes from the grocery store, the good strong kind with handholes. Liquor boxes from the bar on Main Street, with the cardboard dividers still in, which Maisie said were perfect for glasses. A stack of flattened moving boxes with a roll of tape on top and no note.

Wednesday there were more. Thursday there was a bundle of newspapers tied with baling twine, for wrapping dishes, and a coffee can full of black markers.

Nobody called. Nobody said a word at church. The boxes just kept coming, and we kept filling them.

Owen packed his own room. He was fourteen and quiet about it. He put his trophies and his books in a banana box with the model tractor his grandpa helped him build, taped it shut, and went outside to throw a ball against the machine shed for an hour.

Maisie made lists. Maisie was eleven and believed with her whole heart that a thing on a list was a thing under control. She labeled every box with the room it came from and the room it was going to, and she drew a map of Edie’s house from memory and taped it inside the kitchen cupboard door.

Jo did not understand. Jo kept asking if the new house had stairs, and if her bed was coming, and whether the lilac was coming too, because of the cats.

“The cats are staying where they are, honey,” I told her. “They’re sleeping.”

“Will the new people know they’re there?”

“I don’t think so.”

She thought about that. “Then somebody should tell them,” she said, and she went and got a crayon.

On the Friday before moving day, a little after four in the afternoon, Pastor Ray called.

Ray Sundquist was in his sixties, a farmer’s son from Minnesota with a voice like gravel in a pail. In twelve years he never made a phone call that lasted longer than it had to.

“Tess,” he said. “What time are you starting tomorrow?”

“First light, I guess. Cal wants to get going early.”

“Good,” Ray said. “Have the coffee on.” And he hung up.

I stood there holding the phone.

“What did he want?” Cal asked. He’d come home early for once, and he was in the kitchen eating crackers out of the sleeve.

“He wanted to know what time we’re starting.”