The Milk Truck at the Church Steps

The part where I said nothing

So there in the shade that August afternoon, Madison asked me what I was going to do about it.

“I’m not going to do anything about it,” I said.

“Dennis.”

“It’s their party, honey. They’re paying for it. It’s their hall and their dinner and their band.” I picked at the webbing on the chair. “And I want my boy’s day to be easy. That’s all I want out of it. If me keeping my mouth shut makes it easy, I can keep my mouth shut. I’ve had practice.”

That was the reason I didn’t pick up the phone and call Gordon Prewitt, and it was the reason I didn’t call Aaron either. I knew if I called Aaron, he’d feel worse than he already felt, and he’d walk into his own wedding with a knot in his stomach.

Madison wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “That’s what I knew you’d say,” she said. “So I’m going to ask you something instead.”

“All right.”

“My mom rented a white car,” she said. “One of those old ones with the fins, from a place in Stevens Point. It’s three hundred and fifty dollars for one hour. It’s supposed to pick us up at the church and drive us to the hall.”

I waited.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I want you to drive us. In this.” She pointed at the truck. “I want to climb up in that cab in my wedding dress and ride out of that church parking lot with my husband and his dad. That’s the picture I want on my wall. Will you do it?”

I looked at her for a long time. Then I looked at the truck again, at the stripe of sun on the tank, at the mud I’d been scrubbing off the frame.

“Your mother is going to have a fit,” I said.

“My mother is going to survive it,” Madison said. “Aaron doesn’t know. I want it to be a surprise. Please, Dennis.”

I said yes. I don’t remember deciding to. I just heard myself say it, and Madison let out a breath like she’d been holding it for six weeks, which I suppose she had.

The route

I didn’t say anything to Aaron. He called me the next Sunday after church, the way he always does, and we talked about the Packers and the weather and a barn he was working on near Abbotsford.

Near the end he got quiet. “Dad,” he said. “About the wedding.”

“Yeah?”

There was a long pause. I could hear him trying.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just, you’ve got your suit, right? The navy one?”

“I’ve got my suit,” I said. “Had it cleaned.”

“Okay,” he said. “Good. Okay.” And that was all.

I sat on the porch steps a long while after we hung up. I wasn’t angry at him. I was sad for him, which is worse in a way. I knew exactly what he was doing, because I’d taught him to do it. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t make trouble for other people. Swallow it and keep driving.

I said a prayer that afternoon, out there on the steps. I didn’t ask for anything big. I just asked the Lord to help my boy find his voice someday, and to help me keep my mouth shut until he did.

On Tuesday I was at the Brandt place, my fourth stop, hooking up the hose in the milk house, when Lester Brandt came in from the parlor wiping his hands on a rag. Lester is seventy-one and still milks a hundred and twenty cows with his son.

“Wedding’s coming up,” Lester said. “Aaron’s.”

“September nineteenth,” I said. “Two o’clock at Saint John’s.”

“You giving a speech?”

I watched the hose. The pump was humming. “No,” I said. “Her folks got somebody from the bank.”

Lester didn’t say anything for a minute. He just looked at me with those pale old eyes. He remembered Aaron at ten, sitting on an upturned bucket in this same milk house, eating a sandwich and asking a hundred questions about the bulk tank.

“Huh,” Lester said. That was all. But it was a heavy huh.

“I’m driving them away from the church, though,” I said. “In the truck. Madison asked me.”

Lester’s eyebrows went up. “The milk truck.”

“The milk truck.”

“Well, I’ll be,” he said. He started to grin. “What time?”

“They come out about three, I’d guess. Then they head down County Road H to the hall in town.”

“County H,” Lester said, like he was writing it down in his head. Then his wife, Maxine, came in with a cup of coffee for me, the way she has every other day for twenty years, and Lester said, “Maxine, Dennis is driving Aaron and his girl to the reception in the milk truck.”

Maxine put the coffee down and put her hand on my arm. “Oh, Dennis,” she said. “Janet would have loved that.”

I had to look at the pump gauge real hard for a while after that.

I didn’t think anything else of it. I thought it was just Lester being Lester. I didn’t know a milk route is a kind of telephone line, and that word goes down it faster than the milk does.