The Cash Box in Dad’s Closet

Esperanza and the loaf of bread

Box 31 was the Ruiz family, at the end of County Line Road, a farm-labor house with plywood over one window.

The Ruizes are gone from there now. Esperanza Ruiz was twelve the first winter my father paid their propane, the oldest of five, and her mother worked nights at the potato shed. She is forty-four now and owns the bakery on Main Street with the blue awning, the one I have driven past a hundred times.

I walked in on a Wednesday just before closing. She was at the register in a white apron with flour on her forearms.

“I think you are Arlo Renner’s son,” she said, before I opened my mouth.

She came around the counter and put her arms around me, a woman I had never met, and held on for what felt like a minute.

“We did not know it was him,” she said into my shoulder. “My mother never knew. She thought it was the church. Lorraine told me on Friday.”

“He wanted it that way.”

“I know he did.” She let go and wiped her face with the back of her wrist and left a streak of flour. “I will tell you what I remember. A man showed up one January with a half cord of split wood in the bed of an old Ford. He said it was left over. My mother said no, and he said it would only rot, and he stacked it against the house himself, in his mail carrier’s jacket, with his bag still on his shoulder.”

She laughed, and the laugh turned into something else.

“I was twelve. I remember the windshield on that truck was white on the inside. I remember thinking, that man must be freezing. I did not understand.”

She went in the back and came out with a paper bag, still warm.

“For the family of whoever drives that route,” she said. “We have done it every Friday for six years and nobody knows why. Now I think maybe somebody does.”

The nurse who would not take mileage

It was the Sorensen name I could not place.

It ran through eleven bundles in a row, starting with the winter of 1996, on Bannock Ridge Propane tickets. In the field book it was Box 14, on the Lower Flat road, eleven winters in the same square hand. Every year the number beside it was bigger than any other on the page, and every year, in the margin, he had drawn a tiny circle and left it empty.

I asked Lorraine about the circle.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He did that for the families he worried about most. I always figured it meant he was still looking.”

Jolene Sorensen had moved to Pocatello nine years ago to be near her sister. I asked at the church, and a woman there said, “Sorensen? Jolene’s oldest girl is a nurse. Shanna. She does hospice out of Idaho Falls.”

“Shanna,” I said. “She was my father’s nurse.”

“Honey,” the woman said, “I know she was.”

The room did a slow turn around me.

I remembered her the way you suddenly remember a face you have looked at every day for six weeks without seeing. A tall young woman with a braid and a canvas bag who came to my father’s house three evenings a week from the first of September, driving seventy miles each way in a little gray Subaru. She was thirty-seven, maybe. She called him Mr. Renner until the second week, and then she called him Arlo, because he asked her to.