The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

“You can wait in here, hon,” she said that first morning. “We’ve got coffee and a whole stack of magazines.”

“I’ll wait in the Jeep,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

She looked out the window at the Jeep, and then back at me, and something passed over her face. “You carried mail,” she said. “My aunt carried mail out of Forbes for twenty years. She never could sit in a building either.”

The therapist was named Paxton Reiff. He was thirty, tall and broad through the shoulders, with big rough hands and a farm kid’s sunburn on the back of his neck. He had played college ball himself, he told Silas, until his own knee went.

“So you know,” Silas said.

“So I know,” Paxton said. “It’s going to hurt, and you’re going to hate me some days, and then one day you’re going to walk out of here. That’s the deal.”

Then he took Silas into the back, and I went out and sat in the Jeep.

I sat there for an hour with the windows down and a thermos of coffee and the crossword out of the Aberdeen paper. I could see a corner of the therapy room through one of those side windows. Mostly I saw Paxton’s back and once in a while the top of Silas’s head.

I prayed some. I’m not a big prayer out loud, but I pray in the Jeep. I always have. Thirty-one years of gravel will make a praying woman out of anybody.

When Silas came out, he was sweating and gray around the mouth. He got into the Jeep by himself that time, slow, and handed me the crutches without a word.

Halfway home, just past the county line, he took out one earbud.

“He made me stand on it,” he said.

“How was it?”

“It hurt.” He was quiet a minute. “But I stood on it.”

“Well,” I said. “There you go.”

He put the earbud back in. But he left the other one out, the one on my side, and I took that for what it was.

By the second week, Elsie was saving me the spot under the cottonwood.

I didn’t ask her to. I pulled in that Monday and there was an orange traffic cone in the shade spot, and Elsie came out on the front step and waved me in and moved the cone herself.

“It’s going to be a hot one,” she said. “No sense you baking out here.”

From then on, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, that cone was there when we pulled in. I never once saw anybody else park in that spot all summer.

By the third week, Silas was talking on the drive. Not a lot. Fourteen-year-old boys ration their words like they are paying for them. But he would tell me what Paxton had him do, and which part hurt worst, and how many reps he did on the leg press.

“Twenty-five pounds,” he said one Friday. “That’s nothing. I used to do two hundred.”

“You’ll do two hundred again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you,” I said. “That’s close enough.”

The leg lifts at home he did every evening on the living room floor, the way the sheet said. He had a TV tray set up by the couch with his water and his stretching band, and Kayleen’s girls would sit on the couch and count for him.