The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

I will say that for Kayleen’s girls. They counted for him every night. Kids are better than we are, most of the time.

I kept a little spiral notebook in the mail tray on the dash, the way I used to keep my route mileage. Every trip I wrote down the date and the miles. Every time I filled up at the co-op, I folded the receipt and tucked it into the back of the notebook.

I don’t know why I did it. Thirty-one years of keeping a mileage log, I suppose. Your hands keep doing what they know.

Garrett called me from the rig on a Sunday afternoon in late June. It was the first time he had been able to get a good signal in a week.

“Mom,” he said. “Kayleen told me you’ve been driving Silas.”

“I have.”

“She said he was doing fine with the sheet. She said they told her that was enough.”

I could hear the wind on his end, and an engine somewhere, and men’s voices. I could hear how tired he was.

“He’s doing the sheet,” I said. “He’s doing the clinic too. Both. Paxton says he’s right where he should be.”

There was a long silence on the line, the kind that costs money.

“Mom, I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know she canceled. I’ll talk to the boss. I’ll quit this hitch and come home and drive him myself.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” I said. “You’ll stay out there and pay that hospital. I’ve got the rides.”

“It’s forty-four miles a day, Mom.”

“I drove a hundred and fourteen a day for thirty-one years,” I said. “Forty-four miles is a trip to the post office.”

He was quiet a long time. Then he said thank you, and then he said it again, and his voice did something on the second one that I have not heard it do since he was a boy.

I didn’t ask him to fight with his wife from six hours away on a phone that kept cutting out. That fight was his to have, in his own kitchen, when he got home. My job was the Jeep.

The middle of July was the worst of it.

Paxton had told us it would come. He said every kid hits a wall somewhere around week five or six, when the leg is strong enough to start asking it for real things but not strong enough to give them.

For Silas the wall was the stairs. There were four wooden steps in the back of the therapy room, built like a little porch, with a rail on each side. Paxton wanted him to go up and down them without the rail.

That Wednesday, Silas came out of the clinic shaking. Not crying. He would not have cried in front of Paxton or Elsie or God himself. But shaking.

He got into the Jeep and handed me the crutches and sat there with his hands in his lap. He didn’t buckle his seat belt.

“Buckle up,” I said.

He didn’t move.

“I can’t do the steps, Grandma,” he said. “I fell on the second one. Paxton caught me. He says I’m behind. He didn’t say it like that, but that’s what he meant.”