The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

“What did he say?”

“He said my leg is fine and my head is behind.” Silas wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “Same thing.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’m not a coach and I’m not a therapist. I’m a mail carrier. So I didn’t say anything.

I reached over and buckled his seat belt for him like he was four years old, and he let me. Then I said a little prayer to myself, the kind that is mostly just “Lord, help,” and I started the Jeep.

I didn’t take the highway home. I took the long way, through the middle of Ellendale and past their ballfield, where a bunch of boys about his age were running bases in the noon heat.

Silas turned his whole head away from it and looked out his window at the grain elevator until we were past.

Neither of us said a word the rest of the way home. When we pulled into Garrett’s driveway, he got out by himself and went inside without looking back.

I sat there in the Jeep for a while with the engine off. Kayleen’s car was gone. The girls were at swim lessons.

I want to tell you I prayed some big prayer right then. I didn’t. I just sat there. Sometimes sitting with it is the prayer.

On Friday, Silas came out of the clinic and got in the Jeep and buckled up on his own. He looked out the windshield and not at me.

“Can we go past the ballfield again?” he said.

I didn’t ask him why. I just drove past the ballfield. The same boys were out there. Silas watched them the whole way by, both earbuds out, his hand flat against the window.

“I did one step without the rail,” he said when we were past.

“One’s a start.”

“Paxton says one is the hardest one.” He nodded slowly, like he was trying it on. “He said the next ones are just more of the first one.”

After that, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we went home past the Ellendale ballfield. Silas never asked again. He just looked over at me when we came into town, and I turned left instead of right.

Garrett got home the middle of July for his two weeks off.

The first Monday he was home, I pulled into the driveway at a quarter to eight and there he was on the front step, already in his boots, with a cooler of pop at his feet.

“I’m riding along,” he said. “If that’s all right with the driver.”

So that week the three of us went. Silas rode on the left like always. Garrett folded himself into the back between the crutches and the mail tub, his knees up around his ears, and he never once complained.

He sat in the lot with me under the cottonwood while Silas was inside. He didn’t say much. Garrett is like his dad that way. But he watched that window the whole hour like a man watching a calf being born.

On Friday, Paxton came out and got him.

“Come in and see this,” Paxton said. “You too, ma’am, if you want.”

I didn’t go in. I had decided early on that I would wait for whatever was coming out of that door, not go chasing it inside. But Garrett went.