The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

He came back out twenty minutes later and climbed into the back of the Jeep and sat there with his elbows on his knees.

“He did all four stairs,” Garrett said. “No rail. Up and down. Twice.”

He put his face in his hands. I let him. A man ought to get to do that in his mother’s Jeep if he needs to.

What happened in Garrett’s kitchen that week, I don’t know. I wasn’t there and I didn’t ask. I know there were some words. I know Kayleen didn’t come to the window when I pulled in the next Monday.

I know, too, that Garrett left two hundred dollars in an envelope on my kitchen table before he went back out, with a note that said Gas, Love, G. I put it in the coffee can on top of my refrigerator. I didn’t spend it on gas.

My husband got into the act in the last week of July.

The Jeep’s air conditioning had been weak since the first of the month, and on the hot days Silas would come out of the clinic soaked and climb into a Jeep that was worse than the parking lot. I’d been driving with the windows down and saying nothing about it.

My husband said nothing about it either. He just went out to the shed one Saturday morning with his toolbox and his reading glasses. By noon he had a new fan belt on it and had recharged the air, and he came in for dinner with grease up to his elbows.

“Air’s cold,” he said.

That was the whole speech. He is a man of few words and most of them are about machinery. But the next Monday that Jeep blew cold enough to hang meat in, and Silas put his face right up to the vent and closed his eyes, and that was thank you enough for both of them.

August came in hot and dry. The wheat came off, and the trucks were running to the elevator from sunup on, and our little drive to Ellendale got slower with combines on the road.

Silas didn’t mind. He would count the combines. He knew whose they were by the color and the dents, the way I knew every mailbox on my old route.

By the second week of August, he was using one crutch instead of two. By the third week, Paxton had him jogging on the treadmill for five minutes at a time.

“He’s ahead now,” Paxton told me in the lot one Wednesday. He had come out to bring me a cold bottle of water, which he did a couple of times a week by then. “I’m going to be honest with you, Mrs. Brandt. When he came in, the first week, I wasn’t sure he would get there. Not his leg. Him.”

“He got there,” I said.

“He got there,” Paxton said. “Some of that was him. Some of that was this Jeep sitting out here three days a week.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I drank my water. It was not the first time he had come out to that lot. Back in June he had walked out once just to tell me Silas worked harder than any kid he’d ever had.