The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

For the best driver on the route. 31 trips. 0 missed.

I have that card in my Bible now. I’m not ashamed to say it.

Elsie walked over to my window before we pulled out. She handed me the orange cone.

“You keep that,” she said. “You earned that spot.”

It’s in my machine shed. My husband thinks it’s for the Jeep. I let him think it.

That evening, at my own kitchen table, I opened the spiral notebook and added it up.

Thirty-one trips. One thousand, three hundred and sixty-four miles. Eighty-five gallons of gas at the co-op. Two hundred and eighty-one dollars.

I looked at that number a long time. Then I folded the receipts back up and put them in the notebook and put the notebook in my dresser drawer, under my good slip.

I never sent them to anybody. I never told Kayleen what it came to. It was not that kind of bill.

I thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t, quite.

The second Saturday in September there was a fall league game at our town field, a few towns’ worth of kids who weren’t ready for summer to be over. Garrett was home on his off weeks. Silas had been cleared to play two days before.

I got there early and sat in my usual spot in the bleachers, third row, first base side, with my cushion and my thermos. It was a clear cool morning, the first one that felt like fall.

Kayleen came with her girls about the second inning. She sat down at the far end of the bleachers. She saw me. She nodded. I nodded back.

In the third inning, Silas came up to bat. Half the bleachers knew what kind of summer he’d had. Small towns know everything. The women from the café knew about the Jeep, and the men at the co-op knew about the Jeep, and I suppose by then the cows knew about the Jeep.

He hit a hard single into left field. He ran it out on two good legs, and when the boy in left bobbled the ball, Silas made the turn and thought about second, and stopped, and went back to first.

The whole bleachers groaned and then laughed. Garrett, standing at the fence, laughed loudest.

Then on the next pitch, Silas stole second. Standing up. No slide. He just ran down there like it was any other Saturday and stood on that bag and dusted his hands.

I looked down the bleachers at Kayleen.

She was watching him. She wasn’t on her phone. She wasn’t talking to her girls. She was watching Silas stand on second base, and her face was a face I hadn’t seen her wear before. I don’t think she knew anybody was looking.

Two or three women from church were looking. So was I. Then I made myself look back at the field, because I did not come there to watch her. I came there to watch him.

After the game, I was folding up my cushion when Kayleen came down the bleachers and stood at the end of my row. Her girls were already at the concession stand.

“He looks good,” she said.

“He does.”

She stood there a while. She was turning her car keys around and around on her finger.