The Van Dad Drove to Church

The new van

The Ford came the next Wednesday. Garrett drove it down from the lake himself and parked it in the clean spot by the garage, where the old one had been, and handed Dad the keys and the title.

It is white, like the old one. It does not have a crack in the windshield yet, and it smells like the camp, like canvas and bug spray, instead of Juicy Fruit. Dad says it will smell right by Christmas.

The title is in Dad’s name. Just his. He keeps it in the metal box in his bedroom closet, with Mom’s ring and his discharge papers and the deed to the house.

Garrett paid off the rest by the end of October. He never told anybody at the cafe.

As far as I know, the six widows still think he is the son who let his father keep driving, and Garrett has never corrected them. I think that is its own kind of sentence, and he serves it every Sunday.

Because he comes to church now. Every Sunday. He stands in the lot when we pull in, and he opens the door for Inga, because she rides in front, and he walks her up the steps on the side where Dad is not.

Now

The doctor cleared Dad to drive again in the middle of October. He came out of the clinic and handed me the keys to the Ford anyway.

“You drive,” he said. “I’ll do the doors.”

So that is how it goes now. Every Sunday at a quarter to nine I pull into Dad’s driveway, and he is waiting at the kitchen table in his black suit and his maroon tie, and he says we are two minutes late even when we are not.

We go to Theda’s first. He rolls the side door open and holds out his arm. Then down the line, house by house, every door, and Inga last with five minutes extra. Nobody honks.

The ladies are all still with us. Theda turned eighty-nine in October and made Dad a cake.

Inga’s knees are worse, so Dad takes her steps one at a time with her, and nobody minds how long it takes.

Sometimes I think about how close we came to losing all of it. Not the van. The van was just a van.

What we almost lost was the reason a man gets up on Sunday morning and puts on his good suit.

Dad is eighty-six. He has buried a wife, and he has outlived most of the men he worked with at the elevator, and he has picked up the same six widows for church every Sunday for 22 years.

He still sits in the passenger seat, and I drive.