Paige Walked Her Paper Route Back

Mono

On Sunday the twenty-seventh of September, Paige came downstairs with a fever of 102 and a throat she said felt like swallowing a handful of broken glass.

By Tuesday I had her in an exam room at the clinic where I work, with a swab and a blood test. Mononucleosis. The doctor said it with the flat kindness of someone who says it forty times a fall.

“Two to four weeks of real rest,” she told us. “No lifting, no sports, nothing that jostles her middle. The spleen can swell, and we don’t want it getting bumped.”

Paige heard that and started to cry, and it was not because of the fever. “The route,” she said. “Mom, it’s Tuesday. It’s a Tuesday route.”

I told her I would figure it out, though I had no idea how. I work days. Jeremy, my husband, hauls milk out of Beaver Dam and leaves at four in the morning. A route that starts at the top of Cedar Street at six was not something either of us could add.

My stepfather solved it before I had finished the thought.

Melvin Rademacher married my mother when I was twenty-eight, three years after my father died. He is a big man with big hands and a gray crew cut and a Ford F-150 with a bench seat, and he has driven Paige’s route with her on every rain day since she started. He knows which dog will bite.

“I’ll cover it,” he said, right there in my mother’s driveway, the afternoon I told them. “Tell her not to worry. Truck’s warm, I’m up anyway.”

I thanked him twice. I want you to understand that, because it matters later. I stood in my mother’s driveway in the autumn light and thanked a man twice for the favor of stealing from my child.

I even told Paige about it as good news. “Grandpa Melvin’s got your route,” I said, and I watched the knot in her forehead let go for the first time in two days. She closed her eyes and slept sixteen hours.