Paige Walked Her Paper Route Back

The weeks

I would come in after work and sit on the edge of her bed. Sometimes she would put her hand on mine without opening her eyes. Once she said, “Is the route okay?” and I said, “Grandpa Melvin says it’s fine,” and she said, “Tell him the Voigt paper has to be in the box by seven,” and I said I would.

My mother, Corinne, works second shift at the cheese plant out on Highway 33. She leaves at two-thirty and gets home after eleven, and in those weeks she was picking up holiday overtime on top of it. She stopped by twice with a pot of chicken and rice, sat with Paige, and went home tired.

Two weeks went by. Then three. By the middle of October Paige was sitting up for a few hours a day and getting restless, and the doctor said another week of rest. Melvin said he did not mind, truly, and he would keep the route until she was ready.

By week four she was asking for her notebook.

I said, “Honey, rest.”

“Mom, it’s the end of the month. I want to check my collections.”

I told her I would ask Grandpa Melvin to bring the money over so she could count it. I asked him on Thursday. Melvin said he would get it to me on the weekend, after he finished collecting.

That was the twenty-second of October.

The call

On Monday the twenty-sixth, at ten past two, the desk phone at the clinic rang, and the caller screen said Lindley Courier.

“Laurie,” said Pete. He sounded warm and a little embarrassed, the way a man sounds when he thinks he is about to give you bad news gently. “I wanted to call and say how sorry I am to hear Paige’s giving up the route.”

I did not understand him. I truly did not. I said, “I’m sorry?”

“Melvin came in. Said she’s lost interest, with the sickness and all, and he’d keep it. I told him that’s fine, we’ll put him down as the carrier. It’s just, she’s been so good, and I wanted you to know I understand. She’s only fourteen. Kids move on.”

“Paige didn’t give up the route,” I said.

There was a pause on the line long enough for me to hear a printer running behind him.

“Laurie, he told me last week. He’s been telling the customers since the tenth. A couple of them called the office to say how sorry they were.”

I held the edge of my desk. A man was waiting in front of me to check in for a physical, and I smiled at him like a person who was fine, and I held up one finger, and I said to Pete, in the voice I use to confirm insurance, “Please don’t change anything in the system. I will call you back.”

I hung up. The man at the desk said, “Everything okay?” and I said yes, thank you, name and date of birth, please.

Then I went in the bathroom and put cold water on my wrists.

I counted it at the kitchen table that night, with Paige’s green notebook open in front of me while she slept upstairs.

October, fourteen customers, twenty-six dollars each: $364. Tips, going by her notes from the Octobers before, came to about forty-six more.

Four hundred and ten dollars.

I called a number I had saved for three years under “Route customers,” and I asked Eileen Ebling, who is eighty-one and answers on the first ring, whether she had paid the carrier lately.

“Why, yes, Laurie,” she said. “Melvin came Wednesday. I gave him my twenty-six dollars. He said he’d put the receipt in the mail.”

“Has the receipt come?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Why, no. Now that you mention it. No.”

I thanked her and told her I would call back.

I sat there for a long time. I want to tell you what I did not do. I did not call my mother. I did not drive over to their house at ten o’clock at night and bang on the door. I did not call the Lindley police, who are three good men and one bad knee, and whom I have known since high school.