Paige Walked Her Paper Route Back

The notes

The doctor cleared her on Thursday the twenty-ninth. She said short walks, a mile at a time, drink water, rest if her side hurt. I told her the route was two and three-quarter miles and she said, “Then take a break at the church,” and wrote it on a sticky note for Paige.

Paige sat at our kitchen table from Tuesday through Friday and wrote sixty-three thank-you notes, in blue pen, on the good cream cardstock Jeremy’s mother had given us for Christmas cards. I offered to help, and she said she wanted her own handwriting on every one.

She wrote the same words on all of them, and she threw out eleven drafts before she settled. This is what the final note said:

Dear neighbor, thank you for three years. I was sick with mono and I could not carry your paper, but I did not quit. I am better now. I would like my route back, and I wanted you to hear that from me. Thank you for being my customers. Paige.

She put each one in an envelope, wrote the house number on the front, and stacked them in order in a paper grocery bag from the Piggly Wiggly. Sixty-three envelopes. On the fourteen who paid at the door she added one more line under her name: Please tell me if you paid Melvin in October.

I read that line over her shoulder and I said, “Are you sure you want to ask them that?”

She said, “I’m not accusing anyone, Mom. I just want to know where my money is. That’s allowed.”

She was right. It was allowed.

Jeremy came home late Friday and read one of the notes standing in the kitchen with his boots still on. He is not a man of many words. He folded it carefully and put it back in the envelope.

“I’m on a run to Beaver Dam at four,” he said. “Back by three. I can’t be there.”

“I know.”

“Let her walk it, Laurie.” He looked at the ceiling, toward her room. “That’s about the best thing I’ve ever seen a kid do. Just stay close.”

I said I would.

I was afraid of the wrong thing. What came was kindness, and I had not prepared for that.

Number one

“I didn’t quit, Mrs. Ebling,” Paige had said when the note was still in the envelope. “I had mono. I’m better now.”

Her voice shook on the last word. I remember that because I wanted to climb the steps and put my arms around her, and I kept my hands in my coat pockets instead.

Now Mrs. Ebling stood on her porch with the note in both hands, reading it for the second time. When she looked up there was water standing in her eyes, and she did not wipe it.

“He took my twenty-six dollars the Wednesday before last,” she said quietly. “Said he’d mail me a receipt. There was never a receipt.”

She said it to the air between us, almost to herself. Then her eyes came to mine, and I knew she had understood everything in the time it takes to read a page.

“Wait right there, both of you,” she said, and put one finger up.

The storm door clicked shut. Through the glass I watched her cross the kitchen to the wall phone, the kind with a cord that has been stretched out of shape by thirty years of kitchen conversations, and lift the receiver.

Paige looked at me over her shoulder. I did not say anything. I lifted my chin a little, the way you do when you tell a child it is all right to stay where she is.

Mrs. Ebling talked for about two minutes. I could not hear the words through the door, but I could hear the tone. It was the voice a woman of eighty-one uses with a man she has known since he was a boy. It was not loud, and it was not warm.

Then she came back out with her purse on her arm. She counted out twenty-six dollars in ones and fives onto her palm, and she held it out to Paige.

“Eileen, you don’t have to,” Paige said. It was the first time I heard her use a grown woman’s first name, and I do not think she noticed.

“I do,” Mrs. Ebling said. “I paid you once, in my heart. I’ll pay you again with my hand. And that was Pete on the phone, and I told him that if the Courier wants my subscription it’ll be delivered by Paige, or it won’t be delivered at all.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was sorry and he’d call you.” Mrs. Ebling tucked the money into Paige’s hand and closed her fingers over it. “Go on, now. You’ve got sixty-two more to go, and this one’s your first customer, so it’s the one you can’t forget.”

Paige put the bills in the inside pocket of her jacket, the one with the zipper. Then she picked up the grocery bag and went down the walk to house number two.

I stood by the Buick and watched her go. I thought, she will not need me for the next one, and I was right.