The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

“Clarence,” I said. “I have a Class A license.” “I know you do. Ben told me you got it at nineteen.”

“Hauling soybeans.” “Hauling soybeans, hauling grain, hauling hay. That’s a hauler,” Clarence said. “Stephanie, can you do fourteen loads a shift?”

I thought about it for about one second. “I can do fourteen.”

“Then here’s what I can tell you, and I’m only telling you because it’s true.” Clarence’s voice dropped. “The board at the piler has a slot for Unit 7.

The ticket goes out under that number, and the number does not care whose hands are on the wheel as long as they can drive.

Be at the field at five tomorrow. Bring your own thermos.”

I called Dr. Halvorson next. Back in September he had offered me the month unpaid so I could keep the house running while Ben drove, because he knew what harvest meant to families in the valley.

I had only planned to cook and drive Addie to school. Now I needed him to let me spend that month in a cab.

“You want to haul beets,” he said, when I explained. “Fourteen loads a shift.” “Stephanie, I’ve watched you calm down grown men in my chair for six years.

I think you can handle a truck.” He was quiet a moment. “The temp starts Monday. Go.”

Ben had not said a word through any of it. When I hung up he finally looked at me. “Stephanie, you can’t. It’s twelve hours. At night. In that cold.”

“You gave nine years to that truck.” “That’s why,” he said. “I don’t want it chewing you up the way it chews up everybody.”

“Then somebody should finish what you started.” He didn’t argue after that. He just held out his good hand, and I crossed the room and took it, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

That night he sat on the bench by the back door, one-handed, while I pulled on my boots. When I bent to tie them he said, “Let me,”

and he did it himself, slow, with the fingers of one hand, a double knot, the way he tied Addie’s.

“You’re going to be faster than me,” he said. “You’ll see.” “I’m not racing you.” “I know,” he said. “That’s the thing.”

I did not sleep well. At 4:20 I stood in the dark kitchen packing my thermos and my sandwiches and I found something in the lunch pail that I had not put there.

A folded sheet of paper from Addie’s school notebook. She is six.

She had drawn a big white truck with huge wheels, and a stick person in the cab with a long braid, and a pile of brown lumps on the ground that I figured out later were beets.

Under the drawing, in her careful, shaky letters, she had written: Drive safe Mommy. Daddy says you’re faster. I stood there in my coat with the light off, and I will admit it took me a minute.

Then I tucked it in my visor, kissed my sleeping daughter’s hair, and drove to the shop.

The shop door was never locked. Shane kept every key on a row of nails by the light switch, each one with a strip of masking tape and a number in black marker.

Unit 7’s key was on its nail, right where it had always been.