The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

I learned to eat in the truck, to nap ten minutes in line with my chin on my chest and my foot on the brake.

I learned that the beets steam on a cold morning, rising off the piles in soft white clouds.

I learned that Marv had four grandchildren and a bad hip, and that Hank Olson hummed hymns when he was tired.

And I learned what Shane had meant when he said it was the waiting. Every night I came home at six and Ben had supper on the table.

He cooked one-handed. It was grilled cheese most nights, and soup out of a can, and once a pot of chili so overspiced that Addie cried.

But it was on the table, and he’d set it with the good plates, and he had a cup of coffee waiting by my chair.

“How many?” he’d ask. “Fourteen.” “Every time?” “Every time.” He’d nod and say nothing, and then I’d see the muscle in his jaw working, and I’d know what it cost him, a man who had driven that truck nine years, listening to his wife describe the fields.

On the sixth night I found him at the kitchen window at eleven, in the dark, watching my headlights come down the road.

“I feel like a boy sitting in the stands,” he said, when I came in. “Everybody’s playing and I’m up here with a bad arm.”

“You’re not in the stands.” “Stephanie.”

“You taught me the field names. You told me which gate sticks on the Hegg place. You told me to turn my wheel hard left at the piler’s second light or I’ll clip the ramp.”

I sat down across from him. “Every load I haul, I’m hauling it with what you told me. That’s not the stands. That’s coaching.”

He looked at his cast for a long time. “Clarence used to say that,” he said finally, very quietly. “About Little League.”

“Then he’s right.” That Sunday, Clarence let him come.

It was not allowed, strictly. But he drove out to the house in his own pickup and loaded Ben into the passenger seat, and drove him to the piler, and parked on the gravel beside the platform where you can see the ramp and the scale and the whole long wall of the pile.

I did not know he was there. I came up the ramp at ten in the morning with Unit 7’s engine pulling hard against the weight, and I saw them at the edge of the lot, Clarence standing and Ben sitting in the cab with his window down and his cast on the door.

He did not wave. He did not do anything at all.

He just watched me bring his truck up the ramp, slow, and set it square over the hopper, and pull the lever.

He watched the whole twenty-four tons come off the trailer. When I drove out past him, he lifted his good hand, flat, the way you would to a person crossing a stage.

I could not see the road for the next half mile. Shane never spoke to me that first week.

He drove past. I saw his pickup at the field edges and at the scale, white dust rising behind it, and sometimes at the piler I would look up and find him standing on the gravel with his hat pulled low, reading the board.