The Van I Bought for Dad

My brother slid the envelope across the desk without standing up. It was a Tuesday in the middle of May, and the office smelled the way it always did, like river mud, sunscreen and the burnt coffee Dad had been making in that pot since 1994.

“Two weeks’ pay,” Travis said. “I changed the bank accounts yesterday. Your login won’t work anymore, Jodi, so don’t waste time trying it.”

I looked at the envelope. I looked at the wall behind him, where the reservation board hung with my handwriting on every line. Memorial Day weekend was four days away and it was full. Every canoe was spoken for.

“It’s Dad’s business,” I said.

“Dad can’t hold a pen.” He studied the stapler instead of my face. “He’s been home nineteen days and he can’t say my name without working at it. Somebody has to run this place, and it’s going to be me.”

Dad had his stroke on the twenty-second of April, in the gravel lot of his own outfitter, loading a canoe onto a trailer with a teenage river hand. He was seventy years old. He sat down on the tailgate like he was tired, and then he slid sideways, and the boy ran for me.

I was across the road at the clinic, where I work three twelve-hour shifts a week as a nurse. I made it to the lot in under two minutes, and I have never run so hard in my life.

Our family business is a canoe outfitter, and if you have never floated an Ozark river, here is how it works. You rent a canoe, a raft or a tube.

A shuttle van drives you upriver to a gravel access where you put in, and you paddle back down to your car, which waits at the end of the float, four hours or eight depending on how often you stop to swim.

Without the shuttle, there is no float. Nobody can paddle a river upstream. The van is the whole business, and I had driven it, scheduled it and paid its insurance for fifteen years.

The business sits on the Current River outside Van Buren, Missouri, where the water runs so clear and green that first-time floaters think it is a trick of the light. My father built it from six secondhand aluminum canoes in 1979. By last spring he owned sixty-one, two shuttle vehicles, a gravel lot and a metal building.

I kept the books. I answered the phone. I wrote the schedule, argued with the park service about paperwork, and trained every teenager who ever pulled a canoe off a rack. For all of that I took home four hundred dollars a week, because it was Dad’s business and I was his daughter, and that was how we had always done it.

“Fifteen years, Travis,” I said.

“I know how long it’s been.” His jaw tightened. “You’ve got a real job. You’ve got Dwayne. You’ll be fine.”

My husband Dwayne is a lineman for the electric co-op, and that week he was three hundred miles away on a storm crew in Arkansas after a tornado. I had called him the night of Dad’s stroke, and he wanted to drive straight back, and I told him no. People in the dark needed their lights more than I needed my husband in a waiting room.