The Van I Bought for Dad

I did not have an answer. I held the pan.

I looked up once, toward the end, and saw a white pickup parked on the gravel road at the top of the bluff, a quarter mile off, with its engine running. I knew it by the dent.

It sat there for a long minute, watching ninety-four people and a long line of tables and a man in a lawn chair with a brass bell. Then it turned around and drove away.

I did not wave. I did not run after it. I stood on that gravel with a cake pan in my hands and I let him go, because I had no sentence for him that night, and no right to put any in my father’s mouth.

I still don’t know whether Travis will ever come to me. I would like him to. I have not stopped hoping that someday he will say the true thing plainly, with no excuse attached. But I will not be the one to chase him to it.

The final numbers are not the important part, but I did the books, so here they are.

Between the sixth of June and that second Sunday in October, I ran two hundred and fourteen shuttles. We carried two thousand five hundred and ninety riders at fourteen dollars each, about thirty-six thousand dollars. The van, the trailer, the insurance, the fuel and Brooke’s wages took twenty-two thousand. Dwayne would not take a cent.

I cleared a little over fourteen thousand dollars, and that was not sixty thousand, and it was not the whole business. It was enough to pay the credit union through the winter.

Brooke started the new reservation book in September, a spiral notebook with a canoe doodled on the front. By the first of October, forty-four of the fifty-one regular groups had written their names in it for next summer, in pencil. Dad insisted on checking each one. “Good,” he said, turning pages with his left hand. “Boyds. Good.”

The last run of the season was the second Sunday in October, a crisp bright afternoon with the sycamores going yellow along the river. A father and his two daughters, strangers, first-timers, had booked the late float out of Round Spring. I loaded their canoe. Dad rode up front, with a blanket across his knees and his cap on straight.

He told the girls about the cave. He told them about the heron. He told them, very slowly, about a day in 1979 when a young man with six secondhand canoes had stood on the gravel at Van Buren and decided a river was worth his life.

The girls were quiet all the way down to the take-out. When their father paid me, he tried to add a twenty.

“Please,” he said. “For him.”

I took it and gave it to Dad, who looked at the bill a while and tucked it into the pocket of his flannel shirt. Then I turned the van around and shut off the engine at the end of the access. The river ran green and slow beside us, and the light was going.

“Dad,” I said. “That’s the last one of the year.”

He turned his head and looked at the water through the window for a long, long moment.

“Again,” my father said.