The Van I Bought for Dad

“What about the reservations?” I asked. “The deposits? We have sixty thousand dollars in bookings for this summer, Trav. Half of it was paid in advance. Those people are coming because of me.”

“Those people are coming because of Dad’s name on the building.”

He finally looked at me, and for one second I saw something under the confidence, something tired and scared. “The deposits are going to the note, Jodi. I owe eighty-two thousand dollars on the new fiberglass canoes and the truck. I borrowed it against the fleet in January. Dad doesn’t know. Somebody has to carry that note, and it can’t be a man in a hospital bed.”

That was his reason. I will tell you now that I believed him. I believed he was frightened. I believed he did not know how to tell our father he had borrowed against the life’s work.

None of that made it right. He changed the accounts behind my back and waited until Dad could not speak up. A scared brother could have come to me with the bank statement and said, Jodi, help me. He did not.

I stood up. My knees felt strange.

“The reservation book is mine,” I said quietly. “I wrote every name in it, and I know every one of those people.”

“The book is the business’s,” he said. “It stays.”

I did not scream. Screaming would have given him something to tell people about me. I picked up the envelope, folded it once, and put it in my back pocket.

“Dad’s going to ask where I am,” I said.

“Tell him you’re taking some time.”

I walked out into the lot. Sixty-one canoes sat in rows on the racks, silver in the sun. A kingfisher rattled somewhere down the bank. I stood there and breathed until my hands stopped shaking, and then I drove to my father’s house.

Dad’s house sits on the river road, a mile and a half from the outfitter, a white one-story with a porch he built himself and a view of the water through the sycamores. I had moved in for the first two weeks after the hospital, and a home health aide named Pam came in the mornings so I could work.

He was in his recliner by the window with a blanket across his knees. His right hand lay in his lap like something that belonged to somebody else. The left hand was holding the television remote, and he had muted a baseball game.

“Jodi,” he said. It came out thick and slow, the J soft, as if his tongue had forgotten the shape of it. But it was my name. After the stroke, there had been three days when he could not say it at all.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Where… Trav?”

“At the shop.”

He looked at me for a long time. Dad has the kind of eyes you cannot lie to, pale blue, creased at the corners from fifty years of squinting at sunlight on water. I had never lied to him, and I was not going to begin that afternoon, with him sitting there so small.

So I told him.

I did not make it ugly. I said Travis had changed the bank accounts and taken over the office, and that Travis owed money on the new canoes and the truck. I did not say the word fired. I did not say how it felt.