The Van I Bought for Dad

Dad’s good hand came down hard on the arm of the recliner. His mouth worked. His whole face tried to push a sentence out and could not.

“No,” he finally managed. “Trav… no. No.”

That was every word he had. I knelt by the chair and took his left hand in both of mine, and the two of us stayed that way while the ball game played with no sound, until the shadows of the sycamores crossed the floor.

People have asked me since why I did not simply fight it. I want to answer that plainly, because I asked myself the same thing a hundred times that week.

The outfitter was in Dad’s name alone. We had never drawn up a partnership paper, and Dad had always run it on a handshake and a ledger. He could not sign his own name that spring.

I could have dragged it into a courtroom, but the person at the center of that fight would have been a seventy-year-old man who had just relearned how to hold a spoon, forced to choose between his children in public.

I would not do that to him. I decided it right there on the floor next to his chair. Whatever I did, I would do it in a way that did not put my father in the middle of two of his kids.

Dwayne got home that Friday, dirty and exhausted, with his hard hat still in his truck. I told him everything at the kitchen table. He said nothing for a long minute.

“I’d like to drive over there and put him in the river,” he said.

He rubbed his face. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. And I really did not.

The phone answered that for me.

It started Saturday morning, the first day of Memorial Day weekend, and it did not stop. Every floater who had ever booked with Dad’s outfitter had my cell number, because for fifteen years that was the number on every confirmation I sent. Most of them did not know Travis. They knew Jodi, the one who remembered their kids’ names.

Mrs. Boyd called first. Sue Ann Boyd runs a family reunion that drives down from St. Louis every Fourth of July weekend, thirty-eight people across four generations, in matching T-shirts nobody else would wear. She had been coming to Dad’s place since her oldest was in diapers.

“Jodi, is it true?” she said. “Somebody at the post office said Hollis had a stroke and you’re not there anymore.”

“Both are true,” I said.

“Well, I’ll tell you what. I don’t deal with strangers.” There was a clatter, as if she had set down a pot. “I’ve got thirty-eight people and a deposit sitting at that place, and I do not want to float with a stranger. Can you do anything?”

I did not have a good answer for her. I said I would call her back.

By Sunday night I had nineteen messages. A scoutmaster named Gil Peters, who brought Troop 214 down from Poplar Bluff for the first float of every June. A youth pastor from Dexter. A retired highway patrolman named Ray who wanted to know if his canoe would still be waiting.

Nobody asked about the business. Every one of them asked about Dad.