The Van I Bought for Dad

Travis had the canoes. He had the lot, the building and the reservation book. He had the two shuttle vehicles, an old school bus and a pickup with a rack.

What Travis did not have was the people. They had followed me for fifteen years, not him. They came for a day of sun and swimming, and the part they remembered was the van ride up, when somebody’s grandfather told the story of the flood of 1982. Plenty of them owned their own canoes. What nobody could do alone was get from the car to the put-in.

I got a pencil and the back of the envelope Travis had given me. I wrote one word at the top.

Shuttle.

The next morning I called the Ozark National Scenic Riverways office in Van Buren. The Riverways is the national park that holds most of the river, and anyone who hauls paying customers to its accesses needs a commercial use authorization. I had filled one out for Dad every spring.

The ranger, a patient woman named Denise, did not ask why I was calling. She told me what the application needed: proof of insurance, a vehicle inspection, a safety plan, and a fee. “I can’t skip the insurance, Jodi,” she said.

The insurance was the first hard number. A commercial policy for a fifteen-passenger van carrying paying riders ran thirty-eight hundred dollars for the year, and the agent in Doniphan wanted half of it up front.

Then came the van. I spent three evenings online and found a 2011 Ford E-350, white, fifteen seats, a hundred and forty-one thousand miles, sitting in the lot of a church in Poplar Bluff that had replaced it with a newer one. The church was asking fourteen thousand dollars.

Dwayne drove me up on a Wednesday after his shift. We walked around that van in a gravel lot, kicking tires and checking the oil, with a deacon in a short-sleeve dress shirt watching us.

“Starts every time,” the deacon said. “We hauled the youth group to Branson in it, and the senior ladies to the casino boat, and neither ever complained.”

I counted out the money the way I had saved it for seven years, thinking it was for a new roof: eight thousand two hundred dollars from our savings, and a loan for the other fifty-eight hundred from the credit union in Van Buren, where the loan officer had gone to high school with my mother.

Dwayne’s cousin let a twenty-foot flatbed trailer go for sixteen hundred dollars. Lights, a coupler and two tires added three hundred more. Dwayne spent two nights in our driveway with a welder and scrap steel and built a steel rack on it that held eight canoes, cushioned with strips of old carpet.

All told, I had spent or owed nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars on a van, a trailer and a policy, with no customer yet. My brother was across the county sitting on sixty thousand dollars that had been collected under my name, and I was standing in my driveway at ten at night looking at a white van that looked like every church van I had ever seen.

Then Dad’s voice came through the open window of my kitchen, where he was sitting up with the night aide and the television turned low.

“Jodi.”

I went in. He was in the recliner, awake, his good hand pointing at the window.