The Van I Bought for Dad

“Van,” he said.

“Yes, Dad. I bought a van.”

“Ride.”

“You want to see it?”

He shook his head hard. The effort showed in his neck. “Ride. I… ride.”

“Dad, you can’t ride in a shuttle van. You just got out of the hospital.”

His mouth shaped words, and the words did not come. His eyes filled. Then, slowly, with the worst effort I have ever watched a man make, he put his left finger on his own chest, then pointed at the window, and said clearly, in a voice I remembered from before:

“My river.”

I sat down on the arm of the recliner and cried right there, in front of him. He patted my knee with his good hand.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Dad. You can ride.”

The commercial authorization came through on Thursday, June 4. Denise called me herself, and said she’d had the signatures moved to the top of the pile, and that she was not allowed to say any of that.

I booked my first run for Saturday, June 6. Troop 214 out of Poplar Bluff, nine scouts and three leaders, floating Akers to Pulltite, about eight miles. Gil Peters had called me back three times to be sure it was still on.

“We’ll put in wherever you tell us,” he said. “We’re not floating with anybody else.”

I had told him fourteen dollars a head, which was a dollar less than Dad’s old rate, and he did not even ask what the van looked like.

That Saturday I woke at four. I drove to my father’s house in the dark, the van’s old engine ticking in the quiet, and found Dad already on the porch in his green Sunday ball cap and a clean flannel shirt, with the aide standing behind him looking uncertain. He had dressed himself, one-handed. The buttons were off by one.

“I ride,” he said.

I looked at the aide. She lifted her hands.

“His doctor said gentle activity,” she said. “I’m not going to be the one to tell him it doesn’t count.”

I buckled Dad into the front passenger seat myself. I fixed his cap. I checked his blood pressure with the cuff from my bag, and it was better than mine.

“If you get tired, you tell me,” I said. “You don’t be brave.”

He tipped his chin at the windshield, where the sun was starting to touch the tops of the sycamores. “Go,” he said.

Troop 214 was waiting at the Akers access in a tight cluster, nine scouts in Scout shirts and lifejackets, with five canoes pulled up on the gravel.

I backed the trailer to the ramp and began pulling the first canoe off the rack, and Lucas, the lanky sixteen-year-old river hand who had quit Travis’s crew the week after I left, took the other end. The scoutmaster came striding down behind him.

“Jodi,” he said, and shook my hand with both of his. “We were worried.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Dad’s here.”

Gil looked past me to the van, where the front window was down and my father’s cap showed above the sill. Something moved across the big man’s face.

He walked to the window and bent down. “Hollis,” he said.

“Gil.” My father’s slur made it Gill. But he reached out his good hand, and Gil took it through the window and held it a good long time.