The Van I Bought for Dad

By July there were fifty-one regular groups on my schedule, out of the sixty-three on Dad’s old list. They found me through the grapevine, which in the Ozarks is faster than any phone. A word at the feed store. A casserole dish passed across a church lunch table.

Not one of them asked me to say anything bad about my brother. They did not need me to. Ray climbed in the second weekend of June, sat right behind Dad and put a big hand on the seat back. “Hollis,” he said. “It’s a fine van.”

The Fourth of July weekend came, and with it the Boyds. Thirty-eight of them, four generations, pulled into the Round Spring access that Saturday in six minivans and two pickups, all wearing T-shirts printed with a picture of a canoe and the year. Sue Ann climbed out first with a covered pan in her arms.

“I made you a coffee cake,” she said. “It’s my mother’s recipe, and don’t you dare tell anybody I gave you the whole pan.”

Then she turned around and saw my father in the front seat.

I had not known she knew he had been riding. She stood there with her hand on her chest, and the whole Boyd family went quiet behind her.

“Hollis Crowder,” she said. “You old rascal. You look wonderful.”

Dad pointed a shaky finger at her T-shirt. “Same… one?”

“The same one I wore in 1998,” she told him. “It still fits. Don’t tell anybody that, either.”

The whole lot laughed. And right then, Dad lifted from the dashboard a brass bell, the small kind with a wooden handle that people ring at the back door for dinner. I had bought it at a farm sale in Ellington for twelve dollars the week before and set it up there without telling him why.

“Loading,” Dad said, and rang it.

I do not know who started it. A Boyd girl of about seven began to clap. Then her cousins. Then thirty-eight people on a gravel lot in the Missouri sun were applauding a man in a green ball cap who sat in the front of a white van and rang a dinner bell with the only hand he could lift.

I put my sunglasses back on.

I did not hear a word from my brother for six weeks.

He came on a Saturday in the middle of August, at the Pulltite access, at ten in the morning, which on that river is the busiest hour of the week.

I was pulling the last canoe off the trailer for a church group from Dexter when a white pickup came down the gravel and stopped hard behind my rack. I knew the truck. I knew the dent in the tailgate, because I had been in the lot the day he put it there.

Travis got out. He had lost weight. His shirt hung wrong, and there were gray circles under his eyes that had not been there in May.

Nobody around us said anything. Thirty people stood on that gravel in lifejackets, and half of them had been floating with my father since Travis was in middle school. They went quiet the way people do at a church when somebody walks in late.

“Jodi,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not here.”

“Here is fine,” I said. “I’m working.”