The Van I Bought for Dad

He glanced at the crowd and swallowed. “You’re taking my customers.”

“They’re not yours,” I said. “And they’re not mine. They’re Dad’s. They float where they want to.”

“I had eighty-two thousand dollars on the note, Jodi. Do you know what it costs to run sixty-one canoes with nobody on the river?” His voice cracked. “I had three Saturdays in July with fewer than thirty out. You know what that means. You did the books for fifteen years.”

“I do know,” I said. “I knew in May.”

He took a breath. His eyes went to the van, and the window, and the green ball cap behind it.

“Dad,” he said.

My father looked at him. I want you to understand that I will never forget this. For the better part of a minute, my father sat in the front seat of that van and looked at his son, and nobody on that gravel bar made a sound.

Travis took a step. “Dad, get out of the van,” he said, and his voice dropped. “Come on. It’s not safe. You shouldn’t be out here. Let me take you home.”

Dad laid his left hand flat on the dashboard, next to the bell.

“No,” he said.

It was not slurred. It was one clean word, the way he used to say it to a teenager who wanted to push a canoe out in high water.

“Dad.”

“Not… today, Trav.”

Travis stood there with his hands open at his sides. I watched him look for a sentence that would fix it, and I watched him fail to find one.

A man who had taken a seventy-year-old man’s life’s work and a sister’s fifteen years, and who had spent three months believing nobody would have the nerve to do anything about it, found out in front of thirty people that nobody had needed to.

I did not say a word. I let the quiet stand there between us.

He turned around. He got in his truck. He backed up too fast and slapped a cedar sapling and drove back up the gravel, and the dust hung over the access a long time.

I did not hear from my brother again that summer.

I heard about him, because in the Ozarks you always do. He let two of his three teenage river hands go. He sold the new fiberglass canoes to an outfitter in Alton for less than he paid. His school bus broke down and sat by the building with a flat tire.

On Labor Day weekend, which for decades had been the biggest weekend of the whole summer, when every one of Dad’s sixty-one canoes went out by eight in the morning and the lot looked like a parade, Travis put out fourteen.

What I did do, on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, was make dinner.

I had been thinking about it since July. The regulars had given me their summer. Sue Ann’s coffee cake. Ray’s stories at every take-out. Gil’s scouts, who stacked every lifejacket each night. I wanted to say thank you the way Dad would have understood, with food, outside, on the river.

So I got permission from the Riverways to use the big gravel bar below the Powder Mill access for one evening. I wrote it on a sheet of paper and gave it to every person who rode my van in the last two weeks. Supper, Saturday, six o’clock, bring a dish. Dad would be there.