The Name On Every Truck

My husband toasted his secretary at the company dinner and forgot whose name was on every truck outside

The last thing Dale said to me before he picked up the microphone was that I should go check on the coffee.

We were standing at the back of the Legion hall in Red Elm, Nebraska, under the strings of white lights somebody had stapled to the ceiling tiles every year since before I was born. Two hundred people were eating pulled pork off foam plates at folding tables, and my husband leaned down close to my ear, close enough that I could smell the beer, and told me the urns by the door were getting low and would I mind seeing to it.

I had spent eleven days organizing that dinner. I had called the caterer in Ord twice to confirm, driven to the restaurant-supply store in Grand Island for the plates and the napkins, printed the little cards for each table, and arranged for Pastor Lund to say the blessing. I had done the same thing every October for twenty-six years. And my husband asked me to go check on the coffee the way you would ask a girl you had hired that afternoon.

So I went and checked on the coffee. That is the part I am ashamed of. I went.

I need to back up, because if I just tell you what Dale did that night you will think it was only cruel, and it was cruel, but it was also stupid, and the stupid part is the part that matters. Dale forgot something that night. He forgot it so completely that he stood up in front of every driver, every mechanic, every farmer we hauled for, every wife and every widow, and he said a thing out loud that he could never take back, because he had forgotten whose name was painted on the doors of the trucks parked out in the gravel lot under the yard light.

The name is Hollis. It is my father’s name. It is my name.

Let me tell you about my father first. His name was Walt Hollis, and he started hauling grain out of the Loup valley in 1971 with one truck and a handshake. He was not a big man and he was not a loud man. He had a way of standing at the scale house with his cap pushed back, listening to a farmer complain about the price of corn, that made that farmer feel like the most important person in Valley County. People trusted him. That was the whole business, really. The trucks were just the trucks. The business was that when Walt Hollis told you he would have your beans moved before the first freeze, your beans moved before the first freeze, and if a transmission went out on the way he would pull a driver off another run and make it right and never once put it on your bill.