The Last Stop on My Book Route

The first Thursday I did not drive the route, I put on my driving shoes anyway.

They are brown lace-ups with a flat sole, bought at the Pamida in Ord in 1999 for the sole purpose of feeling the pedals through them. For twenty-five years they went out the back door with me every Thursday morning at ten minutes to eight. That Thursday I sat on the bench in the back hall and tied them, a double knot, and then I sat there looking at my own feet, because there was nowhere left for them to go.

The milk crates were not by the door. Golda had carried them out to her minivan on Tuesday, all six, with the books still in them. The recipe box was gone too. The ring of Buick keys was in the drawer under the phone book, where my daughter Lori had put it. I had not asked her to put it there, and I had not asked her to take it out.

It was a clear morning in the middle of October. The beans were off the field across the road and the stubble was the color of a good biscuit. I could see all of this, after a fashion. I could see it the way you see a room through a window somebody has smeared with a thumb, bright at the edges and a gray smudge where the middle ought to be.

My name is Verna Haskett. I am seventy years old. I live eight miles south of Ord, Nebraska, in the house my husband Orville and I bought in 1981, where I have lived alone since he died in the spring of 2016, and for twenty-five years I ran what I always called, because I never thought of a better word, the route. Six houses, one day a week, seventy-one miles in my own car, a crate of library books for every stop and a thermos of coffee for whoever would share it.

At half past eight, the phone on the kitchen wall rang.

I knew who it was before I got up. Thelma Sevenker’s house is the first stop on the route, and eight-thirty is the minute I always pulled into her yard. Nobody had called my kitchen at eight-thirty on a Thursday in twenty-five years, because at eight-thirty on a Thursday I was never in it.

I want to tell you what was on the other end of that phone, and what came after. But I have to tell you about the route first. Without the route, there is nothing to understand, and without the last house on it, I would still be wrong about something I was wrong about for twenty-two years.