Part 7
In the morning, Nancy put the route book back in the truck. Emptying it had felt like a decision until she remembered the clothes still owed to people who could not easily come to the shop. She called Paul and asked whether he could have those bags ready for collection.
The building remained closed for normal business, but the approved customer pickups had begun. Paul brought her the delivery orders from the secured collection area. The clothes were clean, wrapped before the closure, and tagged in Nancy’s handwriting. She checked every name against the book.
“Where’s all your stuff?” Paul asked, looking into the cab.
“At your house.”
He stood with a bag of shirts over his arm. “You thinking of selling this?”
“I’m getting a price.”
“You’ve got to think past next week.”
“I’m trying.”
He handed her the last order. They agreed she would finish these deliveries and tell customers that the route was suspended. Neither of them could promise when it would return. Paul would not take it on automatically, and Nancy would not book work she had no way to complete.
The first customer lived above a hardware repair shop with steps steeper than Nancy remembered. She carried two bags up separately, resting on the landing between trips. Her stamina was returning, but she still tired sooner than usual, and the discharge instructions were folded in her purse where she could reread them.
At the second stop, a man asked whether he could pay next month. His wife usually handled it, he explained, but she was staying with their daughter after a fall. Nancy marked the account and gave him his shirts. He did not ask why the route was stopping, and she was grateful.
The third address belonged to Mrs. Keene, who had used Finch Laundry since before Leah was born. She stood behind a walker in a kitchen crowded with plants, one hand tucked into a cardigan sleeve. Nancy had been bringing her clean sheets every other Thursday for eight years.
“I heard about the little fellow,” Mrs. Keene said. “How is he?”
“Home from the hospital. Well, at a motel with Leah.”
“And you?”
Nancy put the sheets on a chair. “Getting there.”
She explained the route, then stood waiting for the woman’s disappointment. Mrs. Keene asked for the shop’s number again so her neighbor could arrange a pickup. Nancy wrote it in large figures and left space underneath for a name.
“You used to bring Leah with you,” Mrs. Keene said. “She’d sit right there and sort my clothespins by color.”
Nancy looked at the chair. The cushion had changed; the place had not. She remembered her daughter’s little boots swinging above the floor while Nancy carried washing to the truck, Leah watching to make sure she did not leave without her.
“She liked coming,” Nancy said.
“Sometimes. Sometimes she wanted you to finish.”
Mrs. Keene said it mildly, reaching for her pen. Nancy almost laughed. She had been about to borrow a pleasant memory and had received the whole afternoon instead.
After the deliveries, she drove to a used-car lot on the highway. She had bought the pickup there nine years earlier and still had the paperwork in the route book’s back pocket. The man who looked it over found rust along one wheel well and a problem with the tailgate latch Nancy had learned to work around.
His offer was lower than she had hoped. It would cover Leah’s $2,600 with some left over, but it would not replace the truck or rescue the business reserve. She asked him to write the offer down and say how long it would stand.
“Through Monday,” he said. “Mileage stays about the same.”
Nancy folded the paper into her wallet. She had to make it home in time to call Leah with the answer she had promised the day before. Already, she was late.
In Paul’s driveway, she sat with the engine running until Otis appeared at the front window. He pressed his nose against the glass, fogging a small patch, and Nancy turned the key off. She called her daughter before she could invent another helpful preliminary step.
“I can have all of it Monday. Your $2,600.”
“Mrs. Givens needs my answer Monday.”
“I know. I should have called sooner.”
“I sent the application and asked her to check my references.”
“All right.”
Nancy wanted to ask Leah to wait, to trust that one more delayed promise would end differently. Instead, she said the money would be returned whether that apartment was still available or not.
“How are you getting it?” Leah asked.
“I’m selling the truck.”
Her daughter was silent long enough for Nancy to hear Ben making an impatient noise near the phone.
“Mom, I don’t want you telling me later that you sold your truck for me.”
Nancy looked at the paper in her lap. She had not said that, but she had been picturing the sale arriving in Leah’s life with a certain weight attached. Proof, perhaps, of how much she loved them. Something her daughter would have to lift before she could refuse the next favor.
“I borrowed money I couldn’t repay from the business,” Nancy said. “I have to find it somewhere else.”
“Okay.”
Afterward, Nancy went inside and asked Paul about buses. There was a weekday route into Bellwether, but it would not solve every trip, and the stop nearest his house was too far to walk comfortably. She would need rides while she stayed with him. Once she could return upstairs, some errands would be easier and others simply would not get done when she wanted.
Paul read the offer from the dealer. Then he looked at his calendar and said he could pick her up from the lot Monday at eleven, but he had to be back for the contractor by noon.
Nancy wrote down eleven. She did not ask him to leave the rest of the day open.
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