Just as the first families sat down, the front entrance slowly opened, and every head in the room turned toward the doorway, and what came through it was not me.
It was Alma Petrey, eighty-nine, on her walker, taking about four seconds a step.
Behind her, Ed and Rosalie Choate. Behind them, Marvin, who is ninety-one and blind in one eye. Then the Hulsey sisters. Then a woman named Dorothea who has not driven since 2009.
Fourteen of them, coming through that door one at a time, in their good coats, taking a long while about it.
I was out in the lot parking the van.
Here is the thing that never came up when a man took my keys in a hallway. There were two sets on that ring. One opened the building. The other one was the van, and the van has a route, and the route has been mine since 1994.
Nobody knew it was a route. That’s the whole trouble. For thirty-one years those folks simply appeared at church, and everybody assumed a family member brought them, and no family member ever did.
The new administrator had spent three weeks trying to get somebody else to drive it. He could not, and he could not figure out why, until the insurance company explained it to him in writing.
That van is covered under a policy with a named-driver schedule. One name on it. To get on that schedule you need a passenger endorsement, a physical every two years, and a clean motor vehicle record pulled annually, and I have kept all three current since 1994 at my own expense because the church could not afford to pay for it and I never asked them to.
He’d been calling around for a week. I only found out about any of that afterward.
What I’d done was simpler. I had fourteen people who were going to sit in their houses on Thanksgiving morning, and I still had a valid license, so I asked the church that owns the other van in this town, over on Grand, if I could borrow theirs, and they said yes in about nine seconds.
Taped inside the sun visor of our van since 1994, in Pastor Dahlberg’s handwriting — he’s been gone since 2001 — is an index card:
“These fourteen names are the church. The building is just where we meet them. Whoever’s driving this, don’t ever let anybody talk you into believing the other way around.”
Thirty-one names have gone through that card over the years. Fourteen are on it now.
The administrator met me in the vestibule. He is a young man and he was the color of paper and he did not try to explain himself, and I will give him that.
He handed me the keys back in front of about two hundred people, both sets, and said one sentence that he did not have to say out loud and said anyway: that he had taken something from a man without ever once asking what it was for.
Three of the men in that congregation got their passenger endorsements in the spring. I’m still on the schedule. I’m sixty-nine and I am not the only name anymore, which is the thing I should have fixed twenty years ago myself.