He drives my dad to dialysis

The chairs in Shiprock were full so they put my dad on the Farmington run. Thirty-one miles each way on 64. Thirty-four if they go around by Waterflow when the shoulder's tore up, which it was most of last spring.

Monday Wednesday Friday. The pickup window is six-forty to seven-ten, and if he's not out front they put a mark on it, and three marks gets you a letter from the program.

Treatment's three and a half hours. Then there's the sticking and the coming off, and after that he sits a while holding his arm. So it's a five-hour morning before he's back in the chair by the window.

The program doesn't cover stops. Nobody knows that until they need it. No pharmacy, no Bashas'. So the pills are me, Tuesday, after dispatch.

I was on the line for the Authority nine years. Storms is what you remember. Then I lost a toe off the left one and most of my balance, and now I do four hours on the radio and wear a boot that sounds like a horse coming across the linoleum. Three straps on it. The middle one's the one I hate. Anyway.

They've had five drivers on that route since he started. A lady in a green Sentra who did it on contract about four months. A young guy from Kirtland who lasted maybe six weeks and didn't tell anybody he was quitting. Then the white Transit started coming and it's been the same Transit a year and a half.

He's from Farmington. Mexican on his dad's side and something else on his mom's that he makes a joke out of. Not from around here either way. Forty-five. Got a gut about like mine and a bad knee off a roof in oh-nine, and from October to April he wears the same blue windbreaker with the program patch sewn on crooked.

First few months it was nothing. He'd back up to the ramp and take my dad's elbow and get him in and go. Then one morning the Transit sat out there idling with the door open a good ten minutes and I came out in my socks to see what was wrong, and he had a thermos and two cups on the dash.

That went on about a year. Coffee in the driveway with the engine running, because the program says the engine stays running, and my dad in the passenger seat with the door open and his hand out for the cup. The dog won't go near that van and he thinks that's the funniest thing that's ever happened.

Then in March he came back on a Friday after his shift.

He parked behind the house. I don't think he was being smart about it. There's just room back there, past the shed, where my uncle used to leave his flatbed before he moved to Gallup.

That one's a maroon Tacoma with a camper shell and a dent in the tailgate off a deer in 2016 that he'll tell you about.

We drank coffee again, which is a stupid thing to be doing at six in the evening when neither one of us sleeps good anyway. We ate the rest of the stew Loretta brought Sunday. Then we went back to my room, which is off the kitchen, and afterward he sat on the edge of the bed putting his socks on and told me the whole roof story, start to finish, like I'd asked him to.

He left around nine. Came back the next Friday.

He's never been here in the morning. He's out by nine, nine-thirty. He rinses the two cups and leaves them upside down on the towel by the sink, and I put them back in the cupboard before my dad's up.

Darlene calls every night at eight-thirty. She's in Farmington, been there since she married a guy who sells tires out on Main. She calls to get Dad's numbers and to tell me what her kids are into. Sometime in April she asked me, real casual, in the middle of something else, whether the transport guy has family out this way.

I said I wouldn't know.

She said Auntie Ramona says there's a truck.

Grandma's place is a quarter mile up. She's eighty-eight and she sits at the front window with the curtain pulled back and she'll tell you who went by and what time. Past her is my cousin Elsie. Past Elsie is the Yazzies. You can't get to this house without four people clocking the vehicle and one of them knowing the plate.

We had a chapter meeting about the water line and a guy I went to school with asked me in front of maybe thirty people if I was finally doing work on the house. On account of the truck. That's probably all he meant. It's my dad's house anyway, the homesite lease is in his name and my name isn't on anything.

In May my dad said something about it. He was in his chair with the gauze taped down on his arm and the TV going, the auctions, the car ones he watches, and without looking over he said to tell Ray to pull up past the shed by the propane, because you can't see that from the road.

That's his name. Ray.

Then he went back to it. Some guy from Tulsa bought a Camaro.

My sisters are good to me. Loretta brings stew and takes him to the eye doctor in Durango. Darlene calls.

Two weeks ago the unit here called. A chair came open. Tuesday Thursday Saturday, four miles instead of thirty-one, and it's a different program with a different van, the one that does the senior lunch.

It was Verna that called. She works the front desk there and she's got that little red Kia with the Gallup plate frame. She said the transfer's two pages and the bottom half is the doctor's, so he signs it and then it goes over to Farmington, and Farmington has to take him off their list before this one can put him on theirs. It's supposed to be ten working days. She said more like three weeks because the girl who does the faxing is out on leave. She said they'd hold it a while. She didn't say how long a while is, and a chair doesn't sit open. Somebody down in Nenahnezad gets it.

I haven't called her back. There's a form.

I'm supposed to be doing the finger thing twice a day and I do it maybe four times a week, and my numbers are what they are.

Friday I went out early and moved the trash barrels so there'd be room up by the propane tank.