My Father's Route Still Starts at Ten Past Six

The Keys on the Hook by the Fridge

My father died on a Thursday in March, and on the Monday after the funeral the phone started ringing at a quarter to seven.

It was Oom Gert from the panel beater on Bosch Street. He did not know. Nobody had told him, because none of us had thought to. He wanted to know where his water was. I stood in my mother's kitchen in my socks, holding the phone, looking at the bakkie keys hanging on the hook next to the fridge where they had hung my whole life, and I said, "I will bring it, Oom. Give me an hour."

I was twenty-seven. I had a job in Johannesburg doing data capture for an insurance company, a flat in Randburg I shared with a guy who ate my yoghurt, and absolutely no idea how my father's business worked. I knew he left before six and came home smelling of diesel and sun. I knew he called it "the round." I had been on it maybe four times as a boy, sitting in the passenger seat with a Coke, bored out of my mind.

I took the keys off the hook. My mother watched me from the doorway and did not say anything, which in our family is how you say a great deal.

Learning the Round From a Notebook

The bakkie is a 2009 Nissan with a canopy, and it pulls to the left so badly that you drive with your right wrist locked like you are arm wrestling it. In the cubbyhole I found a school exercise book with a cartoon dinosaur on the cover. It must have been one of my old ones. Inside, in my father's square capitals, was the entire route.

Thirty-one stops. Not just addresses. Notes.

"GERT. 2 FULL. Back door, not front. Dog is fine, just loud."

"DR MOKOENA ROOMS. 1 Tues 1 Fri. Receptionist Palesa. Do not come during lunch, she eats at the desk and gets cross."

"LITTLE ACORNS CRÈCHE. 3 Mon. Mrs Venter. Carry them right inside, the children watch. Wave at the children."

Wave at the children. I sat in the bakkie outside my mother's house and read that line maybe ten times. My father was not a sentimental man. He did not hug much. He fixed things and paid things and once drove three hundred kilometres to fetch me from a party I should not have been at without saying one word the whole way home. And here he had written down, so he would not forget, to wave at the children.

I did the round that first Monday in six hours. It took him four. I got lost twice in the industrial area off the Swartruggens road, carried a bottle into the wrong unit at a business park, and arrived at the doctor's rooms at exactly twelve thirty, where Palesa looked up from her pap and gravy and was cross.

What Twenty Litres Does to Your Back

Nobody tells you how heavy water is. You know it, technically. A litre weighs a kilogram. But knowing it and carrying it up a flight of stairs at a dental practice in Waterfall Mall with your knees shaking are two different kinds of knowledge.

The big ones, the 18.9l water bottles my father used, weigh close to twenty kilograms full. He used to swing them up onto his shoulder in one movement, a kind of hip and twist I had seen a hundred times and never paid attention to. My first week I tried to copy it and nearly put one through the windscreen of a Polo. By the Wednesday my lower back had a pain in it like a fist. By Friday I was lifting with my legs like the posters tell you to, and I understood, suddenly, why my father had always sat down so carefully on the couch in the evenings. I had thought he was just tired. He was sore. Every day for nineteen years, he was sore, and he never once said so.

I lay on the lounge floor that Friday night with a bag of frozen peas under my spine, and my mother came and sat on the armchair above me and said, "He used to do exactly that." It was the first time either of us had laughed since the funeral.

Mrs Venter and the Kettle

The crèche was always my favourite stop, from the very first Monday.

Little Acorns is in an old house in a suburb near the hospital, with a jungle gym in the front garden and a hand-painted sign with an acorn that looks more like a potato. Mrs Venter runs it. She is maybe sixty, small, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice that can stop twenty toddlers in their tracks from across a room.

That first Monday I carried the three bottles in one at a time, and the children lined up at the low window of the playroom to watch, exactly as the notebook said. I remembered to wave. About fifteen tiny hands waved back. One boy with a dinosaur jersey shouted, "Where's the big man?"

Mrs Venter came out drying her hands on a dishcloth. She looked at me, then at the bakkie, then back at me, and I watched her work it out.

"You're his son," she said. "The one in Joburg."

I nodded, because I did not trust my voice.

"Sit," she said. "I'm making tea."

She made rooibos with too much sugar, in a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST TEACHER, and she told me that my father had had tea there every Monday for six years. That he had fixed the gate latch without being asked. That once, when the crèche's water had been cut off for three days because of a municipal pipe burst, he had brought six extra bottles and refused to put them on the account. That he talked about me. That he was proud I had "an office job, with a chair."

I had not known any of it. I sat on a tiny plastic chair meant for a four-year-old, drinking terrible sweet tea, and cried in front of a stranger for the first time in my adult life. Mrs Venter just handed me the dishcloth and went to stop a fight over a tricycle.

The Bottles That Were Older Than My Little Sister

By May I had made a decision without quite admitting it to myself. I phoned the insurance company and resigned. My flatmate could keep the yoghurt.

The round was mine now, which meant the problems were mine too, and the first real one was the bottles themselves. Some of my father's stock was ancient. When I lined them all up in the yard behind my mother's house one Saturday, I counted seven that had gone cloudy and yellowish, two with hairline cracks near the neck, and one that had a faint smell no amount of washing would shift. Some of them had probably been on the round longer than my youngest sister had been alive.

My father, I realised, had been quietly patching his way through. Swapping a dodgy one out when he had to, making do, the way that generation does with everything. I spent an evening at the kitchen table with my laptop and his notebook, reading about how long the polycarbonate and PET containers actually last, how often they should be inspected, what the rules are for anything that touches drinking water. I ended up ordering new water dispenser bottles to replace the worst of the old stock, and it felt strangely like a betrayal and a tribute at the same time. Like throwing out his shoes.

When the new ones arrived I kept one of the old cracked ones. It sits in the garage now, upside down on a shelf. I do not entirely know why.

Oom Gert Asks a Question

In winter, Oom Gert finally asked me what I suppose everyone had been wondering.

I was carrying his two bottles through the back door, past the loud dog who is fine, and he was under a Corolla with only his boots sticking out.

"So you're staying, then?" he said to the underside of the car.

"I'm staying, Oom."

He slid out on his creeper and looked at me for a long time with grease up to his elbows. "Your pa said you would," he said. "Last year. He said, that boy thinks he wants an office, but he's going to end up driving this round. I said, nee, man. He said, you watch."

I do not know if that is true. Oom Gert may have made it up to be kind. Afrikaans uncles do that, in their way, without ever admitting to it. But I chose to believe him, and I still do.

Ten Past Six

It has been a year and eight months now. I have thirty-eight stops, seven more than my father had, mostly small offices that heard about me from other small offices. I got the bakkie's alignment fixed, so I no longer arm wrestle it, though some mornings I almost miss the pull. I have my own notebook now, but it sits in the cubbyhole on top of his, not instead of it.

Every Monday I still go to Little Acorns. The dinosaur jersey boy has moved up to Grade R and no longer asks where the big man is. The new little ones wave at me through the window as if I have always been the one carrying the water cooler bottles in, and I suppose, to them, I have.

Mrs Venter still makes the tea too sweet. I have never once told her.

I leave at ten past six, because that is when he left. The back is mostly fine now. I lift with my legs. And at every stop where the notebook says to, I wave.