A Good Day's Work by John Demont Page A

meant to end in the early afternoon, twenty kilometres from where he’d started, after presenting his last cases of milk, yogourt, cheese and cream to a restaurant readying for the suppertime rush. But halfway through the workday things had gone sideways: the chef at a retirement home slept in; when Bill Bennett Jr. finally pulled into the parking lot and unlocked the door leading to the kitchen, he was a full sixty minutes behind schedule.
    A milkman’s enemies are legion: blizzards, gridlock, meter maids, leaky fridges. Time is the ultimate foe when you have somewhere around two hundred stops a day to make and a route that reaches from the newest suburb to the oldest corner of one of the country’s longest-lived cities. “You think you’re okay and then there you go,” Bill moans. “Oh my, oh my. I knew this was going to be a bad day soon as I got up. You know what? I was right.” Lose a couple of minutes on each stop and the interminable day extends even longer. What’s worse, the problems grow exponentially. When Bill is late, his customers—the stores, restaurants, nursing homes and other wholesale stops that make up 90 percent of his income—start looking at the clock. If he simply didn’t show up—well, you never know, the entire Halifax Regional Municipality might just clank and hiss to a halt.
    Today all Bill had to do was conjure up 3,600 mislaid seconds from thin air. Hard to do when your timetable is already as tight as a Hank Williams lyric. When you are sixty-one years old, operating on six hours’ sleep, beset by tennis elbow and carpal tunnel syndrome along with a host of other physical maladies. So, you hunch a little lower over thesteering wheel. You narrow your eyes. You crank 101.9 FM a little louder on the dial, listening to announcers who sound like they’ve had the same kind of life experiences you’ve had. Then you blow through town as the streets unfold before you, and you search for slices of lost time.
    For a decade Bill has arrived at my house at around 5:30 a.m. every Tuesday and Friday to drop off a few litres of one percent milk. Occasionally, when the kids were babies or if I had to catch an early flight, I’d glimpse his truck out there idling in the street. I never once saw his fleeting shape between truck and doorstep. For ten years we’ve communicated by worn pages torn from a notebook, scraps of paper or a used envelope filled with crabbed writing. Usually he was informing us that we owed him money, that a holiday was coming up or that he and his wife were actually going on vacation, which, he explained, they seldom did.
    It always made me feel guilty and a little sad to get these messages. Sometimes I’d stand on the step, hold the piece of paper in my hands and try to imagine what this man who made the calcium appear looked like. I didn’t know then that our lives had been intertwined for half a century. That his father, Bill Sr., used to deliver milk to my parents when I was growing up a couple of blocks from my current address. I can’t remember laying eyes on him either. I just took his existence for granted, like the Tooth Fairy. My parents left tickets or money in a glass bottle on the front step. The next morning there’d be milk.
    I was a boy of my time and place. Sometimes, when sleeping in a tent in someone’s backyard, we’d get up in the dark before the Bills, Jr. and Sr., arrived. Then we’d skulk through the streets looking for milk money to steal. A decentscore would mean a bottle of Mountain Dew, a roll of wine gums, maybe even a round of Fudgsicles. Milk, though, was what packed muscle onto our adolescent frames. At the kitchen table, I’d pour it into an Esso service station glass that urged car owners to Put a Tiger in Your Tank, then I’d empty it in one gulp. I’d drown my Raisin Bran until the fruit bobbed in the wake like baby seals. I’d run through