Route Delivery - Ralph Bland

John Clark Hayes, age 52, failed novelist, eclectic collector, former teacher and retail clerk, and at last stop route delivery salesman for Tasty Snacks on Saint Simons Island, Georgia, doesn't much and never has been a card-carrying member of the world around him. He's a loner, a dropout, and a divorced father of three whose children have yet to be impressed by his fatherly skills. His oldest son David categorizes him as distant, his daughter Linda considers him altogether AWOL from her life, and his youngest son Franklin thinks he is weird beyond words and is deathly afraid it may be hereditary.

When John Clark unexpectedly dies on his route of gunshot wounds from a botched robbery, he suddenly in his new form as someone not living anymore begins to question and learn that the world he's inhabited for so long is going to continue to go on without him, so he decides to revisit all the aspects of his life, his idyllic romance, his ex-wife, his children and pets, his former stops on his route, and all the other puzzle pieces of his existence he fancied and fretted over all his life, and attempt to make everything as right as possible before taking off for the hereafter or wherever it is his soul may be heading. This is not as easy as he initially thinks, for soon he finds his life's aftermath to be changing with his departure, and John Clark is determined to have his former realm in good working condition before the time comes for him to move on. Route Delivery is an ambitious, celebratory trip through one man's vision of life. Its themes of Idealism, Romanticism, and the realities of a fleeting life one cannot hold for eternity make for a story that lingers after its unfolding.