2. Delaney
DELANEY
Iopen at six.
I have opened at six every day except Christmas since I was twenty-four years old, which is nine years now, and the number of people in Ferris who know that is roughly the number of people in Ferris, and the number of people who have ever remarked on it is zero, and that is fine.
That is the arrangement. I am the woman everybody is glad to see.
Glad to see is a good job. It has a low ceiling and no benefits but the hours are dependable.
Six o'clock in November on the Hi-Line means the wind has already been up for two hours and it comes at the building sideways off ninety miles of nothing and it finds the gap under the loading door no matter how many times I stuff it with feed sacks.
I unlock. I turn the pump on. I put the sandwich board out and I set the cinder block on the base of it, and it still goes into the road about twice a month, and I still go get it.
Today is my birthday. I am thirty-three.
My mother is nine years dead and my uncle Tobias is four and my business partner Renny went off the Fort Peck road on ice in a year I have decided to stop counting from, and that is the whole list of people who ever knew the date, so the number of people who will say anything to me today is zero, and I have known that since I woke up, and I made the decision anyway.
You get up. You open at six. The brightness is a thing I put on the same way I put on the coat, and anybody who thinks it comes free has never had to carry it up a set of stairs.
Also, the biker has been in four times this week.
I am going to think about that for exactly as long as it takes me to sweep the front and then I am going to stop.
He buys diesel. He has bought diesel from me for four years, which is exactly how long the store has been mine.
He is lean where the rest of that crew is heavy, and he has grey coming in at the temples of black hair cut down close, and there is a scar that starts at his jaw and goes down under his collar and I have thought about where it stops more times than a woman my age should admit.
He drives with two fingers on the wheel. He sits with his back to a wall.
He has never told me his name. Everybody in Ferris calls him Rook and nobody says it loud.
Four times this week. Four. Tuesday he came at four the way he always comes at four, and then he came Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then this morning at seven, and I have started making an extra cup at six forty-five for no reason I am prepared to write down anywhere.
He said my name today.
I want to be a serious person about this. I am a woman with a mortgage on a feed store and a knee that clicks and a truck named Gladys who needs a water pump. I am past the age where a man saying my name is an event.
It was an event.
The bell goes at two in the afternoon and the man who comes in is not from Ferris.
I know it before he is all the way through the door. It is the shoes. In this town at this time of year you are wearing a boot with a heel or you are wearing a pac boot, and this man is in a low black lace-up with a sole that has never had manure on it, and a canvas jacket bought new for the trip.
"Delaney Cobb?"
"That's me." I put the box cutter down where I can reach it, which is a habit and means nothing. "What can I get you?"
He puts a badge on my counter. He does it gently, which I understand later is a technique.
Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General. His name is Freel and he says it twice.
"I'm looking at a motor carrier registered out of this address," he says. "Ferris Cobb Hauling. Are you the officer of record on that?"
"That's my uncle's outfit."
"Tobias Cobb."
"He passed. Four years ago in March." My hands have gone cold and I put them under the counter. "It's just paperwork now. I keep the filing up so the number doesn't lapse. He put twenty-two years into that number, I wasn't going to let it die because nobody sent in a form."
Freel looks at me for a while. I am used to being looked at like I am a nice lady behind a counter. This is a different thing. This is a man deciding which of two categories to put me in.
"Ma'am," he says, "do you know what's been moving under it?"
The building is very quiet. The wind gets under the loading door.
"Culvert," I say. "Fence panel. It's an ag carrier."
"Do you sign the renewals?"
"Yes."
"Do you read the manifests?"
There is a beat where I could lie and I hear myself decide against it, and the deciding takes about a second and a half and I feel every part of it.
"There aren't any manifests," I say. "None that come here."
He leaves a card. He tells me nobody is accusing me of anything today. He tells me that in the tone people use when they want you to notice the word today, and then the bell rings and the cold comes in and he is gone, and I stand there holding a box cutter I do not remember picking back up.
The box is on the top shelf in the back, behind the mineral tubs, where I put it the week after the funeral because I could not look at his handwriting yet and then could not find a reason to start.
I get it down at four. I close at five thirty and I do not turn the front lights back on.
Tobias kept everything. Feed tickets from 1994.
A warranty card for a chest freezer. And underneath all of it, in a rubber-banded brick, four years of paper that came in the mail and that I signed and mailed back because that is what a person does when a form arrives with her uncle's business name on it.
I read the renewals. I read the insurance endorsements.
I read a page called Designation of Process Agent that I have signed three times and never read, and I read the acknowledgment I initialed that says the officer of record certifies the accuracy of all records of duty status and all shipping documentation.
I sit down on an upturned bucket in the back of my own store at half past six with alfalfa dust in my throat and I understand what I have been.
Nine hundred loads. I do not know the number yet.
I only know the shape of it. Four years of a signature with a smiley face next to it holding the door open for whatever came through, and I never asked, and the reason I never asked is that nobody has ever needed anything from me that had teeth in it, and it did not occur to me that the first time would be like this.
Here is the part I would like to explain to somebody and cannot.
Under the cold going down my back, under the arithmetic, there is a thing that feels almost like being lifted.
I have mattered to somebody. For four years I have been load-bearing.
Men I have never met have gone across a border and come home to their kids on the strength of a piece of paper with my name on it, and nobody ever told me, and now a federal officer has stood in my store and said the word conspiracy without saying it, and I am thirty-three years old today and this is the first thing that has ever happened to me that had consequences.
I hate that I do not hate it. I am going to have to sit with that for a long time.
At midnight I put the box on the passenger seat of the truck and drive out the county road to the old implement dealership with the chain link fence around it.
There is a flare stack burning orange a couple miles south and it lays a stripe of light across the whole lot. Eight bikes and a pickup and a dog barking somewhere behind the building. Every window in the place is lit and the sound coming out of it is the sound of men with nothing to be afraid of.
"Gladys," I say, "if I don't come back out, drive yourself home."
She does not answer. She never does. I sit gripping the wheel and I think about the card in my coat pocket and the word today, and I think about a man with a scar under his collar who has been in my store four times this week and let me give him coffee, and I understand that those two things are the same thing and have always been the same thing.
I get out. My legs work, which surprises me.
The gate is chained. There is a bell on a post, an actual doorbell wired to God knows what, and I stand in the wind with a cardboard box against my hip and my pulse going in my throat like something small and shut in.
Somebody said later that nobody has knocked on that gate in a year. They meant it as a joke about the club.
I did not hear it as a joke. I have been the woman nobody thinks about after for thirty-three years and I got to be a woman who knocked.
I push the button.