Chapter 25 #2
“Questions today. Three routes tomorrow.”
“One more thing.” I waited until he looked up. “If you contact one person behind me, I will take the carburetor off that Harley and put it in the retention pond, and you can spend the winter asking Colin for rides.”
He did not smile, which was correct, and did not promise anything larger than I had asked for, which was newer. “Tomorrow afternoon.”
The questions came through Mia before lunch — height, loaded weight, turning radius, delivery window, unload time, whether the driver could split a trailer. No answers suggested. I called the supplier myself and sent the facts back the same way.
The next afternoon he was in the clubhouse kitchen with three maps, the closure notices, and a mileage sheet. June sat at the end of the table. His phone and route radio were somewhere else. The maps were already turned to face my chair.
“Option one takes the state detour, exits before the underpass, comes in on the north industrial road,” he said. “Legal at the dimensions you gave me. Eleven extra miles, no toll. The final turn into the loading lane has to be made from the east.”
“Why?”
“From the west he turns across oncoming traffic with nothing to straighten in. From the east the truck is already lined up.”
He moved one finger to the second map and did not rotate it toward himself.
Ryder always turned route pages so I could read them upright and then worked from the side, because he knew I hated looking at a map upside down.
He did it with appliance manuals, mortgage forms, and the exploded diagram for Gladys’s gearbox.
Seeing his hand do it in a clubhouse kitchen with a witness at the end of the table made me want to close the folder and hire the man from Terre Haute.
I stayed in the chair. “Two.”
“County roads around the culvert. Six miles shorter. Lower winter maintenance priority, one turn with limited sight distance. I wouldn’t send an unfamiliar driver through it after dark.”
“I didn’t ask what you’d allow.”
“The facts are the maintenance priority and the sight line.” He took his hand off the map. “My recommendation is option one. The choice is yours.”
Option three split the load into a smaller truck at a public transfer yard; he had the posted fee and had not called to ask whether they had space. Every option came with its own hole in it, which is not how he used to give me anything.
“The supplier can run option one in daylight,” I said. “I want the east approach drawn on a separate sheet with no club markings, and the working copies destroyed after June verifies the public facts.”
He reached for the tracing paper, stopped before his arm crossed my folder, and walked around the far end of the table instead.
That put him at my left shoulder. He smelled like laundry soap, metal, and the cold he had carried in.
I knew the soap was the one they keep in the bunkhouse, and I knew his beard was longer because nobody in that building tells him the blade is dull.
Six years of knowing a man does not switch off because five years of marriage did.
I wanted his hand on the back of my chair and the life where leaning into him had not needed a written rule.
He drew the approach and did not touch me.
The work found its old rhythm anyway. I read a road name and he found it.
I caught a construction notice missing from his first page and he added it and said nothing in his own defense.
For four or five minutes we were the two people who used to plan fundraisers over a cooling loaf.
Then he slid the sheet toward me and his knuckle passed close to the bare place on my left hand, and I had Jess’s palm flat over a stomach with nothing in it, and the jacket on the chair after the hospital, and the seat by his good ear given away.
“This doesn’t shorten the bunkhouse,” I said. “It doesn’t buy a bakery visit, another job, or a conversation about where I sleep.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to be pleased I asked you.”
“I’m glad the information was worth something. I don’t think it means anything else.”
The honesty made me angrier than hope would have. He passed the final page to June, left the working maps on the table, and went out with no photograph, no copy, no reason to walk beside me.
The supplier took the route. Brenda got no call from Ryder, Bear, Jax, or anybody wearing a patch.
I went down at five on the first Tuesday in November to take the delivery myself.
The loading lane runs behind the building between a brick wall and three utility poles somebody set there to punish drivers.
The truck came in from the east with the mirrors clearing the near pole by a foot, and I caught myself looking past it, down the lane, for a single headlight.
In July he would have been there, telling himself he only wanted to see the turn work.
Brenda came out with a coat over her whites. “Your husband coming to inspect his route?”
“He gave me public road information. The delivery is mine.”
She looked at my face a second longer than the answer needed. “Then tell the man where you want him.”