A New Kind of Delivery

Ray had been doing the Thursday run to The Anchor Tap for six months now, and in all that time he could count on one hand the number of visits that had gone without some kind of fight, and even then he was being generous with what counted as a fight. He was twenty-eight years old, four years into a job his uncle had gotten him at the beer distributor after the whole mess with Jenna ended, and he had figured out pretty quick that Route 6 on Thursdays was the route nobody wanted. Everybody knew about Roxanne. Everybody had a story about Roxanne. The old-timers at the warehouse said she'd been running that bar alone since before Ray even had a license, and that she'd taken the whole world personally since her divorce, around the time she turned thirty, and that the only way to deal with her was to smile, take the abuse, and drive away.

Ray had tried smiling. Ray had tried being extra polite, calling her ma'am, carrying the kegs all the way to the back room instead of leaving them on the hand truck like the slip said. He had once, in a moment of pure desperation, brought her a coffee from the place on Fifth, and she had looked at the cup, looked at him, and told him that if he thought a two-dollar coffee was going to make up for a shorted case of porter he was even dumber than he looked. Then she had drunk the coffee. He remembered that part because it confused him for a week. Roxanne seemed to hate him personally and individually, like he had been invented for the sole purpose of ruining her Thursdays.

The Anchor Tap sat in a narrow block of a working-class street where the storefronts had been the same storefronts for forty years, and the bar itself was long and dim and wood-paneled, with a single TV mounted over the register that never showed sports, just some fishing channel or a news loop, and it always smelled like stale beer and floor wax, a smell Ray had honestly gotten kind of fond of, though he would never say that out loud to anybody at the warehouse because they'd never let him hear the end of it. The delivery bay was an alley behind the bar so tight that his truck scraped a paint fleck off the brick every single week, and Roxanne always made him wait, always, rain or cold or heat, standing at the back door with her arms crossed while he sat in the cab feeling like he'd been sent to the principal's office, except he was twenty-eight and she was thirty-four and neither of them was fooling anybody.

The regulars were part of it too, and Ray knew that was the part that stung the most. She would do it in front of them. She'd hold up a bottle to the light like she was inspecting a gemstone and announce, loud enough for the whole room, that the shipment was warm, or dented, or late, or short, or that the label was crooked, and the regulars would chuckle into their drinks, and Ray would stand there at the bar with his clipboard feeling about two inches tall. Twice she had called his supplier right in front of him, phone on the bar, speaker on, asking the distributor in the sweetest voice whether they employed anybody who could read, and both times the guy on the phone had laughed, and both times Ray had driven back to the warehouse gripping the wheel and rehearsing arguments he would never actually say.

So when his uncle handed him the Thursday sheet and her name was on it, Ray just sighed and took it, because arguing about it never changed anything either.

That particular Thursday it was raining, a cold gray drizzle that had been coming down since morning, and the truck's heater only worked on the setting that also defogged nothing, so Ray arrived at the alley behind The Anchor Tap in a mood that was already worn down to nothing. He backed in, scraped the usual paint fleck off the usual brick, and sat there for his usual fifteen minutes before the back door swung open.

Except this time it wasn't a waiting day. This time the delivery was the problem.

Roxanne stood in the doorway in a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up, arms crossed, rain spitting past her into the alley. "You're late," she said.

"Truck number three lost its wipers on Sixth," Ray said. "I called it in."

"Well, you can call this in too, because I'm not taking it."

Ray looked at the manifest. Four half barrels of the pale lager she ordered every single week, same brand, same order, every Thursday for six months, printed on the sheet, signed off by her on the phone when the order went in Monday. "You ordered it Monday. You talked to Danny yourself."

"I ordered lager. This isn't my lager."

"That's your lager. That's been your lager since April."

"It's not what I asked for." She said it flat, the way she said everything, as if a door were closing.

Ray felt something go in him that he couldn't really describe, some kind of snap, quiet but total, like a rubber band that has been stretched every Thursday for half a year and finally just goes. He looked past her into the bar, where six or seven regulars were turning on their stools to watch, because they always watched, and he thought, not calmly at all, that he was done being entertainment.

"Sign the invoice," he said.

"It's the wrong product. I'm not signing."

"You ordered it. I have the order. Sign the invoice, Roxanne."

"Take it back and bring me what I asked for." And she turned to walk inside, done with him, the way she was always done with him, and that was the part that did it.

Ray did not drive back to the warehouse. He got in the truck, pulled out of the alley in a slow arc that took him forty seconds and felt like the longest forty seconds of his life, and parked the truck directly in front of the bar's front door, angled across the sidewalk and half the street, nose against her steps, blocking it completely. Then he killed the engine, got out, and leaned against the wet hood with his clipboard under his arm, rain running off his cap, and looked through the front window at Roxanne standing there behind her bar with her mouth open.

The regulars drifted toward the window like it was a parade. One of them, an old guy in a flat cap who Ray recognized as a Thursday fixture, cracked the door open a few inches and stuck his head out into the drizzle.

"Son, you're parked in front of the door."

"I know it," Ray said, loud enough for the whole bar to hear him, because he meant the whole bar to hear him. "And I'm gonna sit right here on this hood until Roxanne comes out here and admits, out loud, in front of everybody, that she ordered this beer. Same beer. Every Thursday. Six months. She ordered it Monday, she talked to Danny herself, and she's not getting out of it today."

There was a rumble of laughter from inside, low and delighted, the sound of people who had been watching this show for months and had finally gotten a ticket to the good part. Ray heard somebody say "oh, this is gonna be good," and heard somebody else say "twenty bucks on Roxanne," which stung a little, but he let it go.

The door banged open all the way and Roxanne came out into the rain, no coat, arms crossed, standing on her own top step so she was looking down at him, which she clearly enjoyed.

"You have lost your mind," she said.

"Maybe," Ray said, settling back against the hood. "But I'm not moving this truck."

"And what, exactly, do you think that's going to accomplish?"

"Well, for starters, it means nobody else can get in to buy a drink," Ray said. "So every minute you stand out here arguing with me, you're losing money, and every minute I sit here, I'm getting paid. So honestly, take your time."

One of the regulars, through the glass, raised his beer in a toast.

Roxanne came down the steps instead of answering, which surprised him, and she kept coming until she was close enough that he could see the rain beading in her hair, and then she grabbed a fistful of his jacket collar and shoved him back against the hood of the truck with a flat smack of his palms on wet metal.

"You think this is funny?" she said, right up in his face. "You think blocking my door in front of my customers is some kind of move?"

"It's not a move, it's a fact," Ray said, and he did not push her off, but he did not back down either, which was new for both of them. "You ordered the beer. Sign the paper."

"Or what?"

"Or I sit here."

She shoved him again, harder, and his cap came off and tumbled into the gutter, and something about the cap, six months of waiting in cold alleys for that cap, made him shove back. Not hard, just enough that she stumbled a half step on the wet sidewalk, and the whole front window of the bar was pressed with faces now, seven or eight of them, and somebody inside yelled "take it inside before the cops come!" and somebody else yelled "no, stay out here, I got money on this!"

"You put your hands on me?" Roxanne said, and her voice went up, actually up, the first time he had ever heard it do that.

"You put your hands on me first," Ray said. "I've been taking your garbage every Thursday for six months. The waiting, the wrong order, the phone calls to my boss telling him I'm incompetent. I'm four years at this job and you've had Danny doubting me since spring. So yeah, I shoved back. Sue me."

"You want to know why the order gets rejected?" she said, stepping in again, and now they were chest to chest on the sidewalk in the drizzle, both of them breathing like they had run somewhere. "Because the first guy who had this route shorted me two barrels and lied to my face about it, and I swore nobody would ever get one smooth delivery off me again. And then you showed up, some rookie in a company jacket who couldn't parallel a truck in an alley, and I decided you were going to be the one who learned."

"I'm twenty-eight, not some rookie," Ray said. "And I've never shorted you a barrel in my life. Check your records. Check every invoice since April. They all match."

"I know they match," she said, and then she stopped, like she had said more than she meant to, and the rain came down between them, fine and gray, and neither of them moved.

"You know they match," Ray repeated slowly. "So every Thursday, this whole time, it's been a test."

"Everything's a test," Roxanne said. "Everything is everybody seeing if they can get something past you, and the day you let it slide is the day you're finished."

"That's a hell of a way to run a bar."

"It's a hell of a way to run a life," she said, "and it's the only one I've got, so sign your own damn invoice and leave it on the bar."

"No," Ray said. "You sign it. To my face. That's the whole point of the truck."

From inside, muffled through the glass, came a chorus of groans and one voice saying "oh, just kiss her already," which was met by laughter and by Roxanne turning her head toward the window with a look that could strip paint, and in the half second she was distracted Ray did something that surprised him more than it surprised her, he laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, standing soaked in front of her door with his clipboard dripping.

"Oh, that's rich," Roxanne said, spinning back to him. "Something funny?"

"You're fighting a beer delivery guy over a signature on an order you placed," Ray said. "There's eight guys inside betting on us. The TV in there is showing a fishing channel. This is the stupidest standoff in the history of this street, and I've been part of it for six months, and I just now noticed how stupid it is."

She stared at him, rain running down her face, and something in her expression shifted, not softening exactly, more like a door cracking open an inch after years of being latched. "Get inside," she said. "Both of us, before one of these idiots calls the cops on you for blocking a sidewalk."

"Move the truck?"

"Move the truck after you sign. Come on." And she turned and pushed through her own front door, past the regulars who scattered back to their stools with the guilty speed of men who had been