Birthday at the Loading Dock

Rochelle was forty minutes into her double shift when Sophie came clomping across the loading dock with two coffees and a grin that meant trouble.

"Happy birthday, old lady," Sophie said, handing one over. There was a birthday candle taped to the lid with masking tape, unlit, bending sideways. "Xander said no open flames on the floor, so you have to imagine the part where I light it and you blow it out and wish for something dirty."

Rochelle was fifty-two years old that morning, though she'd been doing her best to not think about it since she woke up at four. "You're a menace," she said, peeling the candle off and sticking it in her apron pocket. "And the coffee's terrible. Thank you."

"Terrible coffee is the gift that keeps on giving. It's from the machine in the break room, so it's also a threat." Sophie leaned against a pallet of dog food and watched Rochelle scan boxes. "Twenty-eight, by the way. In case you were wondering what fresh looks like. You're fifty-two, I'm twenty-eight, we're friends anyway, which is beautiful."

"I know how old you are. You tell me every Tuesday."

"It's a service I provide."

Rochelle had worked at this warehouse for fourteen years, since the year her life had gone sideways in more ways than one, and she knew every pallet position on the dock the way other people knew the back of their own hands. Tuesday was usually her short day, but Rick had called in with a kidney thing and she'd said yes to the double, which meant she'd be here until ten at night on her birthday. She'd told Sophie this was fine. It was not fine, but she'd told her it was fine, which in a small town counts for about the same thing.

The dock doors were open to the early cold, and the lot outside was still frosted. Meridian Flats in October smelled like diesel and dead leaves, which she would take over any candle at Bath and Body Works, honestly.

The inspector arrived at seven-something.

Rochelle didn't see him at first. She heard Xander say, out front, "Oh, good, you're early," in the voice he used for people he couldn't yell at, and then there were boots on the concrete and a clipboard and a new badge on a lanyard, and she looked up out of habit because a badge on a lanyard always means paperwork, and paperwork is always somebody else's problem landing on yours.

She nearly dropped a full pallet of cat litter on her own foot.

It was Jamie. Fifty-three years old now, gray shot through at the temples, a little thicker through the shoulders, and otherwise exactly the same, right down to the way he stood with his weight on one hip as if the floor owed him money. Fourteen years since she'd seen him, and her first thought, God help her, was not hello or go to hell. It was that his jacket still didn't fit right in the arms.

"Rochelle," he said.

"Inspector," she said, because Sophie was ten feet away and Xander was hovering and the alternative was saying his name out loud, which she could feel in her throat like a pill swallowed dry.

"You look..." He did a small gesture with the clipboard, taking her in, the apron, the scanner, the hair she'd cut shorter sometime around when he left. "Good. You look good."

"I look as if I am a woman holding a pallet jack." She scanned the next box harder than she needed to. "You're inspecting trucks now?"

"Regional. Been doing it six years. I transferred back in September." He said it too fast, like he'd rehearsed it in the parking lot, and maybe he had. "I was going to call."

"Were you."

"Rochelle." He lowered his voice. "Happy birthday."

Her head came up before she could stop it. "How do you know when my birthday is?"

"You told me. Years ago. You said nobody ever remembers, so I made a point of it." He shrugged, uncomfortable. "Turns out it sticks."

Xander saved them both by appearing at Jamie's elbow with a manifest and a monologue about dock three's ice problem, and Rochelle got to spend the next hour pretending to care about inventory while her ears burned.

***

The company gives you a fifteen-minute break and no mercy, and around nine Rochelle escaped to the break room to feed quarters into the vending machine and hate the coffee. She was bent over the coin slot when Jamie came in and shut the door partway behind him, which was either rude or careful, and she decided to wait and see.

"Nine o'clock break," he said. "Same as ever."

"Same as ever," she agreed. "Except I'm fifty-two and you're a government man."

"Regional contractor, actually, it's not..."

"Jamie." She turned around and looked at him straight, arms crossed, because if she didn't cross her arms she'd do something with her hands and she knew what her hands wanted to do and it wasn't professional. "Fourteen years. You took the job in Tulsa, you called me twice, and then you didn't call me at all. And now you're standing in my break room telling me when my break is."

"I've thought about you," he said. "A lot. More than I should have. Every town I've worked in, every warehouse, I'd look at a loading dock and think about this one, and I'm not going to insult you by pretending that's the same thing as staying."

"Good. Don't pretend."

"I know I'm late."

"You're fourteen years late." She fed the last quarter in and the machine gave her the coffee and not the creamer, which felt about right for the morning she was having. "That's not late, that's a different geological era. Sophie in there was in middle school when you left."

"Middle school," he repeated, and winced at his own math. "Okay. That's a bad way to put it."

"It's an accurate way to put it."

He stood there with his clipboard against his chest like a shield. "I'm not asking for anything this morning. I just wanted to say it to your face. That I thought about you, and I'm sorry, and I'd like to buy you dinner at the diner if you'll let me, and if you won't, I'll inspect the trucks and stay out of your way."

Rochelle looked at him for longer than was dignified. The coffee machine clunked. Somewhere out on the dock a horn beeped twice.

"Dinner at the diner," she said finally, "is not a small thing in this town and you know it. Vera waits tables there. Vera knows everybody's business since before I was born."

"So that's a no?"

"That's a maybe. Ask me again after my shift." She picked up the coffee. "And Jamie. If you stand by the vending machine one more minute looking like that, I'm going to do something I'll regret in front of Xander's security camera, so go inspect something."

He went, and he was smiling when he went, which made it worse.

***

The rest of the morning crawled. Rochelle picked, scanned, stacked, and thought about nothing but gray temples and the word maybe, which she had said out loud like a fool.

Sophie caught her at eleven, leaning on a pallet with her eyes somewhere else entirely.

"Okay, spill," Sophie said. "You've been weird since the hot inspector showed up. And don't say your back, because your back is always bad and today you're bad in a different way. You keep looking at the dock doors like they owe you money."

"The inspector?" Rochelle laughed, and it came out too loud. "Honey, he's got to be fifty."

"So? Fifty is a whole person. Fifty can be hot. Ask anybody." Sophie waggled her eyebrows. "Has he said anything to you? He looks like the type who says things."

"He's the type," Rochelle said, "who said things fourteen years ago and then moved to Tulsa."

Sophie blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Nothing. My back hurts. Hand me that scanner battery."

"You are the worst birthday person I have ever met," Sophie said, handing it over anyway, and Rochelle went back to pretending, badly, that she wasn't counting the hours until ten at night.

The lunch hour came at one, and Rochelle took her sandwich to the break room expecting peace and got Jamie instead, sitting at the little table with two vending machine sandwiches and two coffees arranged in front of him like they were a peace offering that had been planned in advance.

"You bought me lunch," she said.

"I bought two lunches. One of them happens to be yours. You can decline it."

She sat down, because she was hungry and because refusing a turkey sandwich on principle felt like spending more energy than it was worth. "So this is a bribe."

"This is a turkey sandwich. The bribe was the dinner at the diner, and you haven't accepted that yet." He peeled the crust off his own sandwich, which was a habit she had forgotten he had, and remembering it annoyed her more than the transfer paperwork had. "Can I tell you something without you throwing the coffee at me?"

"That depends entirely on the something."

"I asked for this region." He said it flat, no buildup, which she had always hated and was now grateful for. "The inspection contract covers four states. I could have kept the southern one, it paid better and the winters are shorter. I read a shipping report last spring that had Meridian Flats in the header, and I sat there in a motel in Tulsa with your town's name on a piece of paper and I