Forklift Letters

*Kept in the notebook in my locker, the week Elliott came. Everything he sent me is copied in.*

My name is Audrey Gonzalez, I'm 28, and I've been running a forklift on nights for four years now. My boyfriend Elliott is 31 and lives eleven hundred miles away. We met at a logistics conference in Atlanta three years ago, back when I was 25 and still impressed by anyone who wore a blazer to work. He's a senior planner, whatever that means. It means he sits in meetings. I sit in a machine that can lift four thousand pounds with a flick of my wrist.

He flew in Sunday for a whole week. Seven days. We'd never managed more than a long weekend before, so this felt like a big deal, the kind of big deal I didn't want to screw up by being weird about it.

I was weird about it.

Here's what I did. Monday night, before my shift started, I sat in the breakroom with a pen and a piece of printer paper and wrote him a note. My hands were actually shaking a little, which is stupid when I think about it now. He'd already seen me in everything from a swimsuit to a bad cold. But this was different. This was me letting him into the part of my life he'd only ever heard about in emails.

The emails were a thing we had. When I'm on nights I can't always call, so I write him these long dumb emails about the warehouse. About the drip in the coffee machine that nobody's fixed in two years. About the way the racks go up so high the ceiling disappears into shadow. About how at 2 a.m. the whole place hums like it's alive. He reads every one. He told me once they were the best part of his mornings, which is a hell of a thing for a man to say about inventory counts.

So the note. I wrote: *You're always asking what my nights look like. Come see. The forklift's yours until I clock in. Sit where I sit. I left you my seat. A.*

I taped it to the steering wheel and drove to the lot and sat in my car with the heater on, second-guessing myself for twenty minutes. Then I clocked in anyway.

* * *

He texted me at 9:14. My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I'd learned to keep it on vibrate because my supervisor has opinions about phones near the machinery.

*Found it. I'm sitting in your seat and it smells like you, which is a strange thing to discover about a forklift. Also I found your backup pen wedged in the dash and three hair ties. You live here more than home. I'm on the mezzanine now, watching you work. I can see your braid swing every time you turn. This is the best date I've ever been on and we haven't even said hello.*

I read that twice, standing next to my machine with my gloves still on, grinning like an idiot at a screen. The night guys probably thought I'd lost it.

I need to explain something about Elliott before I go further. Some men, when you show them your world, they nod and glaze over and wait for the tour to be over. He's not like that. He wants to know how the pallet wrapper works. He asked me once, over the phone, to describe the sound the racks make when the building settles at night. Who asks that? He does. He flew eleven hundred miles to sit in my cold breakroom and watch me work from a mezzanine and he thought it was a date.

So I kept going.

Second note went on the clipboard in the breakroom, where he'd have to go find it, where he'd have to leave his nice warm spot and walk through my night to get it. I wrote it faster this time, because once you start you can't stop. *Well? Do you like what you see? You're watching a woman work a machine most men here can't. If the answer's yes, you know the code. I sign everything A-7 around here. It means yes. Ask me what A-1 means someday. A.*

A-7 is a rack location in aisle three. It's also, for the purposes of this game, the warehouse code for yes. I made that up twenty minutes earlier. He didn't need to know that.

* * *

His reply came in around 11. First a text: *Checked the clipboard. A-7. Noted. I'm going to hold you to A-1 later and you can't take it back.*

Then a photo. He was standing at the base of the pallet rack I'd just loaded, the one with the coffee shipment, and he had his palm pressed flat against the upright, fingers spread. His shirt was rumpled from the flight and his hair was a mess and he looked happier than any man standing next to boxed espresso had a right to look. The caption said: *I can feel your machine through the floor. The whole building moves when you work. I felt you pick up that last pallet from thirty feet away. I don't know how to explain that to anyone.*

I don't know how to explain it either. But I knew exactly what he meant. That building talks to me all night, every night. Having him feel it too, from inside it, did something to my chest I'm not going to spend a paragraph trying to name.

* * *

By midnight I was restless. I'd been writing him notes like a woman with a crush and no shame, which I refuse to feel bad about, and he'd been answering every one, and the whole shift had turned into this slow chase across a dark building. I wanted him closer. The mezzanine was fine. The breakroom was fine. But there's a spot in the far aisle, between two of the tall racks, where the lights don't quite reach and the floor stays warm from the compressor. It's my spot. I eat my lunches there half the time when it's too cold outside.

I grabbed a packing slip off a pallet, flipped it to the blank back, and wrote on it leaning against my cage. My handwriting got worse the longer the night went. *Getting braver. Come down off your perch. There's a gap between racks 14 and 15, far end of the building. Wait for me there. I finish this load in forty minutes and then I'm yours till my break ends. I want you to meet me in the part of the night nobody else gets. A-7.*

I tucked it up under the overhead guard of the forklift, wedged where he'd have to climb into my seat again to get it. Then I went back to work with my heart doing something I could feel in my teeth.

Forty minutes is a long time when you're counting. I loaded slow on purpose. Checked straps that didn't need checking. Wiped down the windshield that was already clean. Somewhere in there my supervisor walked past and I gave him a nod and he gave me one back and had no idea his whole building had turned into something else entirely.

At 12:51 the text came. *Found it. I'm in the gap. It's dark and it's warm and I can hear you working from here. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere. Seven days, remember.*

Seven days. I turned the forklift around, set her down easy on the concrete, and started walking toward aisle fourteen with my jacket zipped up and my pulse loud in my ears. I've walked that aisle a thousand times. I'd never once walked it like that.