The Driver's Seat

I'm fifty-two years old. I want that out there first, because everything that happened at that job site only makes sense if you know it. Fifty-two, single, delivery driver for a construction supply company out on Route 9. Been driving lumber and shingles to job sites for eleven years, and I can tell you most of it is coffee, radio, and men who wave you through without looking up.

This site was different.

It was a custom home renovation over in Crestwood, big old split-level somebody bought and gutted. I'd been dropping deliveries there maybe two weeks before anything happened. Lou ran the crew. Forty-five, foreman, built like someone who carries bundles of shingles for fun. Frank on carpentry, thirty-eight, quiet, always squinting at a framing square. And Abby, the apprentice electrician. Twenty-nine, sharp, funny, the kind of woman who drinks whiskey and laughs with her whole chest.

I knew them from Jefferson's bar, a couple times over the past few years. Abby and I had closed the place down a few times. Lou I knew through a mutual friend. So when I pulled in with a load of two-by-tens that first Tuesday, it wasn't strangers. It was almost friends.

Almost.

Here's the part I'll admit, because what's the point of telling this story if I lie about the fun parts. I like being looked at. I always have. At thirty I had a fling with a guy from the warehouse, nothing serious, and nothing since. But the wanting to be seen, that never went anywhere. It just sat there.

So that first Tuesday, when I leaned against my tailgate waiting for somebody to sign the slip, I didn't tuck my shirt in. It was a work shirt, nothing special, but I left it loose and I stretched a little reaching for my clipboard. And I caught Lou looking. Then Frank. Then Lou pretending to read the delivery slip while looking at me over the top of it.

I drove away grinning like an idiot.

And listen, nobody grabbed anything. Nobody said a word out of line. That mattered to me, and it still does. They just looked, and I let them, and we all knew it, and that constituted the entire game for about two weeks. I'd pull in, linger, sit on the tailgate with my boots swinging. Once I took my jacket off real slow because the cab was warm, and Frank walked into a sawhorse. I heard Abby laugh about it for a full minute.

So yeah. Two weeks of that, both sides pretending it wasn't happening.

Then came the Thursday with the coffee.

I didn't plan it, exactly. Okay, I planned it a little. I stopped at the gas station, bought a big cardboard carrier of coffees, twelve cups, and drove the long way to Crestwood. Pulled in around ten, pulled up at my usual spot by the dumpster.

"Well, look who's here," Lou said. He wiped his hands on a rag and came down the driveway. "You bring lumber or miracles?"

"Coffee," I said, holding up the carrier. "You boys look like you're dying out here."

"We are dying," Abby called from the porch framing. She hopped down off the sill and came over, and she hugged me, which surprised me, quick and friendly, and she smelled like sawdust and shampoo. She grabbed two cups before I even set the carrier down. "Des, you're my favorite person in this county."

I handed them out. Lou, Frank, a guy up on the roof I didn't know got one thrown up to him. Then I did the thing I'd been thinking about since I left the gas station. I hopped up and sat on the stack of plywood leaning against the garage wall, legs crossed at the ankle, cup in both hands.

My shirt rode up. I let it.

Not a lot. Just enough that a strip of my stomach showed, and I made no move to fix it. I talked about traffic on Route 9 and the new dispatcher who couldn't read a manifest, and Lou stood maybe six feet away drinking his coffee and not even pretending to look at my face the whole time. Frank stood behind him. Abby sat on an upturned bucket, watching me with this little smile like she knew exactly what I was doing.

Maybe she did. Women usually do.

"So how's the house coming?" I asked, nodding at the exposed framing. The whole back wall was open studs, plastic sheeting flapping where the window order was late.

"Slow," Lou said. "Windows came in damaged, two of them. We're a week behind and the homeowner calls every morning."

"Poor baby," I said, and he laughed.

I stayed maybe forty minutes. Longest delivery I've ever made. And when I finally slid off that plywood stack, I did it slow, and I heard Abby whisper something to Frank and both of them crack up.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing," Abby said, way too innocent.

I got in the truck. I sat there a second with the window down.

"You know we talk about you," Lou said. Just like that. Standing at my door with his forearms on the window ledge.

"About my delivery routes?"

"Desiree." He said my whole name, and his voice dropped a little. "The crew talks about you. A lot. I figured you knew that."

I looked at him. He was dead serious, not smirking, not sleazy. Just honest, the way a man is when he's decided to take a swing.

"Are you complaining?" I asked.

"No, ma'am!"

"Then what are you telling me for?"

He shrugged. "Figured you should know it's not just in your head. The way you sit on things. The way you stretch. Frank walked into that sawhorse and told everybody about it at lunch."

"Oh my God!" I laughed, but my face was hot.

"And Abby talks about you too. More than the rest of us, honestly."

That made me stop. I'd had drinks with Abby. We'd talked about her last breakup, my whole sad romantic history, whiskey and pool. I'd never once thought about her watching me. Now I thought about it for one long second and my stomach did something interesting.

"So what are you saying, Lou?" I asked. "Say it plain."

He took a breath. "Come by sometime when we're on lunch. Not for a delivery. Just come by. And if you want, do what you've been doing, except don't pretend you're not doing it. That's all I'm asking. That and nothing. And I mean nothing. Your deliveries, our account with your company, none of it has anything to do with this. Say no, or stop whenever you like, and you're still our driver and we're still glad to see you."

I sat with that. My hands were actually shaking a little on the wheel, which is stupid, I know, but there it was.

"I'll think about it," I said.

"Think fast," he said, grinning now. "We break for lunch at noon."

I drove off and sat in the gas station parking lot for twenty minutes arguing with myself. Fifty-two years old. Who does this. Who drives back to a construction site to be looked at by three people, one of them a woman half my age who buys me whiskey and tells me I'm too good for dating apps.

Then I bought a bottle of water, fixed my hair, and went back at noon.

They were sitting in the main room, which had no walls yet, just studs and subfloor and a view of the whole backyard. Frank had sandwiches. Abby was on a cooler. Lou saw me come around the plastic sheeting and stood up so fast he knocked his coffee over, which was the best compliment I got all year.

"You came back," he said.

"Don't make it weird," I said. "I forgot to finish my break."

"You did not," Abby said. "I watched you