The Driver's Test

The dispatch note said pickup at four, which meant by any sane math I should have been loaded and rolling by five. It was now pushing six and I was idling in the empty lot of a furniture warehouse out past the strip malls, watching the light go amber through the tall windows of a showroom that looked like nobody had shopped in it since the last recession. My phone said the dock manager had gone home. My phone also said the pickup had been reassigned to the owner herself. I did not love either of those sentences.

I'm Shawn, I'm thirty-four, and I've been driving long-haul for about twelve years. Ten of those were solo cross-country, which teaches you patience and how to eat a sandwich in fourth gear. The fling I had with a waitress in Omaha when I was twenty-four taught me less, but it was a better story at truck stops. What I wanted that evening was simple: the steady regional route this company was hiring for, home weekends, no more sleeping in the cab outside a distribution center in February. So when the boss wants to meet you in person, you wipe your hands on your jeans and you go be charming.

I locked up the rig and walked in through the front, because the dock doors were already shut and the only lit door was the customer entrance. Inside was that particular warehouse-showroom smell, cardboard and carpet sample and dust cooking under fluorescent tubes somebody had forgotten to turn off. Sofas stacked three high down one aisle, mattresses leaning in a shrink-wrapped brick of them against the far wall, brass lamps in a bin like severed heads. The evening light came through windows set high up, catching the dust, and it was honestly a better show than anything on the floor.

She was standing at the end of the mattress aisle with a clipboard she clearly wasn't reading.

"You'd be Shawn," she said. "Katherine. I own the place. Your dispatcher is a coward who goes home at four thirty, so you get me."

She was fifty-one and looked like she'd decided at some point that caring about what people thought of her was a subscription she'd let lapse. Silver at the temples, a blouse that had been ironed sometime this week, reading glasses pushed up into her hair where they did no work at all. She had a smirk that arrived before her sentences did, like a scout.

"Ma'am," I said, and she made a face like I'd tracked mud in.

"We'll work on that. Walk with me. I like to look at a man while I question him. It's inefficient but I enjoy it."

So we walked. Past the mattresses, past a recliner throne setup that would've embarrassed a dentist, past end tables priced for people who didn't look at price tags. She asked about my driving record and I gave her the honest version. No accidents in twelve years, one moving violation, a speeding ticket outside Flagstaff that I still considered a clerical dispute.

"Flagstaff," she repeated, like she was tasting it. "Downhill or uphill?"

"Downhill. Which is the whole point of my appeal."

"Mm. And the gap here, a year, two years ago. What happened there?"

I told her. My dad's last year, hospice in my guest room, driving local for a medical courier so I could be around. She didn't say sorry. She wrote something on the clipboard, then didn't look at the clipboard again, which told me the writing was theater.

"You know most drivers lie about that gap," she said.

"Most drivers haven't had a year like mine."

"No," she said. "They haven't. They just say 'family thing' and hope you don't push." She glanced sideways at me. "I like that you didn't say family thing."

We turned down the lamp aisle, which was the wrong width, so we walked closer together than the conversation required. At one point she put a hand on my forearm to steer me around a dolly left in the walkway, and it stayed there maybe two seconds longer than steering required, and I noticed, and I decided she'd notice that I noticed, and I was right, because her smirk updated itself.

"Here's my real question," she said. "This route is three states and boring and pays fine. Every driver who interviews says he wants stability. You've run cross-country for a decade. Why do you want boring?"

"Because boring is what I'd be choosing instead of what I've been settling for."

She stopped by a lamp with a shade like a stained lampshade, which is a useless description, but it was that kind of lamp. "That's the first honest answer today and it's nearly seven o'clock," she said.

"Long day," I offered.

"It's about to get longer. I'm going to walk you through the whole floor and ask you questions that have nothing to do with freight, because the freight part I can read on paper. The other part I can't."

The other part, I'd figure out later, was the actual test. At the time I just figured the owner was eccentric and lonely, which is a combination I'd met before and never minded. She asked what I read on the road. She asked if I'd ever lived with anyone. She asked my opinion about mattresses, quality tiers, whether the expensive ones were a scam, and I said yes, mostly, and she laughed for the first time, a real laugh that she seemed to keep in a locked drawer normally.

"The expensive ones are a scam," she agreed. "I sell them anyway. Now the important question. Are you hungry? There's a Thai place two miles out that delivers late and I haven't eaten since noon."

This took a second to file correctly. "You're buying dinner for a driver you haven't hired yet?"

"I'm buying dinner for a man whose record I've already decided to hire, and whose company I'm now auditing separately. Keep up."

I said that sounded fine. We walked back toward the front office, and somewhere in the mattress aisle she drifted a half step behind me and I was aware of her looking, which is a strange thing to be aware of in a building full of furniture, and I did not move faster or slower, which felt like passing some unspoken quiz.

In the office she had me sign the pickup paperwork on a desk with one drawer that opened with a hip bump, an art she demonstrated. While I signed she read my license and insurance like a fortune teller, and then said, casually, the way you'd mention the weather, "You're a good-looking man for someone who eats in fourth gear. Has anyone told you that recently?"

"Recently, no," I said.

"That's a shame. Corrected now."

I put down the pen. There is a moment in every weird evening where you decide which evening you're having. I'd driven four hours for this pickup and the dock was shut for the day regardless, the load wasn't going anywhere until morning, and the owner of the company had just called me good-looking in her own office with the lamps glowing behind her like they were part of a stage set.

"That's going in the file?" I asked.

"Everything goes in the file," Katherine said. "The file is fictional. Order the food. Pad thai, no peanuts, and you get to pick your own."

I ordered from my phone at her desk while she pulled two folding chairs out of a closet that also contained, oddly, a chess set and a wedding punch bowl. We ate off the desk on top of the old paperwork, and she asked about Omaha, because apparently I'd mentioned the waitress story at some point without meaning to, the way you do when you're nervous and don't know you're nervous yet. She told me about a colleague, years back, an affair she described as "conducted entirely in supply closets and past tense," and I laughed and she looked pleased at having made me laugh, like it was a bet she'd placed with herself.

The light through the tall windows had gone from amber to a deeper, dustier gold. The fluorescent tubes hummed over two folding chairs and a desk dinner in a half-empty showroom, and I remember thinking that this was, so far, the strangest job interview of my life, and that I was in no hurry for it to end.

Then she set down her carton and looked at me with the smirk from the mattress aisle, dialed down a notch, more careful.

"One more question," she said. "And you can answer any way you like. What would you do if I told you the interview has a practical portion?"

I set my own carton down. "Depends," I said, "on what's being tested."

"That," she said, standing, "is the correct answer."

The walk resumed, but the temperature of it had changed, the way a highway changes when you stop seeing other cars. She led me past the recliners and the brass lamps, past a row of mattresses still in their plastic, and stopped at a tall mirror in a crate, one of the display pieces that hadn't sold and probably never would, leaning against a wall of shelving like a door to nowhere. The fluorescents caught in it and threw a pale stripe across the floor.

"Show me how you'd load this," she said, tapping the crate. "Fragile. Strapped. Say it's going to Denver."

I looked at the mirror, then at the shipping labels on the shelf, and told her what I'd tell any dockhand. Wrap in furniture blankets first, not last. Blanket bars on the E-track, spaced so the mirror can't walk sideways. Strap through the frame, never across the glass, and put padding under every point where the strap touches wood. And the thing nobody does and everybody should, which is put your hand flat on the crate at every stop for the first hour and feel for humming.

"Humming," she repeated.

"Straps loosen. Freight breathes. A mirror that hums at mile twenty is a mirror that's on the floor at mile two hundred."

She nodded slowly, and then she came around beside me and put her hand flat on the crate the way I'd described, which meant she was standing close, closer than the exercise required, and when I demonstrated the blanket fold on the corner piece I keep folded in the truck, she was watching my hands instead of the blanket. Her shoulder touched my arm. It stayed touched. Somewhere in there her other hand came to rest on my back, light, between the shoulder blades, the way you'd steady someone on a ladder, and she left it there while I finished the fold, and I finished the fold slowly, because I am only human.

"Good," she said. "You'd be surprised how many men fold it fast and wrong."

"Fast and wrong describes most of my twenties."

"I doubt that," she said, and her hand was still on my back, and I was aware of her palm's warmth through my shirt, and I did not step away.

We walked on. The showroom at night is a strange place, all those sofas arranged for conversations nobody is having, lamps lit for nobody. She moved through it like she owned it, which she did, and I kept catching our reflections in the big mirror as we passed other mirrors, which got confusing.

Then she stopped at an end table, set her reading glasses back on, took them off, and asked it.

"Can you handle unusual cargo?"

I looked at her. She looked at me. There was a whole conversation in that question that had nothing to do with freight, and we both knew it, and she waited to see what I'd do with it.

"I can handle anything," I said. "Ten years solo, cross-country. Ice over Donner, construction outside Amarillo, a bull hauler broken down on my shoulder at two in the morning. I've hauled organs in coolers and a church bell and once, God help me, four hundred garden gnomes. Whatever you put on my truck arrives intact."

I held her eyes while I said it, because the question wasn't about cargo and we both knew that too. Something shifted in her face, not the smirk, something under the smirk, like a tide moving.

"Four hundred gnomes," she said.

"Two eighty. It felt like four hundred."

"Meet my eyes again and say the first part."

"I can handle anything."

"Yes," she said. "I believe you can. That's what worries me about you, a little. Men who can handle anything get bored, and bored men do stupid things at eighty miles an hour."

"I've been bored," I said. "It didn't take."

"Good." She took off the glasses entirely and hung them in her hair. "Now show me your hands!"

I put them out. She took them in both of hers, and I want to be fair to her here, she had a legitimate reason, she'd said she checks a man's hands the way a mechanic checks a truck, and her reasoning was that hands tell you what a man actually does versus what he says he does. The reasoning was sound. The execution took a while.

She turned my right hand over and ran her thumb down the callus at the base of my fingers. She did the left the same way.