Truck Stop Minuet

The dock at the Sacramento convention center is not built for a seventy-three footer, but I've backed into worse. Five years of hauling for this same gig, you get to know the angles. I swung the Pete in at six in the morning with the fog still sitting low, rode the brakes until the trailer kissed the bumper stop, and climbed down into that gray morning air feeling older than my sixty-eight years.

She was already there. Rosalind Myers, forty-six years old, standing under the dock light with a clipboard in one hand and a thermos in the other, wearing that canvas apron she always wears when she's working the floor. Her hair had gone more gray since the first year I hauled for her, and the fog behind her made a kind of halo around it, which I'm sure she didn't plan.

"Mr. Ayers," she said, like she always does.

"Miss Myers," I said back, like I always do. We've been doing this dance long enough we could record it and sell it.

She handed me a cup from her thermos without asking. Black, no sugar, because she remembered that from year one. I took it and blew on it while she looked over her clipboard.

"Everything alive?" she asked.

"Cactus is cactus. It doesn't complain much. The orchids are sulking, but they sulk the whole trip, so it's nothing new."

"Good. They're the centerpiece this year. Front atrium." She made a tick on her clipboard and didn't look up. "You want to unload first or do paperwork first?"

"Paperwork. My back votes for paperwork."

That got a small laugh out of her, which I counted as a win. We've got a system, her and me. She signs, I sign, she hands me a check or the office cuts it direct, and we stand around for ten minutes talking about nothing in particular before I drive off. That's been the whole arrangement for five years. Ten minutes a year, plus the phone calls when a crate shifts.

Except this year the paperwork didn't go the way it always goes.

She got through two signatures and then stopped, pen hovering, and did that thing where she presses her lips together before she has to say something she doesn't want to say. I've watched her do it to vendors at the expo. It never means good news for whoever's on the other side of the clipboard.

"Garth," she said. First time she's used my first name at the dock, I think. "How flexible is your week?"

"Why."

"Because Charlie, our logistics coordinator, the one who handles return loads, he double-booked your outbound. You're not on the schedule until Saturday."

I set my coffee down on the dock edge, careful, because throwing it was the other option. "Saturday. Today's Thursday."

"Today is Thursday," she agreed.

"So I'm sitting on a load of plants for two days in a loading bay."

"No," she said, and here she looked up from the clipboard at last. "No, you're not. There's a hospitality trailer. It's mine, technically, the staging unit I use during setup week. It's got a cot in the back, a little fridge, a heater that works about eighty percent of the time. You'd have it to yourself."

I didn't say anything right away. Forty years of driving solo teaches you to be suspicious of anything that sounds free.

"That's a lot of offer for a double-booking that wasn't your fault," I said.

"It was sort of my fault. I approved the return schedule and didn't catch the conflict. Charlie is new. I'm not." She wrote something on the clipboard, an admission of guilt to be documented, probably. "Anyway, you can't sleep in the cab for two nights, and the motels near the convention center are three hundred a night because of the expo. I know because I'm paying for them for half the vendors."

"There's that," I said.

The fog was burning off slow. Out past the lot I could hear a forkloader beeping its way backward somewhere, and the smell of diesel mixed with whatever the greenhouse crates were breathing out through their vents. She stepped closer and lowered her voice like the forkloader might care about our business.

"There's a shower in the trailer too. Small. I'll warn you now, it's temperamental."

"Everything about this setup is temperamental, from what I hear."

"The heater and the shower are temperamental. The cot is honest. It's just bad."

"I've slept on worse," I said, and that was true. I've slept on worse this month.

She smiled then, the real one, not the clipboard one. I don't see it often, maybe twice a year, and each time I catch myself studying it longer than a man my age should study anything. "So it's settled. I'll walk you over after we finish signing. You can park your tractor in the overflow row and keep the trailer hooked if you want, but honestly the bay's secure, security is decent here."

"Keep it hooked. Habit."

"Fair enough."

We finished the paperwork standing right there on the dock, her signing, me signing, the fog lifting off her shoulders a little at a time. I kept thinking about how she remembered my coffee. Five years, one cup a year, and she remembered. Then I told myself to quit it. She remembers everyone's coffee. That's her job, remembering what people need before they ask.

Except she handed me a second cup before we walked to the trailer, and she didn't hand cups to the two dockworkers who came out to start unloading. Make of that what you want. I made a little of it, but I'm a cautious man with that kind of arithmetic.

The hospitality trailer was parked at the far end of the lot, a silver box about the size of a decent horse trailer, with a ramp and a folding sign that said STAGING. She unlatched the door and swung it open and stood back to let me look in first, which struck me as polite in a way that had nothing to do with hospitality.

It was cramped and clean. Cot at the back with a sleeping bag rolled at the foot of it, a camp table with a hot plate, a little dorm fridge humming to itself, a stack of plastic bins labeled in her handwriting. The whole thing smelled like potting soil and coffee, which is a better smell than any motel I've paid three hundred dollars for.

"See? Livable," she said from the doorway.

"Livable," I agreed. "Better than livable. There's a lamp."

"There's two lamps. Don't get greedy."

I set my duffel down on the cot and bounced once on it to test the springs. She was right, it was honest. It was bad. I've slept on worse, but not by much.

"Rosalind," I said, and she raised her eyebrows, because now I was using her first name too, and we both knew what that little exchange was worth. "Thanks. Really."

"You've hauled my orchids five years without losing a single one. This is the least I can do." She hesitated in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and for a second I thought she was going to say something else. Then the forkloader beeped past again and the second passed. "I'll be in the atrium all day if you need anything. Come find me at lunch. I'll buy you a real breakfast, not trailer food."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't," she said, and went down the ramp before I could answer.

I sat on the bad cot and drank her coffee and looked at the two lamps and thought about two days.

I slept a couple hours, which is more than I figured I would. The cot did exactly what she promised, which is fold me up like I was a lawn chair, but the trailer was quiet and the heater ran about as well as advertised, and I woke up at eight-thirty feeling like a man instead of a folded tarp.

I wandered back to the dock around twelve-thirty. The fog was gone and the sun was doing its Sacramento thing, and the whole staging area smelled like wet gravel and cut flowers. She was standing at a folding table with her canvas apron on and a clipboard in hand, checking crates off against a list, and she pointed her chin at a plate when she saw me.

"Bagels," she said. "Convention food. I stole them from the volunteers' table and I'm not ashamed."

"Warm bagels. That's the trouble with these things, they keep everything under heat lamps until it surrenders."

"Eat it anyway. I bought you breakfast, technically."

"I thought you said real breakfast."

"This is realer than your cab, Mr. Ayers. Don't tell me you had a proper meal in that Pete this morning."

"Scrambled eggs. Made on the little stove. I do all right."

She laughed at that, the short one, and shook her head. "Trucker cuisine. One pan, one fork, one man's dignity."

"You joke, but I've made some decent chili in that cab. Won an argument about it at a truck stop in Idaho once."

"An argument about chili?"

"About whether it counts as cooking if the burner is meant for coffee. I won."

I ate the surrendered bagel and it was honestly not bad, and she went back down her list while I ate. Then she stopped at one crate, marked with a red tag, and waved me over.

"Come here. I want to show you this before it goes in the exhibit hall."

It was a long crate, breathing holes cut in the sides, and inside was a plant in a big clay pot, all tangled arms and thorns and nothing much to look at.

"That's the night-blooming cereus," she said. "Centers the whole display. It blooms once a year, one night only, after dark. Fifteen years I've waited to get one to the show in bloom."

"It looks like a heap of trouble."

"It is a heap of trouble. Hold this a second." She reached in past me to steady the pot, and her hand came down on mine on the crate rim, and neither of us moved it. Her hand was warm from the coffee cup. I could smell the potting soil and, under it, whatever she wore that I'd been trying not to notice for five years.

I didn't say anything. She didn't either. The forkloader beeped somewhere far off and it might as well have been on another planet. She was looking at the plant, then she was looking at me, and the pause stretched out long enough that we both knew exactly what it was.

"Well," she said, and stepped back, and wrote something on her clipboard that probably didn't need writing. "It blooms Friday night. If you're still here."

"I'm here till Saturday."

"Good," she said, and that was all, and she went off toward the atrium with her apron flapping.

I went back to the trailer and sat down and thought about that a while. A cautious man with that kind of arithmetic, I told myself, but the arithmetic was getting louder.

The rest of the day she came and went. I caught glimpses of her through the dock door, apron on, moving between panels and vendors like a woman putting out fires nobody could see. Around six she came down the ramp looking like the day had chewed her up some. She pulled off her boots, both of them, right there by the door, and stepped out of them like they'd personally offended her.

"Those boots have been on my feet fourteen hours," she said. "I want it noted that I stayed vertical the whole time."

"Noted. Sit down before you fall down."

She sat cross-legged on the cot across from me, or rather she took the cot and I gave up the camp stool, and she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

"How do you do it?" she asked. "Forty years alone out there. Doesn't it get to you? The loneliness?"

I thought about it honest. "Some roads get to you more than others. There's a stretch of 50 in Nevada, they call it the loneliest highway in America. Ninety miles between gas stations. I drove it at night once, years back, and I swear I didn't pass another vehicle for an hour. Just me and the headlights and the dark coming off the mountains."

"That sounds terrible."

"It's not terrible. It's quiet. There's a difference. You can hear yourself think out there, and mostly what you think is that you'd rather have somebody in the passenger seat. But you get used to not having, is the thing. That's the dangerous part. You get so used to it you stop noticing."

She was quiet a minute, looking at her bare feet on the trailer floor.

"I stopped noticing for about fifteen years," she said. "Work, plants, the show. It's a good life, but I chose it, you understand? Nobody chose it for me. And some nights I wonder if I chose it right."