Ray — Friday, November 13, 2026
The kid had put his sandwich on the loading dock, and now a puddle was getting it.
Ray could see the dark spreading through the paper. The kid couldn't. He stood with his back to it, trying to persuade the receiver that a number on his phone was the number the receiver needed.
“That's my load number,” the kid said.
“I need your appointment number.”
“That's the one they gave me.”
The receiver pushed her glasses onto her head. Ray knew her a little. She had grandchildren whose pictures appeared on the little heater in her office and no appetite for being shouted at before lunch.
“Danny,” he said to the kid, though he wasn't certain that was his name. “Move your food.”
The kid stared at him.
“Behind you.”
By then the coffee-colored water had reached the bread. The kid snatched it up and unwrapped a wet corner, looked at what was inside, and wrapped it again. It was a small defeat but it seemed to finish something in him. He sat on the edge of the dock.
“Let me see what they sent you,” Ray said.
“My dispatcher isn't answering.”
“Show me the email.”
He didn't take the phone. He had learned not to take a young person's phone, particularly when they were already feeling stupid. They worked through the message together. The number was in an attachment the kid hadn't opened. Ray pointed; the kid read it out; the receiver wrote it down without comment.
“Door six,” she said. “Wait till they wave you in.”
There. A morning could go on.
Ray gave him the unopened package of crackers from his cab. The kid said he wasn't hungry, and Ray said, “Good, because that's not lunch.” He liked the way the kid laughed, from embarrassment into relief. Ray had been on both sides of that laugh. You could do a day's driving perfectly well and still end up pleading in a concrete doorway with a person who needed one number you didn't have.
His own load took longer. The receiver called him into the office to look at a shortage she was writing on the delivery papers.
“That's not right,” he said.
“It's what we've got.”
“They counted it before I left.”
“And we counted it when it arrived.”
She slid the papers across. His first impulse was to write beside her note that he disagreed, get his copy and leave. He had a photograph from loading, but the photograph wouldn't tell them what was behind the wrapping. She turned her screen so he could see the order. Twelve. Twelve was what he remembered too. He had been standing beside the trailer checking the rows when somebody at the other end asked him to move.
It was possible he'd looked up and counted one twice. He disliked how easily the possibility acquired a picture: the last pallet, the interruption, him nodding at a man who couldn't have seen whether the count was right.
“Can I look?”
She took him to the receiving area. The warehouse had the warm cardboard smell of a place where nothing ever quite dried. He waited clear of the workers' route. He liked watching a good crew, the unhurried way a man could turn, pick something up and be gone while someone else was still explaining where to put it. There were days when this was the part of the job he minded leaving, not the driving. Then his knees began to ache from standing still and he remembered why he was happy to spend the next week home.
“Those are yours,” the receiver said.
Eleven upright stacks. He counted them again without moving his lips. She watched, arms folded.
“Was there anything set aside?”
“No.”
A worker came back and asked which load they were arguing about. The receiver told him they weren't arguing. He pointed past a row of empty pallets to a lower stack with a different-looking cover.
“That was on it too.”
“That's not the same thing,” she said.
Ray went close enough to read the label. Same delivery, smaller cartons. He could remember it now, the man who had asked him to move had been bringing that one. It had been sitting ready when Ray looked back. He had counted it once. Correctly.
The receiver read it beside him. Neither of them spoke. The worker waited for a decision, then took it away to join the others.
Back in the office she crossed out the shortage. She offered to print a clean copy.
“That's fine,” he said.
“It looks a mess.”
“So do I. Nobody's returning me.”
She smiled at that and gave him the paper. He slid it into his folder with the count right, then took it out to check the signature. All there. He had spent an hour seeing a mistake he hadn't made, and now the hour was done. Outside, the newer driver was backing slowly toward door six. Ray stood until he was in straight. The kid got out and looked at the space on both sides, pleased with himself. Ray left him to it.
His own trailer was empty just before one. He put the signed papers away, checked what he always checked and called Nessa before she called him.
“You're a beautiful man,” she said.
“Don't start.”
“I have one little thing.”
“No.”
“You don't know what it is.”
“I know whose little thing it is.”
She wanted him to collect an empty trailer. It would put him home late, which was not the end of the world, but if he did it she would remember Friday as the day he had been available. He had put this time off in months ago. Ruth had plans. He had said yes to enough things while Ruth waited beside a cold supper to hear how generous he was.
“Ask somebody who's working,” he said.
“All right.” Nessa's voice changed, businesslike now. “I asked.”
He wanted to give her something, once the asking stopped. He told her about the new driver's appointment problem, so she could warn the next one. She thanked him, sincerely enough to make him feel mean about the trailer.
The kid came across while Ray was putting his coat on. Apparently his name was Dan after all. He held up the crackers.
“Appreciate it. I told that lady I found the yard dad.”
“Somebody has to keep you alive.”
“My wife says the same thing.”
Dan grinned and went back. A perfectly ordinary boy. Not a boy, married, thirty perhaps, but they looked like boys to Ray now. Ray could see his sandwich wrapper poking out of a trash can, the clean white part with its stupid red lettering. Yard dad. It would have cost Dan nothing to say the man who helped me.
He shut the cab door harder than it needed.
He drove out past a row of wet loading bays, hearing yard dad in the kid's easy voice. At the gate Dan raised a hand, and Ray raised his. He hoped the fellow got home before the weekend traffic.
Later, driving his own pickup toward the house, he passed a woman waiting beside a bus shelter. She wore a mustard-colored coat, cheap bright material that held the shape of its sleeves even when her arms were hanging down. Paula Keene had worn a coat like that. Not the same coat; hers had buttons, and he had never liked them, large and pale as little teeth.
He remembered being cold in his shirtsleeves while Paula's coat lay across the passenger seat. Three years, and the pale buttons were still there when he looked, making a perfectly good coat seem cheap. She had been forty-seven. She had told him herself.
Ray — September 14, 2023
Paula was trying to get the paper off a small cake without losing the icing. She had bought it with her coffee, then regretted choosing the one that came in a little fluted case. The paper clung to it. She ate a piece of icing from her thumb and offered Ray the other half before she had freed it.
“You don't have to say it's good. I haven't tried it.”
“That's generous.”
“I know.”
She laughed with her mouth closed, still eating the icing. They were in the pickup, stopped after the food, with her coat folded on the seat between them. A warm afternoon had turned chilly while they'd been talking. Ray had taken off his jacket earlier and didn't want to put it on now. She would get the idea he was ready to go.
“I don't usually eat cake in a car,” she said.
“Special occasion?”
“I'm having my birthday out of the house. A little late, but I'm having it.”
“Twenty-one?”
“Forty-seven. Don't do the thing where you say you wouldn't have guessed.”
“I wasn't going to.”
“Good. I'd have had to believe you.”
She got the cake out in two untidy pieces and offered him the larger one. He took it. It tasted mostly of sugar and the paper it had been baked in. He said it was good. She gave him a napkin and said she was getting herself to a movie after this. She had wanted a whole afternoon when nobody expected her back because she happened to be the first person finished with her own things.
“What movie?”
She named one he hadn't seen. She didn't require him to know it. She told him about a film she had gone to the year before, a long thing with a woman walking from one room to another while nothing happened. She had waited an hour for the story to begin, then realized the woman was going to keep walking around until everyone got old. Ray laughed. Paula was pleased and began remembering bits she hadn't thought of until she had somebody to tell.
“She'd open a drawer. You'd think, here we go.”
“Gun.”
“No. Spoons.”
“Could hit him with a spoon.”
“There wasn't a him. He'd gone. Sensible man.”
They laughed together. She was not talking about anyone he had to listen to carefully, no children or bills or men whose conduct he would be invited to judge. It was a bad film. He could enjoy agreeing that it was bad without having seen it. When she asked whether he'd been to a movie lately, he said he usually watched things at home. She asked if he fell asleep, and he said only through the ones Ruth chose. It was not true, not entirely, but it made Paula laugh again.
“Well, there you are. She gets to see what she wants and you get a nap. That's one problem taken care of.”
She brushed a crumb from her coat. Ray could have kept sitting there. The talk had opened a stretch of afternoon he hadn't known he wanted. He had no task in it. She didn't know that he could work out a loading problem while a dispatcher was still looking for the right paperwork, didn't know what people asked him to do or what he could remember for them. She wanted him to laugh at the film, and he did. He had another story, one about a man he'd worked with whose television was too large for his room. By the time he had finished it she was laughing so hard that the cake slid from the paper onto her lap.
“That's your fault,” she said, picking it up.
“I didn't buy it.”
“No, you just encouraged it.”
She ate the fallen bit. He liked her for that too. He wanted to say she was all right, that not everybody could have a laugh these days, but it would change the conversation into something she might have to agree with. He went back to the man and the television. Paula had a better end to the story and supplied it, making him laugh at his own friend.
Then she checked the time.
“I ought to get going.”
He looked at the little clock. “You've got a while.”
“I want to get a seat. I'm fussy.”
“About seats?”
“About people eating near my head.”
“You're eating near mine.”
“That's different. I'm good company.”
She gathered the paper and the empty cup. He could have let her put on her coat, leave him the half minute it took to rearrange the seat, and go on with the day she'd chosen. He saw the whole small movement before she made it. He knew where he would drive next if he let it happen. It would be a perfectly ordinary afternoon until he got home, nothing wrong with it, and this part would be over.
“Tell me the end,” he said.
“Of what?”
“The woman and the spoons.”
“I didn't stay.”
“You didn't say that.”
“I got up and went. It's allowed.”
She said it lightly, offering him the joke. He held it a second too long. Paula waited, still holding the trash, then laughed a little herself and put it in the bag by her feet. He asked where she was going after the movie. She answered, and he asked something about the place. She knew it better than he expected. There was a story about the time she'd gone there in the wrong shoes, and another name, someone who'd been with her. He had kept her. It had required so little that he was almost angry with her for having made him feel the end was settled.
She looked at the clock again.
“I really have to go now, Ray.”
He liked his name in her voice. He had heard it before, when she'd wanted to be sure what to call him. This was different. She was making the small ending polite, so he would help her do it.
“There's something I wanted to show you.”
“Not today.”
“It won't take long.”
“I've got this.” She moved her hand toward the clock, then stopped. “It's my afternoon. I don't want to be rushing when I get there.”
She was still smiling a little. The smile belonged to the conversation they'd been having; it had taken longer to leave her face than the pleasure had taken to leave his. He could say all right. He could be the man who had eaten a ridiculous cake with a woman on her birthday outing, someone she might mention later when she told the movie story again. She might remember his friend and the television. He wanted her to remember him, not the friend.
He said they would go in a minute. Then, when she tried to end the minute, he did not let her leave.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
She had her coat half lifted from the seat. He still had one end. A button pressed against the side of his finger.
“We were talking,” he said.
“We can talk another time.”
“You don't mean that.”
“Why wouldn't I mean it?”
He watched her working out how to answer a question she hadn't expected. He wanted her to say of course they would, to make another small piece of time his. But then she would still go today. He could hear the loose promise before she made it and had already found it insufficient.
“Can I have my coat?” she asked.
He let go of it. She settled it around herself, smiling a little again, making the moment finish without asking him to explain. Then she tried to leave and he stopped her.
“Ray.”
“There's no need to get upset.”
“I'm not upset. I want to go.”
She put the empty cup into the bag and tucked it upright, still doing the little things that might get them back to ordinary company. He watched her take that care. She would have to stop taking it soon and tell him what he was doing. For these seconds he could have the way her attention had fastened on him, her voice waiting for an answer, the movie forgotten by both of them.
“I can get there myself,” she said. “It's not far. I can walk.”
“I know.”
“Then I'll walk. It's all right.”
He could let her. The permission was still there, a thing he could give without explaining why it had been withheld. His hand hurt where the pale button had pressed. She was looking at his face, and he wanted her to know it depended on him, not the time she had chosen on a little clock. He said no.
“Please,” she said, after a while. “I don't know what you want me to say.”
He wanted the voice she'd used about the cake. It was gone now. He blamed her for its going while he listened to what had replaced it.
She grew frightened. She said his name more often, trying to reach the person who had laughed about the film. He hated hearing it used that way. He hadn't wanted fear. Now that he had it he wanted her to know that what happened next was his to choose.
He killed her. He had time to know he was choosing it, time in which she was still alive and he could leave her alive. He wanted an end to her asking, wanted the final thing to be his instead of the little arrangement she had made for her afternoon. The pleasure in it was brief and complete. It was gone when there was no longer anyone to know he had won.
He remained, with the woman he had killed and the coat he'd disliked while she was wearing it. The pale buttons lay in a row. He was cold now. He wanted his jacket and resented having to look for it. The coffee cup had tipped onto its side. She had put the lid back on before setting it down so it would not spill.
Ray — Friday, November 13, 2026
The woman at the bus shelter had gone when he passed it again. He'd stopped to get something to drink, had sat in the parked pickup until he could finish it, and was driving home now. Paula had not gone to the movie. He had known that for three years. He had wanted to ask her what happened after the woman opened the drawer, and she had told him already. She'd got up and left.
At home Ruth had left the porch light on, although it was only midafternoon. She forgot it more often now. He parked and turned it off as he went inside.
“You in?” she called.
“No. Burglar.”
“Take the chicken out, then.”
He could hear her laughing upstairs. He took the chicken out of the freezer and stood it in a bowl in the refrigerator, moved the eggs so she would have room for whatever else she wanted. A week at home. He shut the refrigerator gently so he could hear what she was saying.