He helped me stack the chairs

Forty-two chairs is what the Tuesday meeting takes and I put out forty-four, because two guys always come down the steps at ten after and stand by the wall. I'm there at six. I do the pot and then the chairs.

Nobody stays for the other end of it. Eight-fifteen everybody's up the steps and gone and the chairs are still sitting there.

Reuben started coming in April. It's cold in that basement, colder than the lot. He came down in a Carhartt with the sleeves cut off it and sat in the back by the furnace and didn't say a word for three weeks. Fourth week he gave his first name and that was the whole of it. I went two months at a place in Newark before I opened my mouth, so I'm not anybody to be counting.

He runs a wrecker for a guy out on Maple. Nights. So Tuesday he's got the meeting and then he goes straight on shift, and he parks along the side where the grass is all dead, and the first few weeks he left it idling the whole hour. Denny about came out of his skin over it. I don't know why it got to him that bad. He shuts it off now. He's forty-four. Forty-five in December, or he said December, I don't know.

First night he stayed it was because he was waiting on a call that hadn't come in. I had two chairs going and he picked up six off the end of the row like they weren't anything. Six is what fits. Any more than six and it gets away from you at the top and then you're chasing metal across tile at half past eight.

Four years in October. I know the exact number of days and I'm not saying it, because when I do people make the same face as if I told them my weight.

I took money out of my mother's purse for about eleven months and let her go on thinking it was the kid who cut her grass. I had Nora in the car twice when I had no business behind a wheel. When I tell that one at the front of the room I say once.

In April it came a rain and he ran me the forty feet across the lot to my car in the wrecker, and the heat was already up when I got in. I never said anything to him about being cold. I don't tell people that. I don't know, it was just on.

I wear a hoodie down there in June. Nora had her birthday at the Y in July and I sat in a chair in my jeans for the whole two hours and told her the water bothers my ears, and she took that fine. I don't know if she took it fine.

His hands are tore up from the chains. There's a split across the one knuckle that never gets all the way closed and he puts that liquid bandage on it out of the glovebox. The chairs down there are the old kind and half of them have lost the rubber off the feet, so they walk on you when a guy leans back.

Second week of July we were still out there when the lot lights went. There's a timer in the church and it's nine sharp, and it went black and neither one of us moved, and we kept on another twenty minutes standing at the back of his truck. He told me he had a car on the hook out by Cambridge the day they buried his dad and he finished the call. Then he got onto a beagle his dad had that wouldn't eat with anybody in the room. His dad would set the bowl down and walk out and shut the door. I could give you that story back word for word, and it's a dog that's been dead thirty years.

I pick orders at the DC off 70. Three-thirty to midnight, Thursday through Monday, so Tuesday is mine and that's the only reason I've got the meeting at all. The scanner counts your miles for you. Eleven and change most nights, which is a number I could do without having.

Since August I've been moving Tuesday around in my head. Not on paper. If I hold the coffee till after, that's twelve minutes. If I don't start the chairs while he's on the phone with dispatch, that's more.

Two weeks ago the Cavalier wouldn't turn over. He didn't hook it, he just drove me home, twenty-two minutes, the cab smelling like that cardboard pine tree. He came in. He was there about an hour and I'm not saying past that. I don't know how to. Then he went to work.

I was up at five. I stripped the bed and ran the sheets, it was a Wednesday, I do sheets Sunday. I don't know. Then I sat out in the driveway in the car with it running a while, and at seven I drove up to the Duke station for coffee I had a pot of at home.

I've got Nora every other weekend. We do the handoff at the BP in Hebron, twenty-four miles, and I'm in that lot twenty minutes early every single time. I sit there and go through my phone, same three things every time. Trish texts me when they're coming off 70 and I've usually already seen the car. I don't know what else I'd be doing with the twenty minutes.

Rob wrote the agreement. He's Trish's brother and he does his coffee Saturday mornings at Tom's with two men off this church board. The board gave me the key in February. It's on the ring with the car key.

That week I drove up to the Thursday night in Coshocton instead and sat in the back without saying anything. Forty minutes each way. I don't know what I thought that was going to do for me.

Then Tuesday came and I put out forty-four and he came down at three after seven and sat by the furnace. I chaired. Sheet said gratitude. I heard myself say the word and I don't know, I finished the sentence anyway, because the other thing you can do up there is stop in the middle and then everybody's looking.

After, everybody went up and we did the chairs. He goes six at a time. I'm up to four now.

He said the guy on Maple is selling the second truck and he's been thinking about it. I said that sounds all right. I don't know if it does. That's all that got said.

He waits now. He sits there with the wrecker running till my engine turns over, then he pulls out onto Adair. Somebody's been leaving bags by the dumpster back there and the church has a sign up about it now.