It's two nights a month

You want to know what time I get there. Nobody asks that. They always ask the other thing.

I'm out of a terminal in Southaven. Same lane eight years. Fifty-five up to Sikeston, pick up 57 there, 57 to Effingham, then 70 east into Indiana to a distribution center in Plainfield that wants me in a door at six in the morning.

You get eleven hours of driving inside a fourteen hour window and then you're done, whether you're tired or not. The truck writes it down and sends it to somebody in an office. So where you sleep isn't something you pick. It gets decided for you about ninety minutes out, and if you've been doing this any amount of time you already know which lot.

Effingham is where 70 and 57 cross. Everybody stops there. The lot's full by five thirty and after that men are sitting on the ramp with their flashers on, which you're not supposed to do and which everybody does. There's a light out on the far side they haven't fixed in two years and the asphalt's sunk over there and holds water when it rains. Reserved parking is eighteen dollars a night now. It was twelve when I started. I don't pay it. I get there early enough that I don't have to.

There's a man parks in the same row I do. Runs reefer for an outfit out of Bowling Green. Ray.

First time was February of eighteen. My APU quit and it was nine degrees and I wasn't going to sit there burning my own fuel all night. He knocked and said come sit in mine, it's warm. I stayed till around two. We watched most of a Grizzlies game on his phone leaned against the windshield and the picture kept flipping sideways and he kept turning it back. That's all the first time was.

Now it's the eighth and the twenty-fourth, near enough. My lane doesn't change. Coming back south the clock falls different and I shut down in Sikeston, so it's the one night going up. Twice a month.

Eight years is twenty-four nights a year if nothing goes wrong, and something always goes wrong. Ice in January. My mother's hip in twenty-two, which was three weeks I wasn't anywhere at all. So it comes to something under two hundred nights across the whole of it.

In twenty-three my A1C came back at 9.4. There's a clinic on Getwell and they gave me a pamphlet and a number to call. I was down sixty pounds by that October. Quit the Dew. Started walking the lot at night instead of laying in the bunk with the TV going. Ray said something about my belt the second week of August. Denise said something three weeks after that.

Second Sunday I'm on the usher board. Left door, white gloves. I've done it since my father passed. I've come straight off the road to it more than once, and the gloves live in the door pocket of the truck so I'm not hunting for them.

We talk about tires. We talk about what the brokers are paying out of Laredo, and he has opinions about Prime and I let him have them. He's got a daughter in Clarksville. That's the whole of what I know about his people and he knows about that much about mine. Eight years and we've never once walked into the building and eaten together. It isn't a rule. It's never come up.

March, Robert calls me about a dedicated run. Memphis to Little Rock and back twice, home every night by seven. Once you work out what you lose in per diem it's about nine thousand more a year. I was standing at the fuel island in Sikeston when he called and I told him no before he finished talking.

The truck's a twenty-one Cascadia on a lease purchase. Nineteen hundred and change a month, sixteen payments left. Jaylin turns seventeen in April and I've looked up what insurance runs on a boy that age in Shelby County and I'm not going to say the number out loud. The little one's eleven and plays clarinet and plays it loud. So nine thousand isn't nothing to me. I could tell you what nine thousand is to the dollar.

I told Denise the hours were bad. That's true. Dedicated has you rolling at four in the morning with tight windows and no cushion in it if anything sets you back. She said okay. She had her sister on the other line about the house in Whitehaven, and she said okay, and that was it.

She does payroll for a dental group in Cordova and she does our taxes at the kitchen table in February. Laptop and a legal pad. She prints my settlement statements out of the portal and stacks them by month, then writes last year's total at the top of the page and this year's underneath it. Robert's nine thousand is the space between those two numbers. She'll have it finished in one Saturday, she always does, and she'll ask me about the hours. I don't know what I'm telling her yet.

Some nights we sit in his truck and talk about nothing and I'm back in my bunk by eleven. Some nights I'm not.

I call Denise at six forty every morning I'm out. Have since the kids were small. From the lot, while the truck's building air. That morning sounds like every other morning. She puts me on speaker and does her hair and I hear the dryer going the whole call.

Robert asked me again in August and I told him the same thing and he said alright Marcus. He'll ask once more in the spring, and then he'll stop asking.

Ray texts me the night before. Just a number. Row and space, nothing else on it. Last time it was 7-11 and neither one of us said anything about it.