Signed at the Back Door
At 4:46, Eddie put yesterday's delivery receipts inside a clean envelope and tucked it behind the visor. His daughter had drawn a small blue house on the envelope. She thought he kept important things there. He did.
The truck was loaded before daylight: flour for a bakery in the Bronx, canned goods for two Brooklyn stores, cleaning supplies for a place whose rear entrance never matched its address. Eddie checked the straps and counted the pallets himself. The dispatcher wanted him gone. Eddie wanted to come back with the same number of unsecured loads he was leaving with: none. He settled his coffee cup into the holder's worn foam lining and eased out between two vans.
The first bakery had no one at the loading door. He called, waited, called again. Across the street, men setting up a fruit stand watched the sunrise arrive between buildings. The baker finally appeared carrying a sleeping child against his shoulder. Eddie unloaded quietly. The man signed with his free hand, apologized, and offered a warm roll. Eddie wrapped it in a receipt he did not need. There were eleven stops left and the bridge traffic was already thickening.
By nine he had carried more weight outside the truck than he had shifted with its engine. An alley too narrow for the lift gate. A broken basement elevator. A store owner who inspected every carton while Eddie's parking clock ran down. On the radio, somebody described the city as a machine. Eddie knew exactly which parts would stop if the people with bad backs went home.
At the seventh stop a clerk refused to sign. The manager had gone to the bank, the handheld scanner had no connection, and a carton was dented along one corner. Eddie opened it with the clerk watching. Nothing inside was damaged. Still, no signature. Without one, the stop could become an argument about whether he had worked at all.
He called dispatch. Dispatch suggested leaving the load and photographing the door. Eddie looked at the hand truck, the clerk, the narrow strip of morning disappearing behind the neighboring roof. Then he called the store owner directly. They counted the goods together over the phone. The clerk wrote his name on a carbon form Eddie carried for exactly this failure. It took nineteen minutes. He would have to explain all nineteen later.
The weather turned on the waterfront. Water gathered across a service road while three trucks argued with one available lane. Eddie stopped short of it and took the longer route. Dispatch was unimpressed. His knees were unimpressed too. He thought about the baker's child, warm against a working shoulder, and took the roll out of its wrapping. It had gone flat. He ate it anyway.
At the final store, the owner asked whether he could leave a pallet inside rather than on the pavement. She could not manage it alone. Eddie looked at the time, then rolled it through. She signed before he asked. For a moment they rested on opposite sides of the empty hand truck, saying nothing. Outside, someone laid on a horn for a person neither of them could see.
He returned with every delivery accounted for. At home his daughter asked whether the blue house had helped. He told her it had kept the important things together. After supper he hung his work shirt over a chair, set an alarm, and checked the next day's route. There was a crossing he wanted to make before the city woke.
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