Josh handed out the settlement envelopes at noon on a rain day, standing in the open bay door of the shop with every driver he had around him, and he saved mine for last.
It had rained an inch and a quarter overnight. In wheat harvest that means nobody cuts until the stubble dries, so the trucks sat along the fence with their tarps rolled shut.
“Shannon,” Josh said, and he held the envelope out at arm’s length, like something he had fished out of the floor drain. “You’ll want to look at the bottom line before you go cashing it.”
I opened it right there. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of watching me walk off to read it alone, so I read it in the bay door with the rain dripping off the gutter.
The sheet listed my loads for the week at sixty dollars apiece. Then it had a line I had already seen twice that month, a line that had never existed in nine years of driving for that outfit.
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“Josh,” I said. “I haven’t driven eleven hundred miles empty. I haven’t driven eleven hundred miles total this week.”
“Fuel isn’t free,” he said. He said it to the room, not to me.
“Some people think a truck runs on air. Some people think if they write a load on a sheet, I’ll pay it whether it crossed a scale or not.”
Nobody laughed. That was almost worse. Mike Regier looked down into his coffee cup, and the two young drivers by the parts counter got very interested in a box of filters.
“Every load I hauled crossed Frank’s scale,” I said. I kept my voice down. My mother always said the one who gets loud first is the one everybody remembers being wrong.
“Then you won’t mind getting docked for the miles in between,” Josh said, and he went into his office and shut the door.
I folded the sheet and put it in my back pocket. Then I walked out through the rain to the car, where my son was waiting in the passenger seat with his feet up on the dash.
I did not cry, because Caden was fifteen and watching.
“What’d Dad want?” he asked.
“To give me my check,” I said, which was true, and I started the car.
That was the third settlement sheet of harvest. By the end of June that line would add up to 3,100 miles and $6,200.
Josh and I started that trucking outfit fourteen years ago with one truck.
It was a used red tractor and a hopper bottom trailer that leaked out of the back gate unless you wired it shut. I drove it. Josh fixed it.
I learned to back a trailer up to a dump pit in a crosswind before I learned to make a decent pie crust.
We grew it to six trucks. Josh did the dispatching, the books and most of the wrenching, and he was good at it.
He could hear a bad wheel bearing from across the yard. I want to say that plainly, because it is true.
We were not good at being married. Nobody cheated and nobody hit anybody. We just turned into two people who could run a business together and could not run a supper table.