SIXTEEN

“What are you doing here?” asked Chief.

He was folding up his road map of California. The map was so old it was separating at the folds, and he pinched it together with a red plastic paper clip. Matt Espinosa, one of the assistant shipping clerks from inside the plant, was strapping on a back brace over by the loading dock, having trouble getting the worn Velcro to grip. It was a hazy morning, sky the color of milk.

I made a show of testing knots, the yellow nylon rope making a satisfying squeak with each tug.

“You don’t have to work today,” said Chief, refusing to look at me, like I wouldn’t be officially there unless he acknowledged my presence.

It was Tuesday, after one day off from work, a day spent reading magazines and eating jello salads in the hospital cafeteria.

I opened the passenger door to the cab and climbed in. I was instantly surrounded by the smell of the old truck and the protective quiet. Matt hesitated and made a shrug: what am I supposed to do?

“A delivery schedule doesn’t mean very much. At a time like this.” This was not like Chief at all, grim-faced, terse little sentences. “Espinosa said he’d help me out.”

“Tell Matt to go back to the shrink-wrap department.”

There was nothing I could do to speed my dad’s recovery, nothing I could do to help my mom and Sofia march up and down the waiting room.

Chief shrugged. Matt gave me a wave, a show of being cheerful, both of them letting me know that whatever I wanted was okay.

Chief started the engine and drove the way he never did, about three miles an hour, pea gravel crackling under the tires. He eased the truck along so slowly it nearly stalled, so he tucked the gear back into neutral, as though actually picking up some speed might disturb me.

Even on the freeway he was driving cautiously enough to get a ticket for going too slowly. He had things to say, and he didn’t know how to begin. He had even forgotten to cover up his dog-sex tattoo, wearing a T-shirt that exposed the profiles of two hound dogs mating, fading blue on his upper arm. I had thought of my dad’s condition as something that had happened to me and my family, not guessing that other people would feel connected.

We drove east, out of the cool basin of the Bay Area, into increasing heat. We passed hills cut in half, farms beside the freeway, houses, mops leaning on front porches, and barns, doors open, dark interiors. The hills died out, flat land stretching in all directions. Near Stockton we left the freeway and rolled down a two-lane road, orchard on one side, empty nothing on the other, pasture, weeds.

“If you get hungry, Harriet made me an extra,” Chief said.

I felt the brown bag between us, rolled up tight, crammed with what I called bug-bread sandwiches, wheat-berry bread, bits of wheat like insect abdomens, Chief’s favorite. “What is it today?” I asked. “Bacon and peanut butter?” One of his favorites, one bite and you couldn’t talk for half an hour.

He gave a sharp little laugh: not so lucky. “Cottage cheese and grape jelly,” he said.

A construction site lay exposed in the heat, bare dirt, trucks glittering. I thought this was where we would turn in and find a shady parking place under one of the few trees. We passed it by, although Chief took his foot off the gas pedal to give it a look.

“You can pick up a lot of overtime working a job like that,” said Chief.

Men walked in the air, supported by the yellow skeleton of building, bare wood.

“But there you’d be,” I said.

Chief shifted gears, having trouble with the truck because of the smog device that had been repaired that morning, sucking off some of the engine’s power so its exhaust would run clean.

“It just seems like a wasted life,” I said.

He rolled down the window as far as it would go.

I heard myself keep talking, the Amazing Nuclear Mouth. “You spend most of your time keeping your bills of lading in alphabetical order and snipping your receipts together with that little yellow stapler.”

He made a point of watching a crow abandon a telephone wire and flap over the road. For a long time his driving was a way of responding to me, his eyes shifting from the speedometer to the road to the sky, keeping us right on the speed limit.

The truck lumbered up a gravel road toward a pink stucco house, balconies hanging off every wall, a view east, west, and north of the flat, empty landscape. A man waited for us, so little happening in his life that our arrival was enough to make him stand and watch us for the last half mile, a little figure in the middle of all that heat.

An excavation showed where we were supposed to leave the hot tub, one of the health club models, compact but heavy grade, made to last.

“The Lord has been good to me and my wife,” said the tall man with white hair all over his chest. In a cowboy hat and a pair of tartan plaid shorts he looked like an ad for skin cancer, how to get it. He was already going red, a man probably sixty who needed his mother to tell him to go get a shirt.

“Beautiful out here,” said Chief, the country scenery making him drop the beginning of his sentences. “Big sky, fresh air.”

“Blessed us with five healthy kids and seven grandchildren to date,” said the man, signing one of Chief’s forms.

“They’ll have fun in that hot tub,” said Chief.

“Oh, this is mainly for medical reasons,” said the man as he put his fingers on the line where he had signed his name, feeling the contours of his own handwriting. “Reasons of health,” he elaborated, like maybe we hadn’t understood what he meant. “My hips,” he added.

“I hear nothing but good things from people with hip trouble,” said Chief, accepting his clipboard, examining the form, making sure all the little blank spaces were scribbled in.

“Bone spurs,” said the man.

“Nothing like hot water to ease the body,” said Chief. He had a gift with people, agreeing with them with a smile. “Hot water and enough time to take it easy.”

“Easy does it,” said the man.

I couldn’t stand it when grown men did this, open their mouths and fire inane statements at each other, like a contest, who can say the dumbest things.

I found a pebble in the path and gave it a kick, not able to just stand there and listen to Chief practically promise the man a cure for bone spurs, whatever they were, deteriorating calcium in the man’s limbs.