Hesitantly, I passed her the license I’d been given last night. I presumed Sarah wouldn’t have sent me somewhere where their IDs would get me in trouble, but I wasn’t sure.
Trysta hummed a bouncy tune as she worked, apparently without much difficulty, to pull up a fictitious record of my driving history.
“There you are!” she announced brightly. “Looks like a clean record; that’s good.” She printed off a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Take that in with you.” She checked her switchboard board. “Bill is free; head right on in.”
She gestured to one of four plain white doors leading off from the reception area. I followed her instructions and went in to meet Bill.
He turned out to be a crusty old fellow dressed in jeans and a faded blue dress shirt. I felt like he looked right through me as he looked me up and down, and I regretted the fact that clean jeans and a nice sweater were the best clothes I had.
“Hmph,” he grunted at the sight of me, and took the driver’s abstract. He glanced at the sheet of paper and tossed it on his desk. “Come on,” he barked, walking past me.
“Where?” I asked.
“I don’t care if you talk pretty, do I?” he asked. “I care if you drive safe. So, come on.”
I followed him out to the delivery trucks, where he got in the passenger seat and gestured me into the driver’s seat. With a deep breath, I obeyed.
BILL’S IDEA OF A “TEST DRIVE” turned out to be “I’ll show you how the GPS works, give you an obscure address, and let you go find it.” The GPS was easily five years newer than the truck it was mounted on, a quiet and accurate little piece of technology.
I found his first address quickly, so he gave me another one. I found that one. I handled one street covered in ice, at least three idiots I could swear were trying to kill us, and navigated to three addresses, each easily six or seven miles apart, before returning to the dispatch yard.
Bill pointed me to the stall we’d pulled out of when we left, and I neatly parked the van. I was a little impressed with myself until the old trucker grunted, “I’ve seen better.”
“Oh,” I responded, crestfallen.
“Check with Trysta for your details and paycheck setup,” he continued.
“I got the job?” I asked, caught off guard by the sudden swing in tone.
“Yup,” he answered gruffly. “Now go see Trysta.”
The redhead happily rifled through my various identification.
“Is this your current address?” she asked, glancing over the driver’s license and typing at blurring speed as she read everything.
“No, I don’t have a permanent address here yet; I just moved into town,” I explained.
“Not a problem; just let us know where you settle in when you have an address, if you could.”
“Of course,” I promised. She continued on her way down the form and then ran two copies off on her printer.
“Now, you get paid a week in arrears,” she explained quickly. “Start tomorrow, you’ll get paid for half of this week next Friday. Works?”
“Works,” I agreed, quickly skimming the HR boilerplate and signing both copies of the form. “When do I start?”
“Six AM tomorrow.” The girl—she was a year or so younger than me, I thought—sounded disgustingly cheerful at the thought. “We all start then,” she added.
I groaned but nodded acquiescence.
3
SIX AM THE NEXT MORNING, I reported to work and was promptly tossed into a van with Jake, the oldest driver at Direct Courier, to learn the ropes. He was on the edge of elderly, only a few years from retirement, with a thick accent and from somewhere in Eastern Canada I didn’t catch the name of.
The two days I spent with Jake passed in an exhausting blur, but on the Friday of my first week in this frigid city, he pronounced me ready to go out on my own at noon. He helped me load up the packages Trysta gave us and sent me off on my merry way.
I delivered everything on time, got the necessary signatures, and returned to the office to Bill presenting me with a beer and a clap on the shoulder—I was now officially part of the team.
The rest of the tiny office gathered around and everyone hoisted a “the week is over” beer—Trysta, Bill, myself, Jake and the other two drivers. It wasn’t much of a courier company, all told. But they’d offered me a job and a place, and I wasn’t going to turn that down.
My weekend blazed past in a blur of cheap beer at the Manor and shitty motel TV—it wasn’t like I had much else to do! My first week in the city had passed far better than I was expecting. I spoke to the motel manager and parted with over a third of my remaining cash to pay my room up to the end of the week and my paycheck.
Looking over the paltry remaining funds in my wallet, I budgeted out food for the four days between my succor expiring and my first paycheck. It just, barely, covered me going out and buying a knee-length heavy gray winter jacket.
With that, and the new job, I managed to settle into a routine by Tuesday—get up at oh-Powers-o’clock, get out of the motel and down to work by bus, scrape in the door for six, and be out by six fifteen in the van. The job was pretty simple, pretty easy to be good at. Trysta greeted me with bright smiles each time I came back, and when Friday rolled around, there was Bill with the beer again, and this time, paychecks all around.
“Hey, Jason,” my new boss interrupted me as I was leaving. “You have a place yet?”
“I’m still living at the motel,” I admitted. “Need to save up for rent.”
“There’s a place near here,” Bill told me. “My sister owns it, wants a handy man to rent. Can front you the deposit and you pay me back over the next coupla months. Sound decent?”
I blinked at him. Bill hadn’t been any less gruff or terse with me since he hired me. I hadn’t expected this. I guess the generosity fit with the man; it was just in contrast to his usual demeanor.
“Can I take a look at the place first?”
“Sure. Can take you now,” he offered.
“Okay.”
We trooped out to Bill’s aged red Chevy pickup truck and drove over to the apartment. It was within walking distance of the dispatch, really—not that I’d want to do that in the winter; the weather remained utterly frigid. It was a short little four-story brick building, and Bill’s sister—a stocky older woman with graying brown hair—was waiting for us.
“So, this’s Jason?” she asked, and Bill responded with an affirmative grunt. She offered her hand. “I’m Rhonda; come take a look at the place.”
“You can make it home yourself?” Bill asked. I nodded. One of my smartphone’s many features was an ability to plot bus routes. “All right, places to be,” he said shortly, and returned to his truck as Rhonda led me down the stairs into the basement of the apartment building.
The tour of the apartment didn’t take very long. It was basically one big public room with a kitchen off of it and a bedroom tucked away out of sight. Walled in plain white drywall, floored in worn-but-solid dark blue carpet.
Rhonda quoted me a rent figure that was a bit under half of what I expected to be bringing home from Direct. Certainly more than I currently had to pay.
“My brother and I talked, and he’s agreed to front me your deposit and half your first month’s rent, and take it off your pay for the next few months,” she told me, “to give you a chance to get settled right away.”
“When do you need to know?” I asked, finally, unsure if I was willing to accept that degree of charity from my boss.