The fob chirped once, then nothing. He pressed it again - the little green light on the dash didn't blink, didn't even try. Somewhere in the bed of the truck, under the tarp, his edgers and the sod roller and the four flats of creeping phlox for the Hendersons sat waiting in the dark.
He lifted the blower in first - the way he always did, nozzle toward the cab so it wouldn't shift on corners. The two rakes went flat against the driver's side rail, handles toward the tailgate, tines up. He folded the tarp in thirds the way his father had folded newspapers, pressed it down over everything - and clipped the left bungee to the same anchor point it had lived on for sixty thousand miles. Three phones were already lighting up in his breast pocket - Darnell at the Waverly job, the Hendersons, somebody he didn't recognize yet - and the sky was still the color of a bruise.
The truck found the on-ramp without him thinking about it, the way a dog finds the door. He reached into the breast pocket and moved the three phones to the cupholder, then smoothed the folded invoice on the passenger seat - Delgado - four pages, the top corner dog-eared where he'd read it so many times. The number on the bottom line had its own zip code. He pressed his thumb against it once, the way his mother used to press lottery tickets, and kept driving.
The orange lights stayed on - oil, battery - the one shaped like a little genie lamp he'd taped over with electrical tape two winters ago because the sensor was bad and he knew it. He picked up the top phone: *where u at man aerator still locked up*. The Delgado invoice slid off the passenger seat and landed face-down on the floor mat. Through the windshield, a flatbed loaded with rebar went under the overpass and kept going.
He said *Mr. Delgado, this is Marcus, just calling to let you know we're running a little behind, won't affect your schedule at all* - and watched a pigeon land on the guardrail and walk three steps and stop. The phone beeped twice when it cut off. He set it face-down on the Delgado invoice and put both hands on the wheel and left them there.
The gauges sit clean and he looks at them anyway, the same half-second sweep, oil to battery to temp, the way his tongue finds the place where a tooth used to be. On the passenger seat the Delgado folder rides rubber-banded shut, four new pages on top of the old dog-eared ones. The square of black electrical tape is still in the cupholder - folded once, adhesive side in - he has never used it on this truck and he has never taken it out.
