The Night the School Gym Opened

Knocking on cab doors

I got out of the pickup and started down the first row of trucks.

I want you to know what twenty below feels like when you’re not dressed for standing around in it. The cold doesn’t sting. It grabs. My nose hairs froze on the first breath. My eyelashes stuck together every time I blinked, and the snow squeaked under my boots like dry cornstarch.

I knocked on the first cab door with my gloved fist. It was a red Peterbilt with Texas plates and a pair of dice hanging from the mirror.

The window cracked down. A man about fifty looked out at me with a pillow crease down one cheek.

“The school’s got heat,” I said. “A mile and a half away. There’s a bus coming. There’ll be soup by ten.”

“Lady,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I’m the custodian.”

He looked at me as if I’d said I was the Queen of England. Then he reached for his coat.

That was how it went down the rows. Arkansas. Iowa. Ohio. Nebraska. Georgia. A young woman from Missouri hauling frozen chicken, who would not leave her trailer because the refrigeration unit had to keep running.

I told her I would send soup out to her. She said, “Nobody ever has.” I told her I would anyway, and wrote her truck number on my glove with a pen.

I couldn’t take the cold for long, so I did the rows in pieces, warming my hands in the pickup between aisles. By nine-thirty I had told thirty-nine of the forty. The last one was a driver named Marcus, who sat behind the wheel with a phone in his hand and his face turned toward the glass.

I knocked twice. He didn’t hear me.

The third time he rolled the window down and said, “It’s my daughter’s birthday. She turned four today. I haven’t been able to get a signal.”

“The school has Wi-Fi,” I said. “It’s the one thing I can promise you.”

His eyes filled, and he nodded and began to gather his things.