The walk-in cooler at Leo's had a light that flickered on your left side and just buzzed if you didn't jiggle the door just right. I knew every shelf by heart. The lettuce, the tomatoes, the six-quart containers of ranch.
I was thirty when I worked the line there, between marriages, between good decisions. I folded a hundred pounds of lettuce into those plastic bins every night and thought, this is it. This is my life.
I kept a fold-out map of the state under my register. Highlighted one route that went all the way to the coast. I never drove it. Just liked knowing I could.
The night of the season finale — some show the servers watched — I stayed late to break down the cooler. Scrubbed the racks with a bleach rag until the cold bit through my gloves and my knuckles ached.
I walked home under the streetlights in my work boots, past the auto body shop and the twenty-four-hour laundromat. The house I grew up in was three blocks away, and I was thirty years old, breaking down a walk-in cooler for minimum wage.
Now I'm fifty-two. I write tickets for people who park in the fire lane at the grocery store. I live back in my old room, my mom's sewing machine sitting where my desk used to be.
Some days I think of you — that younger me, standing in the cold, slicing a thumb on a tomato crate and not even cursing. And I want to tell you: the route was never about the coast. It was about having a route at all. And that was enough to get you here.