My name is Ross, and I work the late shift at a gas station off Highway 52. That is not how I would have described myself ten years ago. Ten years ago I would have told you I was a factory man.
Twenty-three years on the floor, the kind of work that gets into your hands and stays there, that you can feel in your shoulders on Sunday mornings when the week has been long. Benefits. A pension I was building slowly and carefully the way you build things when you understand they take time.
A life that did not make for interesting stories but felt solid under your feet, the way a floor feels when you stop noticing it because it has never once given way. Then one morning we clocked in like always, and by afternoon there were locks on the gates. A single piece of paper taped to the fence said the company was filing for bankruptcy.
Twenty-three years, gone between one shift and the next, as cleanly and completely as if none of it had ever been real. I spent months looking for something comparable. I sent out resumes until my printer ran out of ink twice.
I knocked on doors and made phone calls until my voice gave out, then rested it overnight and started again the next morning. The younger guys got picked up quickly, absorbed into other facilities, other industries, other futures that had room for them. At my age, the good jobs were not interested, and the options that were available paid barely enough to cover the gas it took to get there.
I have a wife named Lydia, two kids who grow out of their shoes faster than I can replace them, and a mortgage that still feels oversized for a house that is honestly too small for us. We needed income. I took the night shift.
So that is where I am. Highway 52, fluorescent lights that flicker when the weather changes, the persistent smell of roller grill hot dogs even at two in the morning when the machine has been off for hours. The same three songs cycling on the radio until you stop registering them as music and they become more like a variety of silence, just a different texture of background than the buzz of the lights.
Most nights it is just me and the truckers who need coffee and a bathroom, and the occasional teenager buying energy drinks, and the long stretches of nothing in between where I restock and clean and listen to talk radio and wait for the shift to end. I would be lying if I said I had made peace with it entirely. Some nights I stand behind that counter and think about the version of my life where the factory stayed open and feel the particular weight of things that did not go the way they were supposed to go.
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