Sure was something. What exactly, though, he didn’t know the word for, if such a sensation had ever been located and named before now. Didn’t need a word. This was simply a moment, an opportunity—his. This was his chance to tell the boy things he could explain, as well as the others he was still figuring out. No perfect place to start, so his breath unraveled into sentences similar to those he’d fed into the phone back on the boy’s first birthday. Tonight was different, though. Without a pane to separate them, his message would surely reach its intended recipient. He told the boy secrets and praise, made promises and oaths, then very gently took the boy’s hand into his. The last thing he said before drifting off to sleep, too, was sorry.

$9.04

All the online job forums said if you’re not fifteen minutes early to an interview, you’re late. And so, by this count, Henry is already five minutes tardy.

The address has taken him to an industrial park on the outskirts of the next town east. The blueprints for these buildings hadn’t sought inspiration any further than their most fundamental building material: the cinder block. At the perimeter of each concrete container after concrete container are wide black moats of asphalt poured over burnt-up and bought-out farmland. He accelerates past parking lots designed with higher turnouts in mind, much more than this scattering of midsized sedans and minivans, their windshields glimmering with tin-foil accordions to deflect the nine-to-five sun. He is six minutes late when he brakes, coming up fast behind an eighteen-wheeler that’s crawling ten below the speed limit.

The semi’s brake lights now flare as red as he feels, and the trailer creeps to a complete stop in the middle of the road. Reverse lights blink silver, a beeping rings out, and so Henry’s got to throw his truck in reverse to let this tortoise son of a bitch back up into a shipping company’s loading zone. Again, this fuckwit turns too sharp, has already jackknifed the trailer twice, and now trudges forward to straighten out for a third attempt, apparently hell bent on delaying Henry and ruining his life.

Eight minutes late. In the rearview mirror, the road behind is empty. He peeks between the trailer’s axles, and the coast is clear ahead as well. He cranks the wheel left, throttling hard to hop the curb. The truck bed fishtails, tires spinning over the grass until catching traction, and he goes squealing around and past the semi. As soon as the front tires thump back over the curb, he floors it, rocketing down the road for another thirty seconds before screeching up to the address. It looks like any other warehouse along the way, but up this close he can see a black glass door pressed into the middle of its khaki facade.