The newspaper warehouse buzzed with people waiting for trucks that hadn’t arrived.

The Thanksgiving edition was packed with Black Friday ads. The trucks were late.

I shivered in the cold and yawned.

Mom had woke me at three, shoved a bowl of oatmeal into my hands while I was still half asleep, and hurried me into the car.

This wasn’t unusual.

My brother and sister and I rotated.

Three or four days on.

Seven days off.

Scrawny kids with rollerblades carrying half our body weight in papers through the dark.

Christmas.

Weekends.

Rain.

Sick days.

Mom never rotated.

For more than a year.

The bags under her eyes looked worse than usual.

~

She unfolded the route changes while we waited.

“1337 switched to Tuesday-Thursday-Sunday.”

“263 gets the Times.”

“491 canceled.”

“New customer. 626.”

The list went on for pages. Addresses I knew better than my multiplication tables.

I looked up.

“Six twenty-six?”

Mom answered.

“You know. The house with the stairs.”

I did.

They’d been on-and-off all year.

~

Then the truck arrived.

The room erupted.

Bundles thumped onto folding tables.

Rubber bands snapped.

Everyone grabbed their stacks and ran for the parking lot.

It didn’t matter that the papers were late. Every customer still expected them by 6:30.

Mom folded one and weighed it.

The special edition felt twice as thick as usual.

Thicker papers needed bigger rubber bands. Bigger rubber bands cost more.

Then she looked outside, where rain soaked the sidewalks.

If we bagged every paper, we’d spend away a good part of the morning’s earnings.

If we didn’t, soaked newspapers became complaints.

Complaints didn’t get paid either.

Mom stood for a second with the ream of bags in her hands.

She looked at the rain dripping off the loading dock eaves.

Then at the stacks of newspapers.

And she handed the ream to me.

“Bag the ones that don’t have covered porches.”

I took it.