The truck parks.
Two guys in brown uniforms climb out.
One of them goes around to the back, opens the rear roll-up door, and disappears inside.
The other one grabs a reinforced dolly from a rack on the truck’s side.
The thing they’re unloading is a crate.
An actual, honest-to-God shipping crate, banded with heavy-gauge steel strips and stamped with a logo I’ve never seen before.
It looks like something you’d use to transport a piano.
Or a sarcophagus.
Or a baby grand piano thatatea sarcophagus.
I ordered a vibrator.
I ordered a small, discreet vibrator, and these men are wheeling in a shipping container across my yard.
I’m outside before I’ve made the conscious decision to move, screen door banging behind me, soap dust probably trailing off me like I’m Pigpen from Peanuts.
“There’s been amistake.”
One of the men checks his scanner without looking up.
“Maisie Hayes?”
“Yes, but—”
“1742 Coyote Springs Road?”
“That’s my address, but I ordered a—I ordered something small. Like, the size of a hair straightener? Or a rolling pin? Or like, those tubes of ready-made orange cinnamon rolls? You know the ones, right?”
He looks at me like he’s got better things to do. “Okay?”
“That”—I point at the crate, which the other guy is already wheeling toward my studio with the calm determination of a tugboat—“could hold a person.”
He turns the scanner toward me like he’s presenting evidence in a courtroom. “Barcode matches the order number.”
There on the tiny screen is my order confirmation number, the one from the cheerful little email that arrived at 1:07 a.m. three nights ago while I was lying on concrete and making bad life choices.
“I understand the barcode matches, but there’s clearly been a fulfillment error. I spent about a hundred dollars. That crate costs more toshipthan my entire order.”
“Ma’am, we deliver. Returns and product issues go through the vendor.” He taps the signature pad with a stylus that has teeth marks on the end. “Sign here.”
“Can you just—can you take it back? Put it back on the truck and take it wherever it came from?”
“We deliver,” he repeats in monotone. “We don’t un-deliver.” He holds the signature pad closer and gives me a look.
Behind him, his partner has already maneuvered the crate through my studio doorway with the spatial awareness of a man who moves large objects for a living and has zero emotional investment in what’s inside them.
I look at the crate disappearing into my workspace.
I look at the signaturepad.
I look down the dirt road where the dust from the truck’s arrival is still settling in a long, pale plume, and I think about chasing a delivery truck on foot in this apron, in this heat, in front of God and Mrs. Pritchett’s Ring doorbell camera and whoever might be hiking the ridge this morning.
