The Only Stranger

The third truck of the morning was Cody Muntz with a load of number eight, and Ruthann had the ticket half written before she saw that the handwriting was not hers. Her hand was upright and cramped and always had been, since Sister Loretta and the blue tablets. This one leaned hard to the right and put a loop on the bottom of the g. She tore the ticket off, balled it, and wrote it again the way she wrote, and it took her longer than it should have, the way it does when you have to think about a thing you have done ten thousand times. The scale house was eight feet by ten with a window that slid, a box fan on the file cabinet, and dust on everything in a layer you could write in. Out the window the readout on the pole said 78,240 and then dropped to 78,220 while Cody set his brake. The radio was on the AM station out of Bedford that does obituaries at nine. "Morning, Miss Ruthann." "Gate's strung at the second one," she said. "Ronnie's got them chaining it now, so go slow through there…