In his darker moments, the self-pity can turn into a sort of all-purpose irritability directed at humanity in general. Sometimes he finds himself wondering just what the hell he's doing here. He's usually not the self-pitying type, really, but it's pretty much a literal fact that he's way overqualified for this gig. So he's thirty-five years old, living with his parents, working at a gas-station convenience store. Fastrip is still the only place that's called him back. He's applied for dozens of new jobs since getting here, casting a wide net, hitting up everything from video stores to child protective services. He left Utah last July, came back home to Missouri, where he was born. He'd been living paycheck to paycheck, and with his job gone, he didn't have enough money to cover rent. He couldn't scrape up the money to cover the $400 fine, so the DMV suspended his license, which resulted in an automatic dismissal from his job with the state. No excuse, really: Sometimes he just likes to move fast. Then one morning he got a big speeding ticket, 75 in a 25-mile-per-hour zone. Ruben majored in psychology in college, has a half-completed master's degree in counseling, and though foster-care case management is hard, draining work and burns a lot of people out, he was good at it, and had been doing it for six years. He helped get kids back home to their parents, or, if their parents were incapable of parenting, he helped them find new ones. Last year, he was living a thousand miles away, in Salt Lake City, had a solid job working for the state of Utah. Ruben has been working at Fastrip for only seven months, but the uniform fee is among the many irritations that make him feel as though he's been here seven months too long. He once calculated that his immediate supervisor, who has been working at Fastrip for thirteen years, had spent more than $800 for the privilege of wearing her polo shirt. Every week, a $1.25 uniform fee is deducted from his paycheck. The polo shirt belongs to Grace Energy, the parent company that owns the Fastrip chain.
He's wearing clothes that conform to the Fastrip employee dress code: black shoes, khaki slacks, and a green polo shirt with a little name tag pinned onto it. He plans to resume work at the Fastrip when it reopens. "Everybody back, back, back, way back!" he says. Ruben orders the newcomers to join the others crouched against the back wall, using words that, in another context, could have been the lyrics to a disco song. The power went out several minutes ago, and though the sun should still be shining, the storm has blotted it out. When Ruben stops leaning into the door, the wind slams it shut.Įxcept for the wan and skittery illumination of a few cell-phone screens and the intermittent flash of lightning, the inside of the store is very dark. A father and three children stagger through the opening, slipping and almost falling on the wet tiles.
The accelerating wind shoves back, but Ruben wins out. Since he doesn't have much authority over the muscles of his arms, he pushes this door like he pushes most doors, shoving with the weight and strength of his entire body. When he reaches the door, he unlocks it, then pushes forward. He could cover the distance without support, but his cerebral palsy, the damage to the parts of his brain that control his coordination and balance, would make him do so with his usual stiff plod, and there is no time for that. As he rushes from the rear to the front of the store, Ruben Carter leans on the half-moon cash-register island with his left hand, using the island as a sort of crutch and springboard to propel himself along.
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