They call me “Grandma DoorDash” like it’s a joke, and I let it slide until the paper bag splits and chili bleeds down my ankle, hot and red as shame.

The three boys on the stoop don’t help. They look like every summer boy I’ve ever known, except the eyes—glazed and jumpy from a world that lives inside a screen. They’ve got scooters piled like bones, hair sculpted with product that smells like fruit instead of gasoline and sweat. One of them is filming me with his phone like I’m wildlife.

“Careful there, Nana,” he says. “Food hazard.”

It’s ninety-two degrees and the concrete gives off a smell like wet pennies. I’m sixty-eight, a delivery driver in a town whose glory left with the last shift whistle in ’98. I balance the shakes, grab the leaky bag of chili and fries, and climb.

Third-floor walk-up, no elevator. I’ve done stairs before—pregnant, carrying laundry baskets that bit my hips purple; in the winter of ’77 when heat failed and we hauled kerosene cans up to the apartment like lifelines. You learn to hug your load. You learn to breathe through bad air.

The boys laugh again when I miss a step and catch myself on the rail. I don’t look back. I press my palm to the wood worn smooth by hands—hands that paid bills, held babies, signed divorce papers, brought groceries when the station wagon died, and once, long ago, held a man’s neck while he cried into my hair because the factory cut hours and we didn’t know how to tell the kids.

Third floor smells like bleach and onions. A young woman opens the door with a baby slung to her chest, skin shiny with sleep and milk. She thanks me in a small voice, digs for a tip she can’t afford, and I tell her, no, go on, keep it, spend it on wipes. She cries a little for no reason and every reason. I know that cry. I carried it for years like a secret suitcase.

When I step back into the heat, the boys are still there. One rides his scooter in tight circles like a dog chasing its tail. Another has my torn paper bag, pinched like a trophy.

“DoorDash legend!” he yells, holding it up. “Grandma spills the vibes.”

I could tell them I used to carry more than chili. I could tell them I once hefted a small-block Chevy head with Jerry Mack at the shop, our palms slick with oil, our radio cracking with Motown and the preacher’s baseball voice from Cleveland.

I could tell them how the weight of a sleeping child in a grocery cart feels heavier than iron and softer than bread. I could tell them about the summer of ’73 when we all slept on the roof because the swamp cooler died, and we laid on beach towels and counted satellites and promised to never become the kind of people who mocked struggle.

Instead I take the bag from his hands, fold it tight, and use a spare to wrap my calf. I keep deliverin’.

My car: a tired Corolla with stains that tell the history of spilled milkshakes and a seatbelt that sticks on humid days. In the glove box: a rosary my mother left in there back when a glove box really kept gloves; a map that no app needs; an old gas receipt from 1999—\$1.22 a gallon.

Sometimes I unfold that receipt at stoplights and imagine the smell of leaded exhaust and summer lawn clippings and the Aqua Net cloud from the backseat when the girls would spray their bangs in the rearview and I’d say, “You’ll choke us all, honey,” and they’d laugh and roll down the window and the radio would find Springsteen by accident and it felt like the world was possible.

Another ping. Another address on a street named after trees long cut down. I drive past the bowling alley where the sign is missing letters so it spells OL WI G, which seems honest. We used to bowl there Friday nights, beer that tasted like pennies, shoes that squeaked, fluorescent lights buzzing like hornets. We didn’t take photos of ourselves. We took each other home.

At the next stop it’s the same brand of boys—too much bone and not enough food in their faces. “Grandma DoorDash!” they shout. The name sticks to the air like gum. I hand a bag to the smallest one, and he rolls his eyes so hard I can see the future: he won’t forgive anyone who tries to love him. I want to tell him it gets lonelier than he thinks. I want to tell him not to spit on the hands that carry you to the door.

I don’t. I drive.

The sun hammers the windshield and my eyes water in the way they do now around two-thirty, a weird new middle-aged weather. I pull over at the park where the grass is more dust than blade.

The city took out the old metal slides—the ones that could peel skin off a thigh in July—and put in soft plastic that looks like candy. I drink from my warm water bottle and watch the breeze move the shade like a hand stroking a dog. A girl on a pink bike wipes out on gravel. She sobs like her bones are broken. No one rushes.

I do, out of habit. “You’re okay,” I say, and it’s half wish, half truth. I brush grit out of her palms with the corner of my shirt like my mother used to. The girl takes a breath that shudders through her. Her dad jogs up waving a phone he has to slide into his pocket to actually touch his kid.

The boys at the apartments are waiting for my shift to end. I can feel it like weather. I take one last order—milk, bread, cigarettes—from the corner store that still smells like old wood and pickles, the kind where a bell rings when you open the door and the clerk knows your ex-husband’s softball number. The clerk asks if I’m still “running for that phone thing” and I say yep, like I’m chasing a mechanical rabbit.

Back at the stoop, the boys are stacked on the steps again, sunburn bright, bored. They start in before I’m out of the car.

“Yo, Grandma,” the tall one says, stepping down a stair. “You drop anything today?”

I could tell him I’ve dropped a marriage, a house payment, a baby tooth into a jam jar to keep it safe. I could tell him I’ve dropped a grudge outside a hospital room at 3 a.m. so I could go in and hold a hand and listen to a machine keep count. I could tell him I’ve dropped the habit of apologizing for staying alive.

Instead I bend, set the bag on the stoop, and look him in the eye in a way his teachers probably don’t anymore.

“You boys hungry?” I ask.

He flinches—just a flicker—like I spoke a language he forgot. Hunger is the one thing that doesn’t change. It shows up in every decade, chewing on different bones.

“Nah,” he says, softer. “We’re good.”

“Mm,” I say. “Keep telling yourself that.”

I turn to go and hear it—the small sound of respect being born. It doesn’t come as an apology or a thank you. It comes as silence. The tallest boy doesn’t film me. The smallest one stops smirking. The middle one, the one whose shoelace is broken and knotted too tight, says, “Ma’am, you’re bleeding.”

I look down. The chili has dried to a rusty stripe. “It happens,” I say, and I take a napkin from my pocket—the good kind they used to keep in diners, thick as a prayer—and I dab, and the napkin takes it like it was meant for that.

“Was it good?” the small one asks, nodding at the memory of the food I carried upstairs to a tired young mother.

I think about all of it—bowling alleys and station wagons, cassette tapes rewound with a pencil, the crack of a screen door, fathers who smelled like Old Spice and work, mothers who could stretch ground beef like a hymn, kids who learned to fix their own bike chains because nobody had time to fix them for you. I think about a town that used to make things, a nation that did too.

“Yeah,” I say. “It was exactly what she needed.”

Nobody laughs.

I pick up the empty bag and the boys part just enough to let me through. From behind me one of them says, “Sorry, uh… about earlier.”

He says it like a boy who’s never said sorry without being told to. It lands near my heel and follows me like a stray. I don’t turn around. I don’t release them from it. I let the apology grow legs and pace the porch after I’m gone.

At the car I sit with the door open and the heat sits beside me like an old friend too heavy to move. A song from the nineties comes on—some voice we all thought would last forever—and for a second the town is younger, the boys on the stoop are just boys, and I am a woman with a shift ahead and good shoes and a full tank and a country that still believes in work.

They call me Grandma DoorDash. Fine. I carry dinner the way we used to carry each other. Some days, it’s enough. Other days, it has to be. And on days like this, when a boy puts his phone down and looks up at a bleeding ankle and calls me ma’am, it almost feels like winning.