The Machinist His Crew Would Not Leave

Eunice

Percy married Eunice four years ago, the same fall Wilma died, and I’ll admit I didn’t give either of them the attention I should have that year, grief being what it is.

Eunice grew up in Rochester, on the Minnesota side of the river, and she had worked for a marketing firm before she married my son. She was smart, sharp with a laptop, quick to notice everything the shop didn’t have: a real website, a logo that wasn’t hand painted, a system for tracking jobs that wasn’t a whiteboard and a stack of carbon-copy tickets.

Some of what she pushed for was good, and I said so. We got a website. We got a real invoicing system that saved Radtke two hours a week at the parts counter.

But somewhere in that first year, Eunice stopped seeing the shop as a business her husband worked at and started seeing it as a business her husband should own outright, the way a man his age and his labor deserved to own something, in her words, spoken to me directly at a Thanksgiving dinner I still remember clearly. I told her that ownership wasn’t something I was withholding out of spite, it was something Wilma and I had simply never finished the paperwork on, and that Percy already had more real authority over that shop than most sons ever get handed by their fathers.

She smiled at me the way you smile at someone you’ve already decided not to listen to.

Over the following months she brought in a consultant, a woman with a laptop bag and a binder full of slides who had never once stood on a shop floor before that spring, to help “modernize our operational efficiency,” which turned out to mean cutting corners on jobs that had never had corners cut on them before.