The Daughter Who Owned It All
He never once suggested I should work there. That was its own kind of gift, looking back. He wanted me to choose it, not inherit an obligation to it, and so I chose it at nineteen, after a year of community college that didn’t take, walking onto the floor as a temp on the second shift and asking every question I could think to ask until the line leads started answering them instead of laughing.
I want to be honest about something here, because this story only works if I am. My father did not hand me a career. I earned quality control the slow way, catching defects other people missed, staying two hours late during a recall scare in my fourth year that could have cost the plant its biggest agricultural contract, and eventually becoming the person new hires were told to find if something on the line looked wrong. Twenty two years, most of it before anyone in that building thought of me as the owner’s daughter first and an employee second.
That mattered to him more than almost anything. I only understood how much, later.
The Year We Buried Him
My father died on a Friday in early spring, in the plant’s own break room, during the same monthly potluck he’d insisted on since 1986, a heart attack that took him before the ambulance from the volunteer department six minutes away could get him to the hospital in New Castle. He was seventy one. He had a paper plate of somebody’s green bean casserole in front of him when it happened, which is the kind of detail that sounds almost unbearably ordinary until you are the one who has to keep living around it.
We buried him on a Wednesday, at the small Methodist church on County Road 400 where he’d been an usher for three decades, and the overflow crowd stood outside on the gravel because the sanctuary couldn’t hold everyone who wanted to say goodbye to him. The VFW hall two miles down the road hosted the meal after, folding tables end to end, casseroles and fried chicken and more sheet cake than any family should ever have to look at in one afternoon. My sister Tina and I stood at the door for four hours shaking hands with people neither of us had met, men who told us our father had cosigned their first truck loan, women who told us he’d quietly covered a hospital bill nobody was supposed to know about.