The Man I Let Go Before Christmas

He put his glasses back on and looked down at the binder for a long time. I think he was looking at those two numbers, four and twenty-three, that he had seen every month same as I had.

“I never asked either,” he said, mostly to himself. Then he picked up his pen. “You go and ask him. I’m not calling a man I let go three weeks before Christmas and telling him to report. If he says yes, I’ll do the paper. If he tells you to go to the devil, he’s earned it, and you’re still on the frame bench, because I am not unsaying this to that man twice. Fair?”

“Fair.”

Earl lives on the east side, in a white story-and-a-half with a single garage. The walk was shoveled to the edges. I went up it Saturday morning with his dish under my arm.

I had washed it by hand, careful of the tape. And I had not brought it back empty, because Paige would not hear of it. She said you never take a dish home empty; her mother had taught her that. She had stood in our kitchen Friday afternoon with Missy’s recipe box and made a pan of peanut butter bars by herself, and cut them, and laid them in Jean Dobbs’s baking dish in rows.

Earl came to the door in a flannel shirt and his sock feet.

“Rob.”

“Earl. I brought your dish.”

He looked at the bars. “She make those?”

“Paige did.”

“Well.” He took it. He stood there a second, and then he stepped back. “You better come in out of that.”

His kitchen was as clean as a pin. One cup on the drainboard. A calendar from the co-op on the wall, and on the windowsill over the sink, four tomatoes’ worth of seeds drying on a paper plate, labeled in pencil. He did not ask me to sit and I did not.

I said it the way I had practiced, and it still came out rougher than I meant.

“I knew about August. I want you to hear that from me. I knew what you had coming and what you’d lose, and I put your name down anyway, because I was scared for my own job and you were the one who wouldn’t raise Cain. Then I went and looked at the rework book, which I should have done before I ever picked up a pen. I know what you were doing with those shims. I never asked. That’s on me, all of it.”

Earl set the dish on the counter.

“I figured it was something like that,” he said.

That was all. He did not tell me it was all right. It was not all right, and he is not a man who says things that are not so.

“Kessler will put you back on the second. Your station, your rate, your hire date. Through August eleventh or as long after as you want.”

He looked out the window over the sink for a bit.

“Who’s off, then? He told you one off.”

I had hoped he would not ask.

“The foreman’s job. Dale takes both lines. And nobody gets hired behind you when you go.”

He turned around and looked at me. It was the longest he had ever looked at me in six years.

“Where’s that put you?”

“Frame bench. Then your station, after. If I can learn it.”

He thought about that. I could see him turning it over, checking it for square.

“You were all right on the frame bench,” he said finally. “Your miters were good.”