The Watch From the Ones at Home
“I have a watch. I am not going to have two. A man has one wrist he wears a watch on.” He put his hand flat on the bank envelope. “And I am not going to hand forty-one men their five dollars back, either. They gave it, and it was meant.”
“Then what do you want done with it?”
Dennis thought. He does not hurry when he thinks.
“When I went down last March,” he said, “it was six weeks before the first sick and accident check came. Brenda Kay’s paycheck carried us, and we were all right. But I thought about it a good deal, lying on that couch. There are boys on that floor with three kids and a wife at home. Six weeks.”
“I know it,” Tiny said.
“You keep that envelope in the foreman’s desk. Next man that gets hurt on that line, he gets it. That week. No forms. You just drive it to his house.” He pushed the envelope back across the table. “And then you pass the can again and fill it back up for the one after him.”
Tiny picked up the envelope. He turned it over in his hands, and he nodded.
Tiny stayed for a cup of coffee and a piece of the apple cake. When he left he shook Dennis’s hand at the door, and held on to it a second longer than men usually do.
Dennis stood the card up on the windowsill over the sink, trout facing out.
He slept that night. I listened to him do it.
I thought that was the end of it, and I would have been content if it were. But a card does not go around three shifts of a plant without the front office hearing.
Saturday morning, one week to the day, a gray sedan turned into our drive about ten o’clock. I was at the sink. I saw a tall man get out and stand a moment beside the car with his hand on the roof like somebody getting his nerve up.
“Dennis,” I said. “Mr. Fisk is in the driveway.”
Dennis came and looked over my shoulder. “So he is.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Put the coffee on, I expect.”
He went to the door himself.
Mr. Fisk came into my kitchen with a dark blue box in his hand. He would not sit down at first.
“Mr. Lowe. Mrs. Lowe. I am not going to stay long. I came to say something to your face, because it is not a thing for a letter.”
“All right,” Dennis said.
“A week ago tonight I stood up in front of two hundred people and read a list of names, and yours was not on it, and I did not notice. I shook your hand at the door and asked about your back, and I still did not notice.” He looked at me. “And you thanked me for the dinner.”
“I found out Tuesday, when one of my supervisors asked me why there was a card going around the floor. I have spent the days since finding out how it happened, and you are owed the how.”
He set the box on the table.
“Corporate orders the watches. They order them off a report the benefits department runs every August, of everybody who retired in the past twelve months. That report pulls two codes, normal retirement and early retirement. Yours was coded as a disability retirement. It is a different code, so the computer did not pull you. Nobody in Tennessee decided you did not earn a watch. Nobody decided anything, and that is the trouble.”