The Morning the Whole Plant Stood Outside
“I handed that letter to Kim in the office in July,” he said. “I should have walked it to Texas myself.”
“It isn’t on you, Benny. Go to work.”
He put a hand flat on the roof of my truck, the way you pat a horse, and went back in.
I sat in my 2009 Ford with both hands on the wheel until they stopped shaking. There was frost on every windshield in the lot. I said, in my head, Lord, I’m not asking You to fix this. I’m asking You to keep my mouth from saying the thing I’d be sorry for. Then I started the truck.
Renata was at the kitchen table when I came in. She keeps the books at the co-op elevator, and she took one look at the box in my arms and put her coffee down. I told her all of it. When I finished she was already reaching for her phone.
“We call the Labor Department,” she said. “Right now. Donors are covered, Dwayne. I looked it up in July, I printed it. The notice has to say what’s missing, and they have to give you time to fix it, and nobody gave you anything.”
“I know.”
“Then why are we standing here?”
“We’ll call Tuesday,” I said.
She stared at me. We have been married 22 years, and she knows what stubborn looks like on me.
“I know we can call,” I said. “It might even work. But it takes months, Ren. They send a form. They send another form. Your check from the co-op covers the house payment, and the savings account is what’s left over for everything else, and it isn’t much. The insurance stops at the end of the month. I don’t want to turn what I gave Sal into a case number. Not today. Today I want to be a man who didn’t beg.”
She was quiet a long time. Something crossed her face, and I couldn’t read it.
“The contract gives you ten days to file a grievance,” she said slowly. “I read it in July, too. Tuesday forfeits nothing.”
Then she took the box out of my arms and set it on the hall table, and she put her forehead against my chest, careful of my side.
“Tuesday, then,” she said into my shirt.
I thought she meant Tuesday and the phone call. I have since learned that Renata can say a sentence with two meanings in it and keep a straight face.
I should tell you how I came to be a man with one kidney, because the rest of it makes no sense without that.
Sal Ferro was 58 that fall, and he’d been at Hartwell Stamping and Tool for 31 years. He trained me. I walked in at 25 with a head full of theory and hands that didn’t know anything, and Sal was the die setter on the next press line over. He taught me to read a print and then to read the press. He taught me that you listen to a stroke before you look at the part. He carried the same steel thermos every day of those years, with a dent in the side from the winter a forklift backed over it in 1998, and he swore the dent kept the coffee hot.
His kidneys went the way a pump housing wears, slowly and then all at once. He was diabetic and had been careful, but careful isn’t always enough. By the time I noticed he was gray, he was already on a machine, 3 days a week, 4 hours at a stretch. 22 months of it. He ran his line like always and never complained once. About 40 of us gave Sal our spare vacation hours, which the company allows. I gave 5 days. Nobody ever mentioned it.