The Morning the Whole Plant Stood Outside
The 8 weeks after that I won’t bore you with. Benny came by every Sunday with a lawn chair and his coffee. He told me he’d put a hoist on my press and moved Cody Voss, a good young man with a strong back, next to me for the first month so I wouldn’t have to lift.
Everybody believed I was coming back. My 14 vacation days, with the hours the crew had donated folded in, kept the checks coming for the first three weeks. The first short check landed the last week of September, and I called payroll. A note on the portal said leave pending. Kim told Benny it was being handled, and Benny told me to sit tight, so I sat tight, with the worst weeks still ahead of me. I had given them the surgeon’s letter. I had done what I was told. I thought that was how it worked.
That night around 7 the phone rang. It was Sal.
“What did they say?”
I hadn’t told him. Benny’s wife Tammy had called Marge by noon, and the news had gone through that town like a brush fire in September. I told him straight, and when I got to the 4 weeks’ pay he made a sound in his throat I’d never heard from him.
“I’m coming over.”
“Sal, you’re not to drive.”
“Marge drives.”
They were at my door in 20 minutes. Sal wore a surgical mask, because the drugs that keep his body from rejecting the kidney leave him open to every cold that walks by. Marge held a meat loaf in foil.
We sat in the living room. I told it again, slower. Sal asked me one thing, near the end.
“Did you ask anybody to do anything? At the plant?”
“I told them not to.”
He started to laugh, a dry little wheeze behind the mask. “Dwayne, I love you like a brother, and you’re the smartest man I know about a press, but you have never met that crew. Go to bed. Sleep late.”
“Late till when?”
“Till 5. For us, that’s late.”
I lay awake a while and prayed a little more than I had in the truck. I did not ask Him for anything. I have wondered since whether I should have.
I was asleep by nine. Renata was not.
She told me the rest later, and so did Tammy, so I can tell it straight. She sat at the kitchen table with her phone, the leave paper she’d printed in July and the church directory.
The first call went to Pam, the transplant coordinator. Renata asked one thing: was my follow-up care covered through the end of the month. It was, Pam said, and the hospital social worker would call about what came after.
The second call went to Tammy Dunn, who was sitting up anyway. The third went to Carolyn Brandt, who answered from a motel off I-75 in Kentucky and put Lou on. Lou listened to all of it and said four words. “Ten days. Nobody panic.”
Then he said he would be at the plant by 5, and he asked Tammy to start the phone tree at the church, and Tammy said it was already started.
At 5:40 Tuesday morning I was standing at the kitchen counter in my socks, eating toast, when a pair of headlights swept across the ceiling.
I knew the engine. It was Marge’s Buick with the bad belt.