The Shirts on the Conference Table
When we got home I walked straight through the kitchen to the garage and opened the bottom drawer of the old red tool chest. There they were, folded in a stack: three gray work shirts with the name Ross stitched in gray thread over the pocket, cut into squares the size of a man’s hand. Rags, for the mower deck and the paste wax Ross puts on the truck every April.
I held up the top one. You could see through it in places. The collar was down to a thread. The left elbow had been patched with a square of blue denim, and the denim with a square of brown canvas, and around the canvas ran a line of my own stitching, small and tight, that I could have picked out of a hundred.
I had patched those shirts at the kitchen table for years, eleven times in one year, I counted once, because the company had stopped issuing new ones and Ross would not hear of buying his own. “It’s a work shirt, Renee,” he’d say. “It’s supposed to look like work.”
Worn out in their service. That was what the line on the stub meant, said truthfully. The plant had decided he owed it $300 for the privilege.
Ross stood in the garage door behind me. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re about to do.” He took the shirt out of my hand and put it back in the drawer, gently, like a man returning a bird to a nest. “Renee. It’s $300.”
It was not $300, and he knew it. We would be fine on the money. What I could not get past was a man with twenty-two years of Fridays in that building walking out the side door with a cardboard box, while the person in charge had time to find a folder.
I should say who Ross is, since a story like this makes the husband sound small.
He is not small. Ross Weller ran a press brake at Hoosier Hitch & Axle for twenty-two years, forty minutes south of Fort Cletus, bending and cutting the steel plate that becomes trailer hitches and farm wagon axles. For the last eleven years he was what the plant calls a lead, which means that when a new man came on the floor, the new man was handed to Ross. The press took the tip of his left ring finger in 2009, and he still tells every new hire the story, in detail, so they will understand what it requires.
Seventeen of the 31 people on that floor learned the work from my husband. He had a way of standing next to a nervous kid and saying, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” and a way of saying, “Stop the line, nobody’s mad.” The plant has an unwritten rule that a man who stops a line for safety is never written up. Ross is the reason for it.
So on Friday night, when he sat at our kitchen table with his supper going cold and said the sentence I had been afraid of, I knew he meant it.
“I’m not going to make a fuss.”
“Ross.”