The Shirts on the Conference Table
Jimmy Pace was the last. I almost skipped him. He is the youngest, and I did not want to hang anything on a boy of twenty-four. But he was the one Ross worried about most.
When I explained, he was silent so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Mrs. Weller, can I tell you something about your husband? My dad died on a Tuesday, five years ago in March. Heart. I was nineteen, five months on the floor. I came in Wednesday like nothing happened, because I didn’t know what else to do. Ross looked at me across the shop and he knew. He shut down my press and said, ‘Go sit in the truck with me.'” Jimmy’s voice thickened. “We sat there two hours. He gave me half a sandwich. And Thursday he drove to the funeral home in his good shirt and stood in the back for the whole visitation, and he never mentioned it again.”
I could not say anything.
“I’ll do whatever you need,” Jimmy said.
“I’m not asking for anything, Jimmy.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why.”
Ross found out Sunday night, because Curtis called the house.
I had meant to tell him first, after church, over pot roast. But the phone rang at 7:30 while I was drying dishes, and I heard Ross’s side of the conversation go from friendly to flat to silent.
He came to the kitchen door and stood there. “You went around me.”
“I did.”
“I asked you to leave it alone.”
“You asked. I never said I would.”
“These are my guys, Renee.”
“Larry Haskins got $200 taken off his last check. The Boyd kid lost $100, and he’s nineteen, and the only thing anyone’s said to him about it is that it happened. Is Neil Dickerson supposed to do that quietly, behind a door, to everybody who ever leaves?”
Ross stood very still with his hand on the door frame, and I watched him run it. He does not argue. He lines things up on the bench in his head and looks at each one. Larry. The Boyd kid. The duct tape in Curtis’s collar.
“Well,” he said. He pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. “You’re right about that part. You’re wrong about how a plant works.”
“Then tell me.”
“You can’t go at a man like Neil from the front. Thirty guys walk into his office in a pack, he sees a mob, and a man who sees a mob digs in. A man shamed in front of his own people will defend what he did till he dies, even when he knows he’s wrong.” He looked at me. “You give him a door. You don’t make him walk through it.”
He went into the den and picked up the phone.
I stood in the kitchen and listened to my husband do what he had done for twenty-two years. He called Curtis back. Then Hector. Then Tony.