The Shirts on the Conference Table
At the foot of the table, set a little apart, was a thirty-second shirt, and I knew it.
The name Ross, in gray thread, over the pocket. At each elbow a square of tan duck cloth, and around each square a line of small, tight stitches I would have known blindfolded. It was not one of the three I had cut to rags. It was one of the two Ross had turned in on Friday, which were supposed to be in the crib’s return bin, waiting on the rag man. Curtis had gone through the bin Monday night after his shift and found it.
The card said: Ross Weller. Issued 2004. 22 years. Ask Mrs. Weller about the elbows.
I sat down in the chair at the end.
Rodney McAllister came down the hall at 6:58 with a paper cup of coffee, in a blue sport coat that had seen better years, and walked into that room and stopped.
He did not look at me. He looked at the table, the whole length of it, the cards and the duct tape and the patches. He set his coffee on the credenza without taking his eyes off it. Then he walked halfway down and picked up Tony Ferris’s shirt and held it to the window light and ran his thumb along an elbow.
“Who did this stitching?”
“The wives,” said Curtis from the doorway. He had come in behind Rodney with Hector, Tony and Jimmy at his shoulder. None of them came into the room. They stood there like men at the back pew, caps in their hands. “Mostly the wives, Mr. McAllister.”
Rodney set the shirt down the way you set down something that belongs to somebody else. He saw me, and his face changed. “Mrs. Weller. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Ross asked me to sit. He said it was about the shirts.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He swallowed. “I guess it is.”
At 7:00 sharp the door at the other end opened and Neil Dickerson walked in with a leather portfolio under his arm, in the middle of a sentence to his assistant. He stopped talking. He stopped moving.
Neil is thirty-six, tall, with a runner’s build and reading glasses pushed up in his hair, and I will say it plainly: he did not look like a villain. He looked like a young man who had walked in and found his mistake laid out on a table in front of the one person he had hoped would never see it. Then his jaw set, and I saw the other thing arrive, the thing that comes to a man who has been caught and decides to hold his ground.
“What is this?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Rodney said.
“This is a stunt. Ross Weller came to my office yesterday and told me about it. I’d call that pressure.” He put the portfolio down. “The uniform line was frozen before I got here, in January of 2023, and I kept it frozen. Corporate asked every plant to bring shrink down six percent. I didn’t have room in the budget.”