The Crew That Refilled Locker 114
I knew before I reached the bench.
The locker room at Tallgrass Hydraulics smells like floor cleaner and wet canvas on a good day. That Friday morning in August it smelled like pine, a lot of pine, which told me before my eyes did that somebody had been in there with a mop before the sun was up.
I had been walking into that building at 5:40 every working morning for twenty-nine years and ten months. The test stand on Line 4 needs twenty minutes to come up to pressure, and I never trusted a gauge I did not warm up myself. First shift starts at six. I start at 5:40.
Locker 114 is in the third row, at the end, the one with the Husker sticker gone pale from years of sun through the high window. I put my hand out for the padlock the way I had done maybe seven thousand times.
There was no padlock. There was a hasp hanging open and a door standing an inch ajar.
I opened it the rest of the way. The shelf was bare. The hook was bare. The tape marks where Gene’s photograph had hung on the inside of the door were still there, four little rectangles of clean steel, and that was all of me that remained in that locker.
Then I went out to my bench, because when you have been in a building for thirty years your feet know where to go even after the rest of you has stopped.
My name was on a copier-paper box. Black marker, on the end, spelled right. I noticed that. Somebody had taken the trouble to spell Hanneman with both n’s, and I have thought about that more than I would like to. The box sat in the exact middle of my bench, squared up to the edge, the way you leave something for the next shift so they cannot say they did not see it.
On the lid was a yellow sticky note. Please see Kyle at 6:30, Conference Room 2.
I took the lid off.
My coffee mug, the red one with the chip in the handle. My hearing protection, with the foam rebuilt in duct tape. A jar of butterscotch discs, two-thirds full, because I hand those to the new kids their first week. A tin of adhesive bandages. Gene’s photograph, the one from the county fair, with the tape still stuck to the corners.
And on top, face up, my pocket calendar from the Cobb Creek State Bank, the one I keep inside the locker door, with a pencil X through every working day for longer than I could remember.
Whoever packed the box had put the calendar where I would see it. I do not think that was meant unkindly. I think it was meant the way you set the foil on top of a casserole you are carrying to somebody’s house.
The ninth of October was circled in red.
Thirty years. I was sixty-two days short.
I should tell you who I am, since a story like this sounds smaller than it was.
My name is Judy Hanneman. I am sixty-three. I was hired at Tallgrass Hydraulics in Cobb Creek, Nebraska, eleven miles west of Beatrice, on a Monday in October when I was thirty-three, with two kids in grade school and a husband who farmed a hundred and sixty acres and drove a school bus to cover the loan. I started on assembly. Arlo Nuss was the foreman. He hired me with a handshake and a warning that the first week would hurt my forearms. It did.