The Crew That Refilled Locker 114
“And Mrs. Hanneman,” Pam said softly, from the end of the table. “We need to ask that you not go back through the floor. It’s an insurance matter. There’s a route through the front office.”
“I’ll walk out the way I walked in.”
“Judy.”
“Pam. I have used that hall for thirty years less sixty-two days.”
She did not argue. I signed nothing. I took the folder, because it was addressed to me, and I took the box, and I stood. Kyle held out his hand, and I looked at it, and then I shook it, because my mother raised me.
The long hall to the front lobby has a row of windows that look down on the production floor. I walked that hall with a copier-paper box on my hip and I looked down.
Line 4 was running. It had to. The Meyer Brothers Implement order, twelve hundred loader cylinders, was due on a truck Monday, and a stopped line is a line somebody answers for. Forty people in gray shirts and safety glasses had their hands in the work, and every one of them looked up.
Nobody called out. Tomás Villarreal from maintenance lifted a wrench. Cheryl raised her whole arm. Aiden Roper stood at his station with one hand flat against his chest, like a boy at a ballgame during the anthem.
At the bottom of the hall Vern was waiting at the dock door. He was not supposed to be off the line. He had his cap in his hand, which is how Vern holds his cap at a funeral and nowhere else.
He walked me to the Buick. He did not offer to carry the box. He knew better. I set it on the passenger floor mat and straightened up.
“Judy,” he said. “Don’t sign anything.”
“I haven’t.”
“Don’t. Give us till Monday.”
“Vern, it’s a spreadsheet. The man said it himself. Nobody did this to me on purpose. There’s nobody to be mad at and nothing to fight.”
“I’m not going to fight anybody,” Vern said.
He put his cap back on and looked at me from underneath it, and I saw his jaw working, and that he had no intention of mentioning it.
“I’m going to ask.”
I will tell you what I did that weekend, because it is not much.
I drove home on County Road 12 with the windows down and the corn standing green on both sides, and I did not turn on the radio. At the stop sign at the section line I sat longer than I needed to. I will not tell you what I did there.
At home I put the box on the kitchen table and did not unpack it. I set the folder beside it and sat looking at the two of them until it got dark.
I will be honest that I thought about signing. It was the easy road. Twelve weeks of severance, a reduced pension I could draw right away, and an end to the business. Twice on Saturday I opened that folder to the signature page and closed it again, and I could not have told you why.
I think now it was the calendar. It lay on top of the box where I had left it, and every time I passed the table I saw the red circle and thought, I have been crossing off days for thirty years. I am not going to sign a paper that says nobody counted them.