The Crew That Refilled Locker 114
“No. But Mr. Hargadine tells me the cell is missing something.”
“The cell is missing a person who listens to it.”
“That’s what the board says.” He almost smiled. “Would you consider coming back for the rest of the way to October ninth? As a senior test technician, a title Kyle invented on the drive up. To train people in what you do, and to write it down, so it is on paper this time.”
I looked out at the hydrangeas. They were heavy with water and drooping. They would be all right.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say no. I thought of Gene, who would have said I was within my rights, and then would have patted the table and asked what I actually wanted.
What I wanted was not complicated either.
“I’ll come back,” I said. “On two conditions.”
“Name them.”
“One. I walk in the front door at 5:40 on Monday morning like I have for twenty-nine years and ten months, and I walk to my own locker, and nobody walks me anywhere.”
“Done,” said Rich.
“Two.” I turned to Kyle. He had not said a word. He was holding his iced tea in both hands like a boy at a church social. “Kyle. That column of numbers. How many others fell out of it?”
He took a moment. “Ten, ma’am. Besides you.”
“Go home tonight and read every one of those names out loud, off a printout, by hand. And look at the date next to each one.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kyle.
He did. I only learned that in September. Two of the ten were within a year of a threshold, and both were made right by the end of the week. The roster has a new column now. Shelby says the crew calls it the Judy column. I have not decided how I feel about that.
Tomás came to my kitchen door that evening, after supper, with his cap in his hands, and told me what he had done on Friday morning at 4:41. I told him there was nothing to forgive. He said it did not feel that way. I said I knew.
I walked in the front door at 5:40 on Monday morning.
The lobby was dark and cool and smelled of the same pine. My badge worked. I had not known it would. I stood a moment in front of the Thirty Year Wall, fourteen oak plaques and one empty space waiting. Then I went down the east hall to the third row.
The locker stood open with the rubber wedge in it. There were Tomás’s thermos and the Husker towel, and the butterscotch, and the picnic photograph. On the inside of the door hung the new calendar, every day crossed through to the Sunday before, in a handful of different hands.
I stood there a minute. Then I took the pen off its string and crossed out the Monday.
The last stretch held some of the best weeks I ever had at Tallgrass, and I did not expect that. Shelby and I wrote down what I do, in the evenings in the break room. How you wipe. How long you wait. Where to put your head so the machine noise falls away. It ran to eleven pages, and the cell now has a step on its screen called Step 7, Wipe and Listen. It adds fourteen seconds to every cycle. Grant Whitcomb approved the fourteen seconds himself. By October, Shelby could hear the tick better than I could, which is how it should be.