The Route They Gave His Nephew
Toledo
The regional office is up on the north side of Toledo, a low brick building with the company flag out front and a lobby with chairs nobody sits in. I had put on the shirt Joan pressed, and I carried the accordion folder under my arm, the whole fifteen years of it, and I told the woman at the front desk I needed ten minutes with Mr. Alvarez.
Mr. Alvarez was the regional operations director. I had met him exactly once, three years back, when he came through the depot shaking hands. A heavyset man, careful, the kind who reads the thing before he says anything about the thing.
“He’s got a full afternoon,” the woman said.
“I can see if there’s an opening next week,” she added, not unkind.
“I’ve worked for this company twenty-nine years and three hundred and sixty days,” I said. “I’ll wait.”
I sat in one of the chairs nobody sits in, and I held the folder on my knees with both hands, and I watched the clock on the wall over her head.
I thought about Joan ironing the shirt. I thought about Earl throwing his badge on the counter. I thought about how easy it would have been, any morning that week, to set the broom against the fence and walk out to my truck and never come back, and how the walking out would have felt like dignity for about the length of the drive home, and then it would have felt like what it was, which was losing.
I waited an hour and forty minutes. At four-fifteen Mr. Alvarez came out himself and looked at me, the pressed shirt and the folder and the gray in my beard, and he said, “Walt, is it. From the Lima depot.” He remembered the name. “Come on back.”
I laid the folder on his desk and I opened it, and I did not make a speech. A speech was the thing I had been holding back all week so I would have nothing in me but the paper.
“That’s my record,” I said. “Fifteen years on one route. Every sheet, every scan. No safety write-ups. No preventable accidents. No complaints that held.” I turned to the front page. “That’s the memo moving me off it. It’s dated nine days before my thirty-year pension vests. They put a nineteen-year-old on the route and they put me on a push broom in the yard. I’ve swept that lot every morning this week. I’m not here to complain about sweeping. I’m here so you’ll look at the dates.”