The Timecards I Laid Down

The shoebox

I need to tell you about the shoebox, because the panel of my own good sense says somebody will ask why a grown woman keeps eleven years of paper.

When Roy was alive he did the money. After he passed I did not know where anything was, not the insurance, not the truck title, not the little bit of savings. I spent three months of nights going through drawers trying to prove things that should have been simple. Whose name, which account, what date.

I swore I would never be caught like that again.

So I keep paper. Every pay stub. Every tax form. And the timecards.

Here is a thing most people at the plant do not know, because they threw theirs out years ago. When the badge system came in, it did not replace everything at once. For the first few years the plant ran both. You tapped your badge, and you also signed a paper line sheet at the start of the shift, the one Ronnie the line lead keeps on a clipboard, because the state wanted a wet-ink record for overtime on the overnight.

They stopped making us sign the clipboard about four years back. But I never stopped getting my own paper. Every two weeks the office prints a little slip that shows your punches for the period, the dates and the times, your name and your number right there at the top. Most folks glance at it and pitch it in the trash by the door.

I took mine home. Eleven years of them. In a shoebox on the shelf in my closet, the one that used to hold Roy’s good church shoes.

I had never once needed them.