The Timecards I Laid Down

The night I knew

I waited until my shift and I went to the terminal by the office, the one where you can pull up your own hours. I tapped my badge.

The screen showed badge 2207. It showed me a record with holes in it. Here and there, scattered back across years, nights where it said No Punch. Nights I knew, I knew in my body, that I had stood on that wet floor and run peas until six in the morning.

My stomach went cold in a way the room never made it.

Then, because Deb had trained me on that very screen years ago, I did the thing she taught me. I pulled the shift roster for one of those No Punch nights. January, two winters back. The night of the big ice storm, when only four of us made the drive and we ran the line short-handed and the supervisor bought us all breakfast after because we saved the load.

The roster for that night showed four names. It showed badge 4015 clocked in at 9:54 and out at 6:11.

Badge 4015 is Deb.

And Deb was not there that night. I know she was not, because I remember the four of us, and she was not one. I remember because her kids had the flu and she had called the supervisor at home.

So the system said Deb worked the ice storm night. And the system said I did not.

I stood at that screen a long time. The belt hummed behind me. A forklift beeped somewhere in the back.

Somebody had gone into the record and moved my night onto her number. Not once. Over and over, back across the years, a night here and a night there, enough that her eleven-year count came out clean and mine came out full of holes.

And there was only one person who could go back there and do that.

Ronnie

I did not go to Deb. I went to Ronnie.

Ronnie Pavelka has led the overnight line for sixteen years. He is a big quiet man, a bad knee, a Carhartt that has seen things. He keeps paper the way I do, out of the same mistrust of screens.

I caught him on break, by the loading dock where he drinks his thermos coffee in the cold because he says the breakroom is too loud.

“Ronnie,” I said. “Those old clipboard sheets. The sign-in ones the state made us keep. Did you ever pitch them.”

He looked at me over his cup. “Pitch state paperwork,” he said. “In this plant. They’d have my hide. They’re in the file cabinet in the line office. Why.”

“I need to look at a few nights,” I said. “Years back.”

He did not ask why. That is Ronnie. He set his thermos on the rail and said, “Which nights.”

I gave him the ice storm. I gave him three others I had already found holes on.

He went and got the sheets. He is slow on the knee and it took him a while, and I stood in the cold and watched my breath and did not let myself hope too hard.

He came back with a folder. He laid the ice storm sheet on the dock rail under the light.

There were four names signed in wet ink at the top of that overnight. Mine was the first. S. Marsh. My own hand. 9:51 p.m.

Deb’s name was not on it anywhere.

Ronnie read it the way he reads everything, slow, and then he looked up at me, and I watched him understand. He is not a man who says much. What he said was, “That’s your night, Sheila. That’s your name. I was here. You ran the carrot station.” He tapped the paper with one thick finger. “She wasn’t in the building.”

“I know,” I said.

“You want me to say so,” he said. “To whoever.”

“I might,” I said.

“Then I’ll say so,” he said. “Paper don’t lie. I’ll pull the rest of ’em for you.”