The Timecards I Laid Down

Checking

He took the top rubber band off. He started with the ice storm, because I had told him to, and a man who is going to catch you faking starts where you tell him not to. He did not. He typed badge 4015 into his screen and read what it said and then he read the paper in his hand, and his jaw worked.

He did ten more that way. Paper, then screen. Paper, then screen.

Somewhere around the sixth one he stopped talking to me and started talking to himself, low, the way a man does when the numbers are telling him something he does not like.

“These times match the line log,” he said once, mostly to the screen. “The output for these nights matches a full crew.” He meant the plant’s own record of how many bags came off the line. You cannot freeze a full run with a woman who was home with the flu. The peas do not care whose badge is in the computer. The peas got frozen, and somebody stood there eight hours and froze them, and the output sheet knew how many there were even when the timeclock lied about who.

He went quiet a long while. Then he squared the stack back up, gentle, and set his hand on it the way I had.

“Who else knows about this,” he said.

“Ronnie,” I said. “Because I needed the sign-in sheets. Nobody on the floor. Not Deb.”

“You’ve had this a week.”

“I’ve had the paper eleven years,” I said. “I’ve known what it meant about a week.”

“And you came straight to me,” he said. “Not to her.”

“There’s no point yelling at Deb on the line,” I said. “The paper doesn’t yell. It just sits there and it’s right.”

He looked at me then like he was seeing the overnight woman for the first time.

“Give me the day,” he said. “Don’t say anything to anybody. I’ll look at all of it. Then you and I will talk, and then I’ll talk to her.” He paused. “This is going to be bad for her, Sheila. You understand that. This is money and it’s falsifying records. This is a firing, maybe more than that.”

I had known he would say it. I had already decided what I thought about it. But I will come to that.

“I understand,” I said. “Will you fix my bonuses.”

“If this holds up,” he said, with his hand still on the stack, “and it’s going to, I’m going to fix eleven years of it.”

Why

He called me back that evening, before my shift, into his office. Deb was in there already, in a chair by the wall. She had been crying and had stopped and had the used-up look of a person who has run out of the thing that keeps the face arranged.

I did not want her there. I found out later she had asked to be. She wanted to say it to my face.

“Sheila,” Kowalski said. “It’s exactly what you brought me. All of it. I’ve been through the whole stack. Every night you flagged, and more you didn’t.”

I nodded. I kept my eyes on him, not on her. It is easier.

“Deb has something to say,” he said.

She said it to her hands first and then she made herself look up.

“Carl’s sick,” she said.

Carl is her husband. I had not known. You work next to a woman for nine years and then she goes inside to a different job and you lose the thread of her.

“Kidneys,” she said. “Three years now. He’s on the machine three days a week and he can’t work and the insurance fights me on everything and I was.” She stopped. “I was drowning, Sheila. I’m not saying it to excuse it. I’m telling you because he asked me how it started.”