The Timecards I Laid Down
“Don’t fire her,” I said.
Kowalski sat back.
“Give me back my money and keep her off the records forever,” I said. “She can run the carrot station. Carl’s on that machine three days a week and he needs the insurance this job carries, and if you fire her he loses it, and then it isn’t justice anymore. Then it’s just me putting another man on a machine with nobody to drive him there.”
Deb made a sound I will not try to spell.
“Make her pay it back,” I said. “Out of her checks, a little at a time, so she feels every dollar of it for a long time. That’s the part she earned. But don’t take the insurance. That’s not mine to take and it’s not yours either.”
Kowalski looked at me a good while.
“You’re a better person than I’d be,” he said finally.
“No,” I said. “I just know what the machine costs. I’m not doing her a kindness. I’m not putting a dying man on a worse road so I can feel even.”
The floor
I went and ran my shift.
Deb worked the carrot station four stations down from me that night, and we did not speak, and the belts ran, and at some point around three in the morning she came past me carrying a tote and she stopped for half a second and she said, “Sheila,” and I said, “I know,” and that was all either of us ever said about it on the floor. There was nothing left to say that the paper had not already said better.
The bonus came three weeks later. Not six hundred. It was the eleven years, plus a figure Kowalski called a correction, and I did not fully understand the math, but it was the most money I had ever held at one time in my life. It came as a real check with my name on it and my badge number, 2207, printed right there under it where it belonged.
And they put a new certificate on the breakroom corkboard. Cream colored, gold border, the loopy office print.
Eleven Years Perfect Attendance. Sheila Marsh.
It is still up there. The office keeps asking if I want to take it home. I tell them to leave it. Let the second-shift girls walk past it on their way to clock out. Let it sit next to the sign about washing your hands. It is just a piece of paper.
But I have learned what a piece of paper can do.