The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook

The Longest Week

Wednesday I took the keys again. Thursday too. It stopped being a dramatic thing by then and started being just how the mornings went.

Keys off the hook, slip on the counter, out into the cold, haul myself up by the grab handle. I got used to the truck. I even started to like how high you sit, how you can see over everything, how the heated seat came on warm by the time I hit the highway.

I understood, a little, why he wanted it so bad. I still took it every morning.

The women on line two figured it out fast. You cannot keep a secret in a plant any better than you can keep one in a church.

Tammy on the molder next to mine leaned over during the ten o’clock break Wednesday. “That you parked out front in the big Ram?” she said. When I said it was, she just nodded slow and said, “Good,” and went back to her machine.

That was the whole conversation. That was all the blessing I needed.

Another woman might have told me I was being hard on him. Tammy did not. Tammy had put a man out on the porch once herself, and she knew the difference between hard and finally.

A plant full of women who get up at four and stand on concrete for eight hours does not have a lot of patience for a husband who hands off his wife’s car like a spare set of mittens. They were on my side before I said a word.

My days were long that week. I ran trim and pack on line two, which means I pulled hot molded totes off the line, checked the corners for flash, and stacked them on a pallet. Then I did it again about four hundred times before lunch.

It is loud, honest work, and it does not leave much room in your head for anything but the next tote. For eight hours a day I did not think about Greg at all. Then the whistle blew and I walked out to that truck in the front row and the whole thing came back.

Greg started setting his alarm for five. I would hear it go off down the hall while I was still in bed, and then the water running while he shaved in the dark.

Then the front door, and his boots on the porch steps going down to wait at the end of the drive. He could not even get himself to the carpool on his own.

By Thursday his cousin Pat was dropping him at the lot on Pat’s way through. That meant Greg was now bumming two rides a morning to get to a job he used to drive himself to in a truck that cost more than my first house.