The Timecards I Laid Down

The certificate on the breakroom wall had my eleven years on it and somebody else’s name.

I read it twice. The paper was cream colored with a gold border, the kind the plant orders by the box for birthdays and retirements. Across the top it said Prairie Gold Foods, and under that, in the loopy print the office uses, it said Eleven Years Perfect Attendance. Then the name.

Deb Hollis.

Not Sheila. Deb.

I stood there in my hairnet with my coffee going cold in my hand, and the second-shift girls filed past me to clock out, and nobody looked twice. Why would they. It was just a piece of paper on a corkboard next to the safety posters and the sign about washing your hands.

“You coming, Sheila?” Ronnie said. He had his lunch cooler under his arm. “Whistle’s in three.”

“I’m coming,” I said.

I did not tell him. Not then.

The line

I run the vegetable line on the overnight shift, ten at night to six in the morning, outside Fremont, Nebraska. We freeze peas and corn and the cut carrots that go in the bags with the little steam valve. The room sits at a steady cold and the floor is wet most of the night and the belts never stop, and for eleven years I had been the woman who did not call in.

Not when my car would not start. Not when the roads iced over so bad that half the shift did not show. Not the winter my husband Roy passed, when I worked the Friday and buried him the Saturday and worked again the Sunday because sitting still in that house was worse than the cold.

Eleven years. I know the number because the plant pays a perfect-attendance bonus, six hundred dollars a year, and every December it came in a separate check with my name on it, and every December I put it toward Kim.

Kim is my daughter. She is twenty-six now, married, a little boy of her own. But those checks paid for her braces and then her band trip and then, the last two years, a piece of her community college. Six hundred dollars does not sound like much to the people who name the bonus. It was a whole month of groceries to me, and it was the proof, in writing, that showing up counts.

So when the eleven-year milestone came around, there was supposed to be a second thing. The plant does a small recognition at the eleven-year mark, a gift card and the certificate and your name read out in the Monday meeting. The office had told me in October it was coming.

And now the certificate said Deb Hollis.