Page 22 of Working for Keeps

I get up and walk to the wall of the trailer and stand there with my forehead against the cheap paneling until my vision stops swimming, and then I go back to the desk and I do the only thing my training has ever let me do with a catastrophe.

I document it.

I export the folder to an encrypted drive. Ninety-one documents. Then I open the collective bargaining agreement, because before I do anything else I need to know exactly how much rope everybody has, and that is when I find the second landmine.

Section 14, Clause B. The no-strike provision. Any work stoppage initiated before the formal dispute resolution window opens constitutes a material breach of the collective agreement. In the event of material breach, the company may immediately terminate the agreement, freeze the legacy pension fund, and void all severance obligations.

I read it three times.

If the men walk off that floor before the corporate dispute window opens, and it does not open until the sale is publicly recorded, Chicago doesn’t just win. Chicago wins for free.

No severance.

No pensions.

Four hundred families with nothing but a chained gate and a lawyer they can’t afford.

The plant is dead either way. The only thing still on the table is everything they’re owed for it.

At 7:52 my communication app chimes. Incoming Video Call: Roland Keller, Vice President of Domestic Operations.

He knows.

Of course he knows.

Somewhere in Chicago, a permissions log has my badge number on it, timestamped.

I look at the flashing blue icon. Then I straighten my blazer, and I answer, because the version of me that runs away is dead on a factory floor somewhere behind me, and I’m not going to go dig her up.

Keller’s face fills the screen. The corner office, the lake behind him, the silver hair, the smile that has never once reached his eyes.

“Vera,” he says. “You’ve been in the data room.”

“Kestrel,” I say. “Cute. Kestrels hover.”

“They do.” He doesn’t blink. He adjusts a gold cufflink. “I’d hoped to have this conversation next week.”

“You sent me here to close it.” My voice comes out level. It comes out like a stranger’s. “This whole time. Not to fix it. To close it.”

“I sent you there to be seen fixing it,” Keller says, and there is no more velvet on him at all. “There’s a difference, and you’re bright enough to know it. Halvorsen is a dinosaur, the union contract is a millstone, and Cardinal wants the rail proximity. What Cardinal does not want is a wildcat strike or a municipal injunction gumming up a property transfer before it’s recorded.”

When I don’t say anything, he continues, “So for the next ten days, you will keep running your studies, and you’ll keep that steward, Hayes, is it, locked in a room arguing about shift differentials until he’s hoarse. Keep them arguing about numbers, Vera. Let them think there’s a number that saves them. You’re the exhaust valve. You keep the pressure off the boiler until the ink is dry.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then you’re a thirty-four-year-old woman with a mortgage, a noncompete, and an NDA,” he says, in the voice he uses to order lunch, “and I make one phone call, and you never work in this industry again. Whereas if you’re a professional about it, there’s a director’s chair in Cleveland with your name on it in September.” He lets that sit. “You were always my best. You have the one quality that can’t be taught. You can do the necessary thing to people who don’t deserve it, and you don’t flinch.”

“No,” I say. “I just run. It looks similar from the outside.”

Keller’s smile goes off and comes back on. “Ten days, Vera,” he says. “Keep them quiet.”

The screen goes black.

I sit in the trailer with the ballast humming over my head and don’t move for a while.

Three years ago, I sat at a kitchen table in a cabin on the ridge with a decision in my hands that belonged to two people but I made it alone. I left it in ink on the table because I couldn’t stand to be in the room when he read it.

I could do it again right now. God, it would be so easy. I could smile at Keller and stall him and work in the dark to find a way out and hand it to Mick at the end like a gift. I could tell myself the whole time that I was protecting him from Section 14, Clause B, from himself, from the strike he would call by noon.