Page 24 of Working for Keeps

And the flags in the weeds go off behind my eyes like a flare.

Saturday night, coming back down off Elm Street in the rain, orange ribbon on new wire marching from the rail siding out across the scrub to the back fence of the plant lot.

I sat at that stop sign with the wipers going, orange ribbon in the headlights, and couldn’t make them mean anything, because I was adding it up wrong. Nobody surveys a parcel they intend to keep running a factory on.

They survey it for whoever is buying it.

And the requisition. Two hundred and eleven dollars of hardened steel for the guide-pin housing, stamped DEFERRED twice in six weeks by a company that was about to spend six figures automating that same line.

It never worked as a number, but it works fine now. You don’t buy the bolt for a machine you’re planning to put in a skip.

Four hundred men. Artie, whose wife is halfway through a chemo protocol that runs off the plant’s insurance. Toby, who put a down payment on the house by the river in March. Red Holloway, forty years on bridge steel before a fall wrecked his hip, who keeps the union hall now and would be left locking up an empty one. Kincaid’s. The hardware store. The school levy. The whole valley hanging off a payroll a man in Chicago has already crossed out with a pen.

I set the papers down on the steel desk. My hands are steady, but my chest isn’t. There is a heat coming up through my chest that wants to come out of me and take the doorframe with it.

Vera hasn’t moved. She’s standing in the middle of my union hall in a gray blazer with her arms at her sides, not defending herself, not talking. She is white around the mouth.

“When?” I say.

“Signed Friday. Three-thirty.”

“Friday.” I look up at her. “Friday at three-thirty.”

“Yes.”

“You were on my floor at nine.”

“I know what you’re doing,” she says. “Do it. I’d do it too.”

So I do it, out loud, like a man counting his own teeth after a fall. Three-thirty Friday, and at nine that night she was standing on the catwalk with her hair down while I worked the feeder track, and four days before that she walked into my office with a briefcase, and last night she was asleep in my bed with the whole cabin still smelling like her mother’s kitchen.

And every piece of that could be a play, if I wanted it to be, if I had to make it one so the rest of it made sense.

She’s not the woman who left. The woman who left didn’t have circles under her eyes at nine in the morning and she didn’t drive to a union hall with the evidence under her arm and hand it over before anybody made her.

“Say the rest,” I tell her.

“Keller called me twelve minutes after I opened the file. He confirmed it.” Her chin comes up. “My job for the next ten days is to keep you talking. Shift differentials. Efficiency curves. Anything with a number on it. He used the phrase exhaust valve.” She swallows. “He offered me Cleveland.”

“And?”

“And I printed everything, and I came here.”

The heat behind my sternum turns over.

I stand up, the chair moving back into the filing cabinet with a crash but Vera doesn’t flinch. Then I’m across the room with the phone off the cradle before I know I’ve reached it.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“Calling Red. Then Toby. Then every steward on every shift.” My thumb is already moving. “Second shift is on the floor right now. We shut the presses down at noon, we chain the gates, and we let Chicago watch four hundred men stand in that lot until somebody with a lawyer comes down here and explains to my face why⁠—”

“Mick.”

“—why they think they can sign a paper in a glass tower and erase seventy years of⁠—”

“MICK.”

She has two fingers jammed down on the phone cradle, holding the hook, and she got across the room fast enough that I didn’t see her come, and her face is inches from mine.