Page 31 of Working for Keeps

“Mick,” Red says.

“Red.”

“You want to tell us what this is.”

“Yes,” I say. “I do.”

I walk to the front of my hall. I have stood here maybe sixty times in four years and never once had to make my legs do it.

I put Vera’s stamped filing on the table. Facedown. Not yet.

“Everything in that paper is true,” I say.

The room comes apart.

It comes apart the way a load comes apart when a chain lets go. All at once, in every direction. Men on their feet. A chair goes over. Somebody in the back is shouting August, just the word, over and over, like if he says it enough times it’ll turn into a different month. Toby is yelling at the ceiling. Danny Moreno has got a fistful of the paper crushed in his hand and he is looking at it like it bit him.

Red Holloway’s voice cuts through all of it like a torch through sheet metal.

“QUIET.”

They quiet. For Red, they quiet.

“Say the rest,” Red says to me.

So I say the rest.

“Vantor signed an asset purchase agreement with Cardinal Holdings a week ago Friday, at three-thirty in the afternoon. They are not restructuring this plant. They are selling the ground it stands on. Manufacturing ends August fifteenth. Every job in this building ends August fifteenth. They intend to knock the brick down and put up an automated fulfillment center that will employ, by my count of their own documents, nineteen people, none of whom will be us.”

Not one man in the room moves.

“I found out on Monday morning,” I say. “Four days I have been sitting on it. Vera Warden brought me the file. She found it, she printed it, and she drove it to this hall and put it in my hands before she did anything else with it, and she will be fired for it tomorrow.”

“Monday,” Artie says.

It goes through me like a spike.

“Monday,” I say.

“You’ve known since Monday.”

“Yes.”

“You stood on my floor Wednesday morning.” Artie is on his feet now, and Artie Vasquez has never raised his voice to me in twenty years. “You stood there and I asked you and you said we’re still talking. I asked you Wednesday, Mick. And then I told you about Consuelo’s scan and you said that’s nothing, Artie⁠—”

His voice goes.

He stands there with his fists at his sides and his mouth working and two hundred men watching him, and I make myself keep my eyes on his face, because he has earned that much and it is the only thing I have left to give him.

“—and you looked me in the eye,” he says, “and you lied to me.”

“Yes,” I say. “I did.”

The room roars.

I stand in it. I don’t hold my hands up and I don’t shout them down. I take it, because every word of it is owed, and because a man who cannot stand in front of what he did should not have been trusted to do it.

It doesn’t burn down. It gets worse.