Page 36 of Working for Keeps

“And for about an hour tonight,” I say, “standing at that table with my pin lying on it, I hated you for teaching me how.”

It’s out of me before I know I’m going to say it. It’s true, and it’s unfair, and both of those are still going to be true in the morning.

Vera doesn’t move.

“Okay,” she says.

“That’s it. Okay.”

“You said it out loud.” Her voice isn’t steady, and she isn’t trying to make it steady, which from her is the whole confession. “To my face. In a parking lot. On the same night you felt it. Do you have any idea what I would have done with that, Mick? I’d have carried it for three years and let you find it on a kitchen table.”

She opens the car door.

“Nine o’clock,” she says. “Go home. Sleep if you can.”

I stand in the lot of my own union hall and watch her taillights go down Third Street, and I do not feel like a man who has just won a vote.

Thirteen

Vera

Roland Keller calls me at eleven-forty on Thursday night.

I’m still in the blazer, sitting on the end of the bed in a company duplex with a bad furnace, and I answer on the second ring.

“You had a meeting tonight,” he says.

Two hundred men in a cinderblock room on Third Street with the doors open and half the wives of this valley on the sidewalk outside it. Of course he had it by ten.

“I did not have a meeting. The local did.”

“Eighty-eight,” Keller says, and I close my eyes. “First vote. That’s a number I can work with, Vera. Do you know how long I’ve been doing this? You don’t need a local to walk out. You need sixteen frightened men to not clock in, and the rest follows them out the door by the second break because nobody wants to be the one still standing at his machine.” A pause, and in it I can hear him doing something at his desk, moving paper. “Which is why at a quarter to six tomorrow morning there’ll be a courier at the gate of that plant with a certified letter for every man on the seniority list. Group health plan terminated by the parent, effective at the close of business Friday. It isn’t punitive. It’s an administrative consequence of a signed asset transfer, and my counsel has it clean.”

The room goes a long way off.

“Artie Vasquez,” I say.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Yes, you do. His wife has a scan on the eleventh. You’ve read the census file, Roland, because I built it and I watched you open it.”

“Then you know exactly what happens on that floor at six o’clock in the morning,” Keller says, the way another man might explain a fare increase. “Your steward stands up and tells four hundred men to keep their hands on the machines while their families lose coverage. He won’t hold them. Nobody could hold them. They’ll be in the lot by seven, and that is a work stoppage before the dispute window opens, and it’s a material breach, and I’ll have the pensions, the severance, and the contract by lunch.” The paper stops moving. “It was always going to be one of the two, Vera. Either they swing at the letter of intent, or they swing at this. I only needed them to swing.”

“You did this because they didn’t take the first one.”

“I did this because you didn’t.” He says it without any weight on it, which is how I know he has been waiting all night to. “Cleveland is closed. The offer I’m making you now is the only one left, and it expires when that courier gets out of his van. Be at the nine o’clock, present the deployment schedule, say nothing about anything, and I will personally see the health plan reinstated through the wind-down. Every man. Including Vasquez.” He lets it sit. “That’s four hundred families, and it costs you one meeting. You’ve done harder sums than that before breakfast.”

I sit on the end of the bed in a rented room with the furnace ticking. He built this for me specifically. Not for Mick. For me. He put four hundred families on one side of a scale and one woman’s conscience on the other, because in three years the only thing Roland Keller has ever needed to know about me is which way I would let a scale tip.

Three years ago I would have hung up the phone. Three days ago, I would have hung up and sat with it until two in the morning and worked out the cleverest possible version, and then I would have handed Mick a decision that was already made.

“Roland,” I say. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

“Vera—”

I hang up on the vice president of domestic operations, and my hands are shaking so hard it takes me two tries, and then I call Mick at seventeen minutes before midnight and tell him every word of it before I have decided a single thing about what any of it means.

He listens all the way to the end without saying anything.