Page 35 of Working for Keeps

Red Holloway puts the union pin back down on the table in front of me.

“Not mine to keep,” he says. “And it’s not yours to give away in a temper, either. You want to hand it in, you hand it in at the next election like a grown man, and you’ll lose fair or you’ll win fair.” He picks up his hat. “Nine o’clock tomorrow, that woman had better be right.”

I don’t pick the pin up.

I leave it lying there on the wood in the middle of my hall where anybody can see it, because it isn’t mine tonight. It’s theirs. It’s been theirs the whole time.

Artie is the last one out.

He stops at the door with his hardhat under his arm, and he doesn’t come back over, and he doesn’t shake my hand.

“The eleventh,” he says. “The scan.”

“I know.”

“You’re going to come with us. Me and Consuelo. You’re going to sit in that waiting room for three hours with the bad coffee and the magazines from 2019, and you’re not going to say anything, and you’re going to hate every minute of it.”

I can’t get anything past my teeth for a second.

“Yes,” I say.

“Good,” Artie says, and goes out into the dark.

Toby waits until the door shuts. Then he comes up with his hardhat in his hand.

“Nine o’clock,” he says.

“Nine o’clock.”

“Mick.” He looks at me sideways. “She really burned her whole career down? In four days?”

I think about a woman on her stomach in ninety years of iron dust under the floor of this plant, taking pictures of stone laid by dead men, so that Toby Krantz can keep the little house by the river.

“No,” I say. “She burned it down in about eleven minutes. The other four days she spent making it worth something.”

Toby goes. The door swings shut behind him and the hall is empty and the folding chairs are sitting where two hundred and eight men left them.

Vera’s rental is at the far end of the lot with the parking lights on.

She gets out when she sees me coming, and she doesn’t walk to meet me, because she has known me since we were seventeen and she can read a walk from forty feet.

“How bad?” she says.

“The first vote failed. Eighty-eight.”

The color goes out of her face. “Mick⁠—”

“Red Holloway stood up in front of my local and said out loud that you’d turned me.” I hear my voice doing something I don’t like and I can’t get in front of it. “And there wasn’t one wrong fact in it. That’s the trouble. He said a company officer has been in my ear for ten days, and he said I looked Artie Vasquez in the face on my own floor and lied to him to keep this shop quiet, and both of those things happened. I couldn’t give him a single thing back.”

She doesn’t defend herself. She stands in the cold with her arms down at her sides in a gray blazer and lets me have it, the same way she did on Monday morning, and I would give a year of my life to watch her flinch once so that I could stop.

“It carried in the end,” I say. “A hundred and sixty-one. Artie stood up and carried it for me.”

“Then it worked.”

“It worked.” I look past her at the hall. “Vera, I stood in that room and told them every hour of it, and they still could not take my word, and the reason they couldn’t is that I did the thing you did. Not this week. Three years ago. I decided for people who trusted me, and the whole time I was doing it I told myself it was kindness.”

The wind comes across the lot and moves the ribbon on somebody’s tailgate.