by D. K. Wall
“Yeah, baseball is cooler.” Not to mention a safer topic, but he guided the conversation back. “What I want for you is to go to college and have all the choices I didn’t have. I won’t tell you that sex is dirty or any of that because that’s a lie. And I won’t lie to you. Ever.”
Jacob’s eyes were wide open, his mouth slack, his face still red. But he wasn’t staring out the window.
“So I promise to be straight with you. Answer any question you ever have. And you talk to me about anything on your mind. Does that make any sense?”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m okay dealing with the weirdness of talking about anything. And I want you to be able to tell me anything. Is that cool?”
Jacob nodded. “Cool.”
They drove in silence for a few moments, the tires hissing on the wet pavement. “So you kissed Missy?”
“Ah, Dad.” But Jacob didn’t look out the window. He held his father’s gaze as the blush blossomed across his cheeks.
Wait for him. Don’t push too hard, or he won’t say it.
Jacob looked down at his hands. “It was cool but weird too.”
“Weird how?”
“I don’t really like her like that. I mean, I wanted to kiss a girl but not kiss her, you know? Cora is so much cooler, but Missy just pushes and does stuff. So it was cool to kiss, but it was weird too.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
Jacob looked shocked. “You do?”
“Yeah, I do. When I first started dating your mom, one girl, Emma, kept trying to get me to…” He glanced over at Jacob as he mentally edited the details of the story. “To kiss her. But I didn’t really like her like that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. Once upon a time, girls chased me, too, you know.”
“No way!” The shock in Jacob’s voice was genuine.
No cool-dad points. Zip. Zero.
Jacob rode for a few seconds in silence before speaking. “So, what did you do?”
“I told Emma no. I was with your mother, and no way was I going to do anything with Emma.”
Okay, that wasn’t accurate. He hadn’t said no so much as waited too long to say yes, but this didn’t seem like a good time to split hairs.
“What did she do?”
“Got mad at me. Then she dated one of my friends.”
“Lucky friend.”
Except they didn’t really date because the relationship didn’t last more than a romp in bed. Hank took one for the team that time, didn’t he? But he couldn’t say that out loud. “It didn’t last. Emma was not right for him either. And I won because I got your mother.”
Jacob chewed on his lower lip, mulling over the conversation. “When Missy tried to kiss me, I started to say no. But the guys, they would make so much fun if they knew I wouldn’t do it.”
Ah, locker rooms. Where lies and bravado are easy because the girls who knew the truth weren’t allowed inside. “I get it. I do. Here’s the thing, though, Champ. Don’t do something because of what the guys think. And don’t do something because of what some girl wants. You have to do what you think is right.”
They rode in silence for a few moments, Jacob twisting the book-bag strap and chewing his lip. His face brightened, a decision made, and he piped up, “Okay. I will not let Missy kiss me again.”
“And Cora?”
“She can kiss me,” Jacob replied, grinning. He turned toward Nathan, his face a look of innocence. “But nothing else, I promise.”
“I am okay with that. But that other stuff—you can talk to me about that too.” Though Jacob groaned, Nathan didn’t relent. “Any questions for me, Little Man?”
Jacob thought for a minute. “You coming to my game tomorrow?”
Nathan laughed, relieved to be back in safe-conversation territory. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Heard you are headed to the high school for their practice after school.”
Jacob’s face brightened. “Yeah, they are so cool. I even hit against Carlos Estrella.”
The high school star pitcher—tall and lanky, he had a deceptive throwing style that challenged high school batters. Nathan was very impressed his son had an at bat against an older, more skilled player of that caliber. “You took pitches from Carlos?”
“He’s unreal. And he has a wicked curve.”
“Had you chasing it, huh?”
“All over the place.”
“How did you hit?”
Jacob shrugged. “I barely touched it. A few foul balls. A bunch of whiffs.”
“No shame in foul balls. Keeps the pitcher working.”
“I got one sweet line drive off of it.”
“You did?”
“Yep. Right to the shortstop. He had the ball to the first baseman before I was halfway down the line, but Carlos was still steamed I hit off him.”
“What did he do?”
“Threw the fastest ball I’ve ever seen.” Jacob paused and shook his head. “Or didn’t see, you know? Just heard the damn thing hit the catcher’s mitt. I think I pissed him off, getting that hit.”
“Language.”
Jacob shrugged. “Sorry. Made him mad.”
Nathan smiled and decided not to point out the other curse word. “Made him mad, maybe, but earned respect too. Remember, your old man was in football for a reason. I never could hit a baseball like you can. Proud of you for connecting on Carlos.”
“Yeah, I loved it,” Jacob said, beaming with pride. “But I was careful. You know, not celebrating. Coach says never make them mad, even when you beat them.”
He thought back to his own taunting of Ricky Ward after his last football game. “Good advice. Coach is smart.”
Jacob shrugged. “Yeah, after that fastball, Carlos talked with me for a while after practice and let me sit in the dugout with them.”
“What else did you get to do?”
“Mostly, they had us shagging foul balls for them, but they let Luke and me do a few fielding drills.”
“How did that go?”
“Hurt like hell. They throw fast.” Jacob proudly held up his bruised left hand. “See?”
Nathan ignored the language that time. “Ouch. Luke’s hand look like that?”
Jacob shook his head. “Nah. He’s got that fancy new fielder’s glove. Plus, he has those inner gloves.”
Nathan picked up the glove lying in the seat between them. The padding in the glove was worn thin from use. “This glove has about had it. Let’s get you a new one and an inner glove just like Luke’s.”
Jacob glanced sideways at his father. “It’s okay. I’ll make this one work.”
Nathan returned the glance. “You don’t want a new glove?”
“It’s okay. They’re expensive. Luke’s was a hundred and fifty dollars. Plus another fifty for the inner glove.”
Nathan whistled. “Wow.” He pulled the truck into the turn lane for the school and crept toward the drop-off point.
“Yeah, his Uncle Hank gave it to him for Christmas. As few balls as Luke catches, he will never wear it out.”
Nathan chuckled. “Talking smack about your pal.”
Jacob threw his shoulders up in an exaggerated shrug. “It ain’t smack if it’s real. I run circles around him on the field, and he knows it.”
As they glided to a stop at the entrance of the school, Jacob unbuckled his seatbelt, gathered his backpack and baseball glove, opened the truck’s passenger door, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He turned to his father and said, “Coach says all the time, ‘It ain’t the glove. It’s the hand.’ I don’t need no new glove, Dad.”
“You don’t need a new glove,” Nathan corrected.
“That’s what I said.” After the door slammed shut, Jacob disappeared into the mass of students, but the aroma of aftershave stayed.
8
Lying on his back underneath the conveyor system he was disassembling, Nathan saw only a worn pair of Red Wing work boots and the legs of blue work pants, but the distinctive vo
ice calling his name told him Ronnie had walked up.
With a kick of his feet, he rolled the shop creeper from under the machine and looked up from his supine position into the glare of the overhead factory lights. Ronnie’s white short-sleeve shirt, stained from ink pens, machine grease, and coffee contrasted against his black arms and face. The top button of his tieless collar gaped open. A collection of pens gathered in the shirt pocket, ready to add notes to the neatly organized reports in the bulging notebook he carried.
When visitors from the corporate office came, his shirts were clean and pressed. A tightly knotted tie hung from his neck. Slacks replaced the work pants. A sport coat indicated the visitor was an executive.
The break room buzzed with a perpetual debate. Did he dress up to impress the bosses? Or did he dress down on other days to ingratiate himself with the worker bees? But Nathan never wondered. Ronnie was a wrench-turner at heart and was more comfortable in the working-man’s uniform.
“I have bad news, Nathan.”
Nathan sat up on the wheeled creeper and planted his work boots on the shop floor. Tension tightened his muscles, and his pulse accelerated as he wiped grease from his hands. He wondered if today was the day his job was being eliminated. “How bad?”
“The parts for the boiler weren’t in this morning’s shipments. Seems they got held up at customs.”
Nathan exhaled slowly, but relief was quickly replaced with a stomach-churning guilt. Every layoff notice Ronnie delivered ripped a piece of his heart from him, graying his already salt-and-pepper hair. In his mind, he failed every employee who lost their job through no fault of their own. His job was to protect them by running the factory as profitably as possible.
Along the same vein, Nathan took great pride in keeping the aging equipment running. A broken-down machine meant someone was sent home early, their pay shrunk even though they had done nothing wrong.
“Customs? I thought they made those parts in Alabama.”
“Not anymore. Nothing is made in the good old USA anymore. Cheaper crappy Chinese parts now, so the idea must have made some accountant giddy.” Ronnie fiddled with the stacks of reports in his hands. “You thought I was over here to lay you off?”
Caught, Nathan could only shrug. “It’s Friday.”
Ronnie smiled sheepishly and shook his head. “They don’t do layoffs on Fridays anymore. Some stuffed shirt in HR came up with this brilliant strategy that it was bad for morale to do layoffs on Friday.”
“They think the problem with morale is when they tell people they’re unemployed?”
“They aren’t worried about the feelings of the people they fired, just the ones left. Something about ‘people will talk about it all weekend,’ so you do reductions earlier in the week so you can manage the chatter.”
Nathan shook his head in disgust. “I guess I should have gone to college so I could understand crap like that.”
“I think college just teaches how to spew garbage with a straight face.” Ronnie shrugged. “Anyway, the good news is the parts cleared customs and are on a truck to the FedEx depot now, but they won’t get delivered until tomorrow morning—around eight, nine at the absolute latest.”
The bad news wasn’t the delay but that the parts were arriving on a Saturday. With corporate visitors coming Monday morning, Nathan knew the answer before asking, “So you want me to fix it first thing Monday or come in over the weekend?”
The echo of clacking machinery from the distant end of the building muffled Ronnie’s quiet reply. “Sorry, but the vultures are here Monday morning. Can’t have anything down while they are in the building. Hate to ask, but I need you tomorrow.”
Of course that was the answer. No surprise. And he would work simply because Ronnie asked. The question was how to balance his desire to be with his son. “Jacob’s ballgame starts at two. If I get here at seven and shut everything down, I can get the old parts torn down by nine. Take an hour or so to install the new parts. Give me another hour to power up and run tests. I should be done by eleven and still make Jacob’s game.”
Relief spread over Ronnie’s face. He bled for every employee, past or present, but the bond with Nathan was special, more family than business. “I’ll have the door open by seven and fresh coffee brewed. Hell, I might even stop at Abe’s and get some of Martha’s homemade biscuits. Help you get started and then head to the office so I can keep an eye out for the packages to come through the gate. As soon as they get here, I’ll hustle the parts out to you.”
“Fred can’t watch for them?” At sixty-seven years of age, Fred wasn’t much of a physical threat as a security guard, but he could sign for packages on weekends.
Ronnie looked down at his boots, studying one speck of grease among the many. “Fred’s gone. The sons of bitches cut the security budget.”
“Jesus. Poor Fred. How they gonna keep people from stealing stuff on the weekend? At least he could call the police if he saw anyone who wasn’t supposed to be here just walking in.”
“The geniuses think a padlock and chain on the gate will do it. They said there’s nothing of value to steal.”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “The copper thieves will love that.”
Copper in electrical wires could be easily stripped and sold to recyclers who melted it down and manufactured new wire, making it a prime target for anyone trying to make enough money to buy illegal pain pills. Some people risked electrocution to steal copper wire from live street lights, so jumping a fence and ripping out wires from disconnected machinery was easy in comparison.
“You try convincing the damn bean counters. The copper doesn’t show up as a line item, so they can’t figure out it’s inside the machines. These are the same geniuses who look at people as costs.” Ronnie waved his hand toward the people working hard on the assembly line at the other side of the cavernous building. He took a deep breath and shook his head, an attempt to keep his frustration in check. “You need an extra hand getting the work done tomorrow?”
“How about Carl? He could use a few dollars.”
Ronnie loosed a mirthless chuckle. “And get in trouble with both the accountants and the soulless wonders in HR? They would tell me how I cost us money because I restarted some stupid unemployment benefit clock. I wish I could, Nathan, I really do. But I meant me. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me as your helper.”
“Because they pay you a salary, so you working on a Saturday doesn’t cost them a penny?”
“See? You don’t need college to be executive material. With that logic, all you have to do is lose your heart, sell your soul, and you, too, can make the big bucks.”
“No, thanks. I prefer working for a living.” Nathan grinned at the old joke. “I’ll take your help, but don’t slow me down, old man.”
The return smile was genuine, the ease of banter. “Don’t even go there, son. I’ve forgotten more about boiler repairs than you will ever know.”
“That’s what I’m worried about—everything you’ve forgotten about real work since you became management,” Nathan shot back. “You and Dad probably put this old thing in, didn’t you, Ronnie?”
“Yep. That’s why it lasted so long.”
“Funny. I was going to say that’s why it’s falling apart.”
Both men laughed. After honing his skills in the Navy, Ronnie had installed and repaired more manufacturing equipment than Nathan had ever seen—including, ironically, being sent by the company to install equipment in China and unwittingly helping to move so many jobs overseas. In turn, he taught Nathan everything he knew.
“We’ll put you to the test tomorrow and see how much you remember,” Nathan said.
“Deal. Just don’t slow me down, youngster.”
Nathan stood and scanned the building, planning the rest of his day out loud. “I got parts to harvest off these old conveyors anyway. The machines on Line Five aren’t going to last much longer. And I can attack that old press to see what I can salvage off of it. We’ll need those parts sooner
or later.” He gestured at the pile of what they called “carcasses” in one corner of the plant—old machines that had been decommissioned as layoffs reduced the plant employee count. Those machines coughed up parts needed to keep the remaining production lines running. Nathan tried hard to buy supplies only when absolutely necessary.
The smile on Ronnie’s face faded. “Sorry, Nathan, but no overtime. The bean counters are all over me about that.”
“But how am I supposed to fix that machine tomorrow without overtime?” Nathan’s voice trailed off. He knew how. The only way to stay below forty hours this late in the week was obvious. “That’s not fair.”
Ronnie did his best to paint a stern face, but the hurt in his eyes betrayed him. He was powerless to fight the corporate office. He wiped at a coffee stain on his shirt. “Accountants suck, but you don’t want to appear on one of their damned lists, particularly with the suits here Monday. You know as well as I do that the only thing that happens when they show up is there are less of us around.”
Nathan nodded. He did understand how that worked. “Same idiots as last time?”
“New idiots.” Ronnie glanced around to make sure no one was listening.
No risk in that—people in a dying factory knew to avoid management as much as possible. No one wanted to be remembered when it came time to draw up the next layoff list.
“The people coming Monday are from Ireland or something.”
“Ireland?”
“Yeah. The venture-capital moneybags who bought the company a couple of years ago have this big plan to do some sort of merger so the company will be headquartered in Ireland. Something about taxes—I don’t know. Anyway, since they closed the McKinnon plant, they need us for a while.”
“I thought that work went to China or something.”
“Vietnam. Can you believe they think China is too expensive? Go figure that one out. But no, they closed McKinnon because of some EPA regulations. They were going to have to replace the scrubbers and retool the waste-water plant. It was cheaper just to close it down and move the work.”
“So, what does that have to do with us?”