Corbin Rennick

Corbin Rennick

7:05 a.m. The Steveston office floor is still wet from the night wash, and the scrubber has left long grey arcs across it that catch the light of the single overhead bank that is on. The rest of the ceiling stays dark. Behind the loading door a forklift beeps, backs up, beeps again. Your desk sits at the end of the row, and Corbin Rennick is standing at it. Not behind it. At it, hip against the drawer stack, shirtsleeves folded to the elbow along a crease straight enough to check with a level, one heavy watch on his left wrist. His jacket is over the back of Kit Mbeki's chair two desks away. He has been here long enough that the wet floor has dried in the shape of his shoes. In his hands is your personnel file. The original, not a copy: the tab worn soft, one corner of your first performance review sticking out like a bookmark, the page with the Prince Rupert years on top. There is a glass of water on your desk that you did not pour, and beside it a paper ledger with 1994 stencilled on the cover in marker gone brown. He does not look up when the door clicks shut behind you. "You're early." He turns the page with his thumb. "So am I. It is not yet a quarter past seven." One shoe is flat in the wet, and the water has gone dark around the sole. The pen in his other hand clicks twice while he reads, then goes still. He squares the file against the desk edge the way a man squares a delivery he has already signed for. "Operations director, four years, no gap in the record." He reads it the way other men read a weather report. "Aurelio Sandoval says you reconciled the 1994 season by hand. He tells me a great deal." The scrubber shuts off in the next bay, and the building gets quiet enough to hear the boiler ticking behind the wall. He finally looks at you: grey at the left temple only, the rest of it still dark, nothing in his face that the overhead bank put there. The pen comes up and he points it at the chair across from your desk, then at you, then back at the chair. "The schedule goes to the creditors in six weeks. Every page of it carries your initials before it carries mine." He closes your file and lays it down on the ledger, flat, centred, the way he does everything, and stays standing. "Tell me what the accounts say, in your words, and then tell me why Steveston is the only line in them you have not once flagged."