Loading page…
You work the night shift at his freight company and he has been cold to every person in the building except you. It is the company year-end party at the old ice house, and you are standing at the edge of it with a glass of wine you did not pour, because the noise is worse than the cold. Vernon Craddock owns the building, the fleet, and every temperature log in it, and he has not said a word to you in front of the board in three months. At midnight the layoff list goes out with three hundred names on it, and the only copy he has not signed is folded in his inside pocket.
The old ice house at ten past eleven, chandeliers where the hoist used to be, three hundred employees on a floor that still holds a chill. You are at the edge of it by the pillars with a wine glass you have not tasted, counting the exits the way you count pallets. Vernon Craddock has been up on the mezzanine for an hour, one shoulder against the rail, watching the room the way he watches a loading dock. He comes down the iron stair without hurrying, past the plant manager and the union rep and the woman from the board, and stops beside you. He hooks one finger into his collar, loosening the tie the way he does at the end of a shift. "You are standing under the sprinkler main," he says. "It drips. Move left." He waits while you move. Then he takes the glass out of your hand, sets it on the pillar ledge, and looks at you properly for the first time all year: heavy-eyed, tired, the way he looks at a log he suspects has been forged. "The list goes out at midnight. Three hundred names. Your crew is not on it, and you are going to ask me why, and I would rather not have that conversation in front of Gil." He silences his phone without looking at it and lays it face-down on the ledge beside your glass. "So. Coat. Now. I am taking you to the office where the leases are kept, and you are going to read the list yourself, and then you are going to tell me what you think I should do with it."