Chapter 14: The Shop Floor

On Monday at ten to seven, the padlock was still on my mother's gate.

It was a new one, brass and bright, bought by a man who wanted me to see it.

The sign above the gate still said MERROW in iron letters taller than my arm.

Rhodri opened the trunk of his car and took out a canvas bag.

"I didn't know which size you'd need," he said.

Inside were four pairs of bolt cutters, each longer than the last.

"You bought four."

"The man at the hardware store said four was a lot of cutters for one lock."

"What did you tell him?"

"That the lock was in my way."

I took the second-longest pair.

It took me three tries, and on the third the shackle sprang open with a crack, and the gate swung inward on its own weight.

Rhodri put the cutters back in the bag.

"I'll be at the wall by the door," he said. "I won't say a word."

"You promised."

"I did."

Inside, the whistle blew.

My mother had installed that whistle herself, in a year when the plant ran on a single shift, and it blew every morning at seven.

A hundred and forty people came out of the break room and the packing floor.

They stood on the poured concrete in front of the main furnace.

Nobody asked who I was.

They had all known me since I was small enough to be lifted onto the packing tables.

The shift foreman, a gray man with burn scars on both forearms, took his cap off.

"Miss Juliana," he said.

"I'm sorry about the gate," I said.

"It was on the news, Miss Juliana," he said, and several people laughed. "We figured you'd be along."

"I'm going to say a few things," I said. "Then you can go back to work."

I climbed onto the packing table my mother used to stand on.

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