My Father Went to Prison for Their Money, So I Married Their Heir novel · Chapter 14 of 32
Chapter 14: The Union Hall
The Local 1244 union hall had a basement with a hundred folding chairs, a coffee urn.
A portrait of the founder with a coat of dust on its frame.
I had worked upstairs in the office for six years.
I had never once stood at the front of that room.
By seven the next Monday morning every chair was full, and men and women were standing along the cinderblock walls with their coats still on.
They were the retirees.
I knew most of them by their first names, and the rest by their husbands'.
Opal sat in the front row with her purse on her knees.
Winston's notice had gone out on Friday, on company letterhead, with the same polite sentence I had typed a hundred times for other people's bad news.
Due to continued market pressures, supplemental health benefits for fund retirees will be suspended effective the first of the month.
That meant the clinic.
It meant the little blue pills that kept one old man's heart going.
A widow's dialysis, and the shuttle van that took the oldest ones to the doctor.
A man in the third row stood up before I had spoken.
"We all know whose girl she is," he said loudly. "Whose girl and whose wife. Why's she standing there? Which side is she on?"
A mutter went through the room.
I felt Beau, by the door, go still.
He had come in last and stood in the back with his arms crossed, and I had told him not to speak.
"I'm on the side that's standing here," I said. "I'm Amos Braswell's daughter. You can call me that."
"The thief's," said the man.
"The treasurer you trusted for nineteen years." My voice carried. "He made your pension checks, and he knew every one of you by your dog's name. And eleven years ago somebody took nine point four million dollars from this room, and my father paid for it, and none of you got a cent back."
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