The Imperfect Marriage novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Fall
I looked at the man who had sent me a bribe in an envelope and an eviction in a note.
"No number," I said.
"Everyone has one."
"Not me. Not today."
I said it into the microphone, because Faith had left it live on the stand, and the speakers carried it over the whole slip.
"No number," came back off the water.
He turned his head and saw what I had seen already.
Two hundred of his own workers stood in a half circle around the foot of the stage.
They did not look angry.
They looked like men and women who had just heard what their boss thought of them.
A big man in the front row, with a welding scar on his jaw, took off his hard hat.
"Two hundred hands," he said.
It was not loud.
"Is that what you call us?"
"I was speaking figuratively," said Lowell's father.
"You were speaking in your own voice. I have worked for you for twenty-two years."
Somebody in the back began to boo.
It was a low, ugly sound, and it spread.
It spread row by row.
Soon it filled the slip and rolled out over the harbor.
Lowell's father stood in his camel coat and looked for someone to give the order that would make it stop.
No one gave it.
"You have to be reasonable," he said. "I built this yard."
"They built it," said the executor, clearly, from the stage.
She had put down the champagne and picked up her gavel.
"I have a petition before me," she said. "It was filed by a man whose own recorded words show he bought a sick man's mortgage to force a wife to lie under oath."
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