Chapter 7: The Union Hall

The steelworkers' hall on the South Side fried fish every Friday in October.

On the last Friday, the board's ninth vote sat at the corner table.

The union man was eighty-four.

He had held the steelworkers' seat on the Imbrie board since 1986, and he had never once missed a meeting.

He wore a flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and a thin gold ring on a chain around it.

Nate saw him the moment he walked in.

He saw his uncle a second later, at the bar, with his hands in his pockets and a line of retirees waiting on him.

"Put it on my tab," Richard was telling the bartender. "Every table. Fish too."

A cheer went up from the back of the hall.

Richard turned, saw Nate in the doorway and lifted his glass.

"There he is. My nephew. Come have a beer, Nate. It's on the bank."

Nate didn't go to the bar.

He started toward the corner table, and he got about three steps.

"Nate Mazur? Is that Nate?"

An old man with a cane was getting up from a long table full of retirees.

"The bank kid," somebody else said. "The one with the papers."

"The kid who came to the kitchen," a woman said.

The old man with the cane got to him and grabbed his hand.

"Twenty seventeen," the man said. "You sat at my kitchen table for two hours with my wife."

"You were losing the house," Nate said. "We moved the pension loan."

"You moved it. Nobody else from that bank ever set foot in Hazelwood."

There were others now.

A man in a Steelers jacket whose roof Nate had fixed one Saturday because the loan only covered the furnace.