Dominated by My Dad's Boss novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: Closing Day
Uncle Gus moved the closing up by a week.
He called my father on Monday, all warmth and concern, and said the lawyers were ready and the market wouldn't wait.
By Thursday, the whole foundry stood on the pour floor in clean aprons with the furnace banked behind them.
Three hundred people, shoulder to shoulder, in the red dusk of the skylights.
My father stood on a flatbed trailer in a suit that didn't fit him anymore.
Torin stood beside him, calm and tall, with a leather folder under his arm.
Gus stood at the foot of the trailer with his hands folded and his silver head tipped up.
"I want to read you one page," Torin said.
His voice carried to the back rafters without effort.
He opened the folder.
"Renwick Castings employs three hundred and four people today. For thirty-six months after this signature, it will employ three hundred and four people. No layoffs. No transfers out of Cleveland. No cuts to the pension, the health plan or the Christmas ham."
A laugh rolled through the crowd.
"If any of that is broken, the company's chair loses his seat and pays each of you a year's wages out of his own pocket."
He looked up.
"I'm the chair. I wrote it that way."
The roar that followed shook dust out of the girders.
A foreman near the front, a man who'd worked beside my father for twenty-five years, took off his hard hat and wiped his eyes.
I stood at the edge of the crowd with my arms wrapped around myself.
Gus applauded, smiling.
My father picked up a pen.
He didn't read a single line of the stack in front of him.
He signed and turned the page and signed, with the look of a man writing his own name on a stone.
"Dad," I whispered, though no one could hear me.
He didn't look up.
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