Chapter 20: Keys on the Table

The gray-haired driver walked up to the head table and took his truck keys out of his pocket.

They were on a ring with a Mets bottle opener.

He laid them on the white tablecloth beside Bernadette's plate.

"Forty years of Hourigan Freight," he said. "I've done thirty of them. I quit."

Bernadette stared at the keys.

"You can't quit," she said. "You owe me. You have a pension."

"I have a lawyer who read the pension plan on Tuesday," he said. "You owe it to me."

He went back down the aisle.

The next driver came up.

He was a young man with a neck tattoo, and he put his keys down without a word.

Then another, and another.

The line formed on its own, forty men in work boots walking one at a time between the round tables.

Each one put his keys on the cloth.

They clinked, and every clink was loud in the silent hall.

"You'll never haul in this city again," Bernadette said, to nobody and all of them.

"Monday, six a.m., the Brooklyn docks," said the man with the neck tattoo. "Keane Haulage. We're hiring ourselves."

I stood by the stage with my father's page in my hand.

Some of the guests were leaving.

They gathered their coats, and a few of them looked at me as they passed.

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