The envelope was sitting on Mr. Jenkins’s desk when I walked into his office. Plain white. My name written across the front in neat blue ink.
Ross.
No last name. No return address. No stamp. Just my first name, like somebody had copied it off the little plastic tag pinned to my shirt.
“Sit down, Ross,” Mr. Jenkins said.
I didn’t sit down. My stomach had already dropped into my shoes. In my experience, when a boss calls you into his office and tells you to sit down, nothing good comes after it.
“Did you cover somebody’s groceries last Friday night?” he asked. “Around eleven-thirty?”
And that’s when I knew I was in trouble.
Or I thought I did.
My name is Ross Kowalski. I’m forty-nine years old.
I’ve got a wife named Lydia, who I’ve been married to for twenty-two years. I’ve got two kids, Caleb and Maddie, who grow out of their shoes faster than I can buy new ones. I’ve got a mortgage on a three-bedroom house in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that still feels way too big for a house that’s honestly too small.
The roof leaks over the back bedroom when it rains hard. The water heater makes a sound like a dying cow. There’s a crack in the driveway that’s been getting longer for six years.
But it’s ours. And that counts for something.
At least, I used to think it did.
A few years back, the factory I worked at shut down overnight.
I don’t mean that the way people usually mean it. I mean it literally. Overnight.
Carolina Fiber and Thread. We made industrial yarn. Big spools of it, for carpet companies and upholstery shops. I started there when I was twenty-six years old, running a spinning machine on the second shift. By the end, I was a line supervisor with eleven guys under me.
Twenty-three years.
On a Tuesday morning in February, I clocked in at six-fifty like always. I drank my coffee from the machine in the break room, the one that always tasted a little like pennies. I walked the floor. I checked the machines. I yelled at a kid named Tommy for wearing headphones on the line.
At two o’clock that afternoon, a man in a suit I’d never seen before came out of the front office and told everybody to shut down their machines and go to the parking lot.
There were about two hundred of us standing in that parking lot in the cold.
The man in the suit stood on the back of a pickup truck. He read from a piece of paper. He didn’t look up once.
He said the company was filing for bankruptcy. He said all operations were ceasing, effective immediately. He said our final paychecks would be mailed. He said our health insurance would end at the end of the month. He said he was sorry.
Then he got down off the truck and got into a black car and drove away.
By three-thirty, there were chains and padlocks on the front gates.
There was a single piece of paper taped to the chain-link fence. Printed out from a computer. It said the same thing the man in the suit had said, in smaller words.
I stood there and read that piece of paper four times.
A guy named Hector Ruiz was standing next to me. He’d worked there even longer than I had. Twenty-nine years. He was sixty-one. He had two years left until he could retire with his pension.
He stood there reading that paper, and then he sat down on the curb, right there in the parking lot, and put his face in his hands.
I sat down next to him.
Neither one of us said anything for a long time.
Twenty-three years of my life. Gone. Just like that. Taped to a fence.
I tried to find something else right away.
I want you to know that. I didn’t sit around feeling sorry for myself. I’m not that kind of man. My father wasn’t that kind of man, and neither was his father.
I updated my resume for the first time since 1999. Lydia helped me. We sat at the kitchen table at night with her old laptop, and she typed while I talked. Supervised a team of eleven. Maintained a ninety-eight percent safety record. Trained over forty new employees.
I sent it out everywhere. Every factory within sixty miles. Every warehouse. Every distribution center. Every place that had a HELP WANTED sign in the window.
I knocked on doors. I filled out applications on computers at the public library, because our internet at home was too slow. I made phone calls until my voice went hoarse.
