He’d gone to the plant manager in March of ’03 and offered his own name in place of mine. My wife was seven months along with our second and everybody on that line knew it, and Gary was thirty-nine and single and had a brother with a roofing crew who’d take him on. The manager told him it didn’t work that way — you can’t just trade — and then, two weeks later, the list came out and my name was off it and Gary’s was on. He was gone for nineteen months. He came back in ’04 as a new hire at the bottom of the scale, which is why a man who started four years before me retired last month on a smaller number than mine.
The question I finally asked him was why he waited twenty-two years. He said if he’d told me in ’05 I’d have tried to make it even, and there was no even, and it would have sat in the middle of the table between us at lunch every day for the rest of our working lives. He said he’d wanted the lunches more than he’d wanted the credit. Twenty-nine years of a man eating a ham sandwich next to me and deciding, daily, not to say it.
Then he told me the part I wasn’t ready for: the nineteen months on the roofing crew is where he wrecked his shoulder, and the shoulder is why he never went back to school like he’d planned, and he said all of that in the flattest voice you can imagine and then said it was a long time ago and he’d made his choice like a grown man.
I told my wife on a Tuesday. She sat down on the arm of the couch and put her hand over her mouth and stayed like that a while, and then she said we’re having him for dinner, and she has now had him for dinner four times, and she calls him on Sundays. Our daughter is twenty-two and doesn’t understand why her mother cried over a man from the plant. The plant closes for good in March. Gary’s middle name is Alan. I asked him at the second dinner and he laughed at me for asking.
