This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
The news came over the radio in the stockroom, wedged between a stereo commercial and the traffic on the tens, and I stood there with a stack of clean shirts on my hip and listened to a man from the wire service say that somebody had walked out of an armored company's Los Angeles office with more money than I could put a shape to. Eighteen point nine million dollars. I said the number out loud, quietly, the way you test a word in a language you don't speak, and it did not get any smaller in my mouth.
The report said the place was Dunbar Armored. Not ours. Ours was Harrowgate, a smaller outfit with a depot and a fleet of trucks that smelled of the same hot vinyl and gun oil as every other truck in the county. But a thing like that does not stay in its own building. By the time I clocked out, two of the drivers were talking about it by the cage, and one of them, a man who had twenty-two years in, kept saying the same sentence over and over, that this was why you didn't trust anybody, and I did not like the way he looked at the newer hires when he said it.
I had been at Harrowgate six years that fall. I was forty-eight years old and I knew the uniform room better than I knew my own kitchen: the shelves of folded trousers, the rack of coats with the branch patches, the shoebox of spare buttons sorted by size because I had sorted them myself. My job was to keep the people who wore those uniforms looking like they belonged to something. That was the whole of it. It was not a large job, but it was dependable, and dependable was a word I had built a household on.
The notice was in my pay envelope, folded twice, on Harrowgate letterhead. Due to reduced contract volume, effective the first of the month, hours in the uniform department would be cut to twenty-four a week. It did not say for how long. It did not say whose decision it was. It had the flat, careful language of a document written by somebody who had already decided and was only now informing the furniture.
I read it on the bus and then I read it again on the sidewalk outside our building, and then I folded it back into the envelope and put the envelope in my purse, because I did not want to be a woman standing on the street with a piece of paper in her hand.
Hugh was at the table with the classifieds already spread out, which is how I knew he had heard something from somebody. He worked the parts counter at an appliance-supply place, and the men he worked with had wives and cousins all over the trade, and news moved among them faster than it moved through any office. He didn't ask me right away. He waited until I had set down my bag and poured a glass of water and stood at the sink with my back to him.
"How many hours," he said.
"Twenty-four."
He was quiet. I could hear him turning a page, though I don't think he was reading it. "That's not a cut," he said. "That's a door closing with you on the wrong side of it."
"It's a reduction. It says reduced contract volume."
"Nella."
"I know what it says, Hugh. I'm telling you what it says because that's what I've got."
The refrigerator kicked on and filled the room with its noise. Outside, a car went by with its bass turned up, and the window glass buzzed faintly in its frame, and I thought about how little was between us and the street, and how we had always called that enough.
We had bought the van in the spring, a used van with a hundred and ten thousand miles on it, and Hugh had spent a Saturday replacing the belts and another Saturday on the brakes, and we had told each other it was for hauling and for camping and for the day we might need it. It was the only thing we owned outright. Everything else in that apartment belonged to a payment.
"The uniforms," I said.
He looked up.
"The depot sends them out to a shop for alterations and repairs. They pay per piece and they pay slow, but they pay. I know the work. I know what a seam should look like and I know what a superintendent will accept and what he'll send back."
"You'd need a machine. You'd need a place to put it."
"We have the van. It's got the room in back. Weekends, I take in what the depot won't pay to send out, and I bring it back Monday. If it doesn't work, I stop."
Hugh folded the classifieds until the edge met the edge. "And while you're finding out whether it works, what do we live on?" He was not asking to discourage me. I knew that, even then. He had laid out the newspaper because a wage was something he understood how to look for, whereas I had just offered him a van full of torn trousers.
I took the notice out and set it between us. Under the full name, Harrowgate Armored Services, the reduced hours looked even smaller. "Your pay. My twenty-four hours. Whatever I earn on the weekends." I heard the order I had put those things in and wished I had started with mine.
"We ought to write it down," he said. "Rent first. Then the payments. Then what you're spending to start." He pushed the back of an envelope toward me. I wanted him to say I could do it. Instead he was asking what it would cost, which felt less generous and was probably more useful.
We made the list. There was an old sewing machine in our closet, a household machine that skipped when the fabric got thick. There were needles, thread, bags, and fuel to buy. I crossed out bags and wrote clean cartons. Hugh did not argue with the change. He did put the fuel back when I tried to leave it off.
"I'll need the van Saturday," I said when we had finished. "To see who wants repairs."
He looked at the figures, then at me. "Then we aren't going camping."
"Not this weekend." It was the closest I came to admitting that the whole shape of our days had changed. I put the envelope beside the machine in the closet, so I would have to see the numbers before I could get at the work. That night I lay awake listening to Hugh breathe, and planned what I would say to the first person who asked my price.