Gordon came in early December with the written renewal and a copy of the December Bar article. Celia was at the cutting table. I asked him to sit where we could all see the papers, not by my machine as though the conversation belonged to me alone. He placed the proposed payment schedule on top, but I moved it aside to read the work restriction.
It allowed me to continue servicing the account. Other former armored-company workers could not handle his orders. There was no reference to sewing skill, missed work, or an individual act. Celia read the sentence over my shoulder, then went around the table and sat down. Nobody had to explain which of us it would remove.
"I made the exception clear," Gordon said.
"You made my exception clear," I answered.
He touched the article. "Read this before you decide I'm inventing concerns."
The December account identified Allen Pace III as the convicted organizer and reported a sentence exceeding twenty-four years. It also described attorney David Matsumoto's guilty pleas to six money-laundering counts and one count of assisting a false tax return, his twenty-seven-month federal sentence, and his resignation from his law license with charges pending. I read each part slowly, keeping the reported outcomes separate in my mind.
The account described proceeds moving through a client trust account and checks creating an appearance of wages. That troubled me in a way I had not expected. Wages were the thing I had always understood: time spent, work done, a payment that said the two had met. I looked involuntarily toward our ledger, as though the same word had stained it.
Celia saw me look. "Ours records actual work," she said. "You can pick up the garments. You can see who did it."
"I'm not saying otherwise."
"Then don't let a story about false wages turn ours into something you have to be ashamed of."
Gordon said he was not accusing either of us. He wanted a condition for future work. Celia asked why a condition could deprive her of hours without anybody being willing to name an objection to her. He repeated that the policy applied generally. She pointed to the exception with one finger and left it there until he stopped.
I asked whether ordinary access to our work records, invoices, and purchase receipts would satisfy him. He said those measures could remain, but the restriction would remain too. There was work waiting on our rail under the existing agreement, and for a while we discussed how to finish it. That was easier than looking at the proposed year ahead.
Before leaving, Gordon offered an advance to reserve production capacity while I considered the renewal. I said I would not sign the exclusion that day. He said the advance need not mean acceptance if we documented the refund. Celia asked him to state that in writing, not just across our table.
We wrote a separate acknowledgment: the advance reserved capacity pending a decision, did not itself accept the renewal, and would be returned in full if no agreement was signed by the stated decision date. No work or supplies would be charged against it without another written agreement. Gordon signed it. I signed only after reading it aloud.
"You don't have to take it," Celia said while he put away his pen.
I knew that. I also knew he could leave and reserve another shop. I accepted the payment and gave him his copy of the acknowledgment. It was a choice, not an accident, and the paper did not make it innocent of consequences. I had brought money into the room that offered one of us a place and the other a prohibition.
After he left, I entered the advance separately, marked refundable and untouched. Celia watched me attach the acknowledgment. "I haven't agreed to disappear from your work," she said.
"I haven't asked you to."
"Not yet." She returned to the cutting table. I put the proposed renewal beside the open ledger, where she could read it again without asking permission, and telephoned Hugh to say there was something we all needed to examine before I spent a cent.