Craig Fired Me Before The Last Truck Left The Yard

Craig put my severance packet on a stack of yellow count slips.

That bothered me before the firing did. Those slips belonged at the dock. Each had a small box beside the count. You left it empty until you had checked the load yourself.

"We're moving forward without you, Layla," he said.

It was Tuesday. The merger closed Friday. Three days, after sixteen years of fixing loads other people had booked wrong.

At forty-four, I had brown skin, dark eyes, and a thick black braid with a silver streak above my left ear.

Craig Haller was fifty, white, broad through the chest, with a pink scalp, a tight blond haircut, and a golf polo stretched over his belly.

He wore a different golf polo each day. He called that dressing for the customer.

I was the logistics coordinator at Cedar Signal Freight in Detroit. I knew which dock door stuck when the river wind turned cold. I knew which drivers needed a bathroom before they needed a signature. Craig knew how to say those things cost too much.

I was Lebanese American, born and raised in the city. On weekends as a girl, I had counted bolts in Dad's shop while he fixed scales. He paid me to find errors, even when the errors were his. I had expected office work to follow the same rule.

"What's the reason?" I asked.

Paula Rusk from human resources stared at the folder in her lap.

"Position eliminated," she said.

"My position is on the merger staffing chart."

"Charts change," Craig said. "Don't make this ugly."

He tapped the packet. Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars, less taxes. Eight weeks of health coverage. A release that ran fourteen pages.

"Sign today and you're covered," he said. "You have a boy to think about."

My son, Sam, was sixteen. My husband, Daniel, had been dead four years. Craig had learned both facts when I needed two days off for a hospital bill appeal.

He used facts the way some men used elbows.

"I'll have someone read it."

"It's standard."

I put the packet in my bag.

Through the office window, a driver waited beside a trailer with its red seal still on. I had cleared that load at eight. It would sit there now until someone found the right receipt.

"Your badge," Craig said.

I laid it on his desk. I kept my little pad of yellow count slips. I had bought that pad myself for three dollars.

Paula walked me out.

"I'm sorry," she said near the stairs.

"Was my work the problem?"

She looked back toward his door.

"Read every page."

I did not take company files. I did not send myself a list of customers. My lunch bag held lentil soup, an apple, and the spoon Sam always forgot to put away.

Outside, trucks groaned along Fort Street. Salt dust lay in the cracks by the gate, though the morning was dry. I sat in my car until my hands stopped shaking.

Then I called my sister.

"He fired me," I said.

Mira let out one hard breath.

"Don't sign anything. Call Nora."

"I know."

"Does he know about Fourth Bay?"

"I don't think he ever asked my maiden name."

Fourth Bay Service was my father's company. Elias Haddad had fixed truck scales and dock plates in a rented shop near the Rouge. After he died, Mira and I sold the shop building but kept the company.

Dad had kept little yellow slips, too. When a driver gave him a number he could not check, he drew an empty square beside it.

"An empty box is honest," he used to say. "A wrong number gets somebody hurt."

Six weeks earlier, Fourth Bay had paid $296,000 for an investment through a loan broker. Our lawyer, Nora Bell, had checked the records before Mira and I approved it. The money came from the shop sale, after Dad's estate had closed.

It was a large check. We had both slept badly afterward.

Now Mira said, "Nora called this morning. Something came in from a title office."

I looked across the lot at Craig's warehouse. Water had left dark tracks below the gutters.

"I'll call her."

At home, Sam's shoes lay across the kitchen doorway. There was a spelling quiz stuck to the fridge from years before. Daniel had put it there. Neither of us had moved it.

I set the severance packet on the table and read the release.

Page eleven covered claims held through businesses I owned or managed. An extra signature line asked me to sign in that role, too.

There was nothing standard about it to me.

Nora called before I reached page twelve.

"Did you authorize a reduced payoff?" she asked.

"No."

"Did Mira?"

"No."

My phone chimed. Nora had sent a PDF marked DRAFT SATISFACTION OF MORTGAGE.

The amount was $140,000.

Below it was my father's signature.

He had been buried for three years.