Gerard Fired Me Before the Buyer Finished Touring the Mill

Gerard Mott waited until I had fixed loom nine before he fired me.

The cloth had been coming out with a thin bare line through each blue leaf. Someone had left one hole out of the pattern. I found it on the third card, right where the stem should have turned.

One hole could change a whole field.

At forty-four, I was a white woman with pale freckled skin, gray eyes, and brown hair cut blunt at my jaw.

My job was industrial jacquard programmer. I turned drawings into instructions that told thousands of warp threads when to rise. Most of our looms ran on files now, but I read the old punched pattern cards as easily as sheet music.

I kept one beside my screen. Its missing corner reminded me to check what was absent.

Gerard stood clear of the oil marks on the floor.

Gerard was a white man of sixty-three, tall and narrow, with silver hair combed flat and soft pink hands that never touched the looms.

"Miss Wren," he said. "A word upstairs, please."

He always said please when something had already been decided.

Our mill, Bellwether Figured Cloth, sat in a brick bend above the Blackstone in Pawtucket. Rain had darkened the stone steps. Through Gerard's office window, I could see water sliding past the old loading wall.

A clean table held six coffee cups for the merger team. Mine was a paper cup beside his wastebasket.

"Harbor Span will bring its own systems staff," he said. "Your position ends today."

"Who will finish the hospital curtain order?"

"That will become their concern."

He pushed a document across the desk with two fingers.

It offered $5,000 if I signed a release of every claim against the company. The release included employment claims, ownership claims, and claims I did not yet know existed.

"My last paycheck?"

"Separate, naturally."

"My vacation?"

"Payroll will calculate it."

"And the shares?"

His hand stopped beside the coffee tray.

Then he smiled.

"Tessa. You fix loom instructions. The buyer needs the building, the contracts, and the machines. You own nothing involved in this transaction."

I looked at the release again.

Ownership claims.

There was the missing hole.

Fifteen years earlier, when a bad winter had left us short of cash, Bellwether had owed me $18,000 in earned wages. Gerard had asked me to wait. I had refused another promise and accepted preferred shares under a written exchange agreement instead.

The paper had come in a blue envelope. I still had it.

"May I take this home?" I asked.

"Of course. Have someone explain it, if you wish."

He said that kindly. He even held the door.

Downstairs, Ada Pike had stopped her inspection table. She had worked there thirty-one years and wore finger guards made from old leather scraps.

"They did it?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Before the sale?"

"Nine days before."

She glanced toward the office stairs.

"He still owes our shift the make-up pay. Said the sale would clear it."

For six months, the crews had worked extra hours under a written catch-up plan. Each pay stub showed a small balance carried forward. Gerard called it temporary. The balances kept growing.

"Keep every stub," I said.

"Already do. Biscuit tin."

I cleared my locker without taking a single company file. My mug, my coat, my lunch. I left the repaired pattern on the workbench with the correction marked in red.

Leila Haddow met me at the time clock. She was thirty-eight, Arab American, and the company's accountant. She had joined us eight months earlier. She could find a false total faster than I could find a dropped warp end.

"Did he give you a release?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Don't confuse the offer with the amount you're owed."

"Do you know something?"

"I know the ownership schedule has no opening balance. He told me old records were lost in a pipe leak."

She looked at the dry ceiling above the records room.

"Pipes leave marks."

At home, in my second-floor apartment off Mineral Spring Avenue, I pulled the blue envelope from a box of tax papers.

Certificate A-001. One hundred twenty shares. Issue price: $150 each.

Gerard's signature ran along the bottom beside the old treasurer's name. The back held small type, a seal, and a reference to Article Seven of the company's charter.

I had read that article once at my kitchen table. Then life had filled fifteen years.

I read it again while the kettle cooled.

Before I could finish, my phone rang.

"Ms. Wren?" a woman asked. "I'm calling for Harbor Span's closing counsel. Mr. Mott says your signature is routine. Can you come in tomorrow?"