Friday morning, I got up at five thirty like I have since 1997, took the bus down Genesee, and stood at that front door before the lights came on, and I was not there for my job.
Sophie Kaminski asked me to meet her there. She is eighty-three and she called Thursday night and said, be at the shop at six forty and do not say anything to Martin.
She had a key. Of course she had a key. Her husband’s name is on the building.
We stood in that front room in the dark and she gave me a book.
A wage book. Green cloth, ruled columns, and Stanley Kaminski kept the payroll in it in his own hand from 1974 until his eyes went in 2011.
She had it open to 1998, the bad year, when the mill let four hundred men go and nobody in Utica was bringing in a suit.
My line is paid every week. Every single week, in ink.
His own line for eleven weeks that spring says nothing at all.
And out in the margin beside the fourth blank one, in pencil, in that little crabbed hand of his:
Pay Lena first. If it comes to it, I can eat at my sister’s, but if that girl leaves this shop there is no shop, only a building with equipment in it. Do not let Martin find this book and get ideas about being generous. It is not generous. It is arithmetic.
Sophie let me sit on the customer bench with it.
Then the lights came on, and Marty was inside, and it was ten till seven on court day.
The tunnel had run all night on the shirts. Shirts, it does fine. But there were eleven suits on that rack for court day, and a tunnel finisher will not put a crease in a wool trouser and will never in this world do a lapel, and Marty had found that out around four in the morning.
I did not go in and press them. Sophie would not have let me and I would not have done it.
She gave him the book on the counter with the lawyers starting to come in the door.
Here is what she did that I did not expect. She did not take the shop from him. She is not going to and I told her not to and she had already decided.
What she did was buy me two boards and a press and put them in the back of Odetta’s tailor shop on Bleecker. It is my name on the window, and Marty sends me every suit that comes through his door, because his machine cannot do them and both of us know it.
He pays my invoice on the tenth. He has never been late and has never said one word to me about any of it, and I have stopped waiting for him to.
Judge Battaglia found me in six days. Most of them did.
Marty called his father’s people strays. His father wrote down in 1998, in pencil, in a book nobody was ever supposed to read, that it was not charity and it was not sentiment. It was arithmetic, and his son had never learned to do the sum.