I got up early and headed back to that yard before opening, and I let myself in with my key, and I went straight to the loading dock, where the camera looks down over the bay, and to the office where I have kept the real books for thirty-two years.
Because that chain manager, so eager to trim the old-timers, never checked the seasonal kid, and never looked at the one camera that watches every pallet that comes and goes.
My ledger showed the pallet of decking signed in and accounted for, and the dock camera showed the seasonal kid loading that very pallet onto his own truck at the end of his shift, plain as morning, the boy the manager never so much as questioned.
I copied the footage and I took the ledger, and I waited for the cookout Friday, because the founding family were driving in, and they were the ones who needed to see it.
The old family started that yard fifty years ago, before they sold to the chain, and they still cared. When the manager rose to say his cold few words about my thirty-two years, I asked the family to look at something first.
They looked. The ledger. The dock. The kid, the pallet, his truck.
The founding family were not smiling anymore, and not at me. They had the chain office on the phone before the burgers were off the grill, and the manager who threatened me with the sheriff was gone by Monday, and the seasonal kid with him.
The chain, embarrassed to its bones, asked me back, with the raise I had been owed for years. I took it, on my terms. I still know every board foot and every account in that place.
The decking the kid took was recovered from his yard at home. My name came out clean.
I thought a long while, that first dark night, about just signing the paper and going quiet. That is what a man like that counts on, that an old worker is too tired or too proud or too afraid to fight, and will slink off and let the lie stand. I nearly did. I am glad I did not. A name is the one thing you carry your whole life, and I was not going to hand mine to a stranger over a thing I never did.
The young folks coming up watched the whole of it play out, and I hope they learned what I learned the hard way. Keep your own records. Trust your own hands. And when a person with a title tries to make you carry the blame for a thing you never did, do not put your name on their paper until the truth has had its say. The truth is slow sometimes. But it keeps, and it comes around.
Thirty-two years I kept those books honest, and they tried to end me over one pallet on another man watch. It turned out an old family, and my own careful ledger, and a camera over the dock would not let it stand.