Friday came. I ordered the hot dogs, and I did not say one word about Blake.
Not one. Ronnie and I sat at that food court table fifty minutes and talked about his boy’s shoulder and whether the Rays are going to be anything, same as every Friday since 2009.
I want that on the record, because about nine people have asked what I said to him, and the answer is nothing, and two of them were disappointed in me about it.
Here is why.
Ronnie Etheridge pushed carts on my crew in 1996 when he was seventeen and his mother was sick. I moved him to receiving so he could get the shift differential, and he stayed four years and put himself through Edison on it.
He is a commercial lender now and he does not owe me a thing, and the day I use a Friday hot dog to lean on a man about somebody’s boat loan is the day that plaque in Fort Myers is a lie.
It says Integrity on it. My crew picked that word, not the company.
There is a paragraph that goes with it. They read it at my party in 2019 and I did not hear it, because I was in the men’s room having a minute, and I never asked to see it.
Ronnie has it framed in his office. Six years, and I did not know until my daughter told me in October.
Pete Marchetti ran this dock for nineteen years. In that time he never once let a man take the blame for a mistake he made himself, and he never once took the credit for a save that belonged to somebody else. We asked for a plaque with the word Integrity on it because we could not think of anything else that covered it and we are not writers.
Jenny is the one who broke, and it was not that Friday, it was the Sunday after.
She called at nine at night, cried a while, and then said the sentence I had waited five years for, which was, I should have said something at that table.
She had her own conversation with Blake. I do not know what was in it and I am not going to ask.
He called me in November. Twenty-two minutes, eleven of them talking around it, and then he got there. It was not a good apology. It was his, and he drove over on a Tuesday to make it in person after, which counted for more than the call did.
He has not made a forklift joke since. He introduced me at a boat show in February as his father-in-law who ran a receiving operation for thirty years. He had the terminology wrong, and he had gone and learned some terminology, and I let him have it.
Ronnie and I still eat Fridays. He still calls me Boss and I have quit correcting him.
Blake forgot that loans in this town get signed by people. What he did not know is that the man who signs them learned everything he knows about people on my dock, and the first thing I taught him was that you do not use a dock to settle something at a dinner table.