Chapter 6 - The Fall of the Prodigal Son
The warehouse at Bay 4 smelled of diesel exhaust, industrial floor wax, and the damp, metallic tang of the East River.
It was three-fifteen on Thursday morning. A driving sleet rattled against the corrugated steel roof like handfuls of buckshot.
From the observation catwalk forty feet above the floor, I stood in the shadows, wrapped in Frank’s old wool hunting coat, my bare head covered by a dark knit beanie. Beside me stood Sal Moretti, the plant manager who had started as Frank’s first mechanic back when Vance Logistics was just a dream on a napkin.
Down below, the automated conveyor line hummed relentlessly.
Jackson was halfway through his eight-hour shift. He was dressed in high-visibility orange overalls and steel-toed boots that were already scuffed and grey with road salt. His face was covered in a film of sweat and black soot from the diesel lifters. He was lifting forty-pound crates of automotive components from the roller line and stacking them onto wooden pallets, four high, four across, according to the shipping manifests clipped to his clipboard.
His hands were wrapped in athletic tape where the heavy cardboard had split his skin. Every time he hoisted a crate, his face twisted in raw, unadulterated pain. His breath billowed in white plumes in the unheated warehouse.
A heavy-set forklift driver named Big Mike slammed his rig to a halt beside Jackson’s station, spitting a stream of dark tobacco into a plastic cup.
"Hey, college!" Mike barked over the deafening whine of the conveyor belts. "You're leaning that corner pallet! You drop twenty crates of transmissions on my bay floor, and I'll make you sweep the grease with your tongue! Re-stack it!"
Jackson dropped the crate he was holding. He stood there, his chest heaving, his shoulders trembling with exhaustion. For a terrifying second, I thought he was going to throw the clipboard at Mike’s face. I saw the old, arrogant Jackson—the Jackson who dined at Le Bernardin and threw his black Amex down like confetti—rise up behind his bloodshot eyes.
He took a step toward Mike, his hands balling into fists.
"Jackson," Sal murmured beside me on the catwalk, his hand resting on the steel railing. "Don't do it, kid."
Jackson froze. He looked at Mike’s massive, calloused hands resting on the steering wheel of the forklift. He looked at the forty other men working along the line—men with families, men who had done this six nights a week for twenty years without complaining, men who didn't have an Eleanor Vance waiting in a Park Avenue penthouse to rescue them when they bruised their egos.
Jackson let out a ragged breath that sounded like a sob.
He didn't yell. He didn't drop his father’s name.
He bent his knees, picked up the bottom crate, pulled it off the leaning stack, and began rebuilding the pallet from the bottom up, his movements slow, mechanical, and disciplined.
Big Mike grunted, popped the forklift into reverse, and sped down the bay aisle, leaving Jackson alone in the cold glare of the halogen lights.
"He's got Frank’s back," Sal said softly, not looking at me. "His hands are soft as butter, and his pride is bleeding out of his nose, but he hasn't missed a punch-in. He showed up fifteen minutes early every night this week."
"Does he know you talk to me?" I asked, my voice muffled by the collar of Frank’s coat.
"I'd rather jump into the East River than tell him," Sal chuckled dryly. "He thinks I hate him. He thinks I'm riding his ass because I want him to quit."
"Keep riding him, Sal," I said, watching my son wipe grease from his forehead with the back of his taped wrist. "If you go easy on him, you kill him. He needs to know what an honest dollar weighs."
"He's living in the back room by the boiler, Eleanor," Sal added, his tone growing serious. "It’s thirty-five degrees in there when the north wind blows. He’s eating canned soup and stale rolls from the lunch wagon."
I gripped the cold steel railing of the catwalk, feeling every one of my sixty-eight years deep in my bones. My heart screamed at me to bring him home. Every maternal instinct I possessed wanted to wrap him in a cashmere blanket, put a bowl of hot stew in front of him, and tell him that the world was soft and forgiving.
But that was the lie that had brought Natalie into our lives. That was the indulgence that had allowed him to watch his mother’s head shaved clean and look away.
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"Let the north wind blow, Sal," I said quietly, turning away from the railing and heading toward the metal stairs. "A cold room builds an honest man."
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