I had two hundred dollars, a seven-year-old daughter, and a pink slip with my name spelled wrong.
Benjamin Caldor. An o where the e should be. Fourteen years pouring brake housings at Brenner Castings, and the last piece of paper they ever handed me was a typo.
The meeting took four minutes. I know because the clock above the door in the HR office was one of those loud ones, and I counted the ticks instead of listening. A woman from the regional office did the talking. She had a lanyard and a head cold and a box of tissues she kept touching but never used.
"This is in no way a reflection on your performance," she said.
"Then what's it a reflection on?"
She looked at Walt Prusik. Walt had been my foreman for nine of those fourteen years. He'd stood up at my wedding. Right then he was studying the carpet like he planned to buy it.
"Restructuring," Walt told the carpet. "Second shift's done, Ben. All of it."
All of it turned out to mean sixty-one people. They had us in fifteen at a time, which is why the woman with the lanyard needed four minutes and not forty. She slid an envelope across the table. Two weeks' pay, insurance through the end of the month, and a pamphlet about navigating transitions with a sailboat on the front.
I said thank you. I don't know why. You say thank you when someone hands you something, I guess, even when it's the end of your life.
In the parking lot I sat in my car with the engine off and did the math on the back of the sailboat.
Rent was already a week late. The car payment was due on the ninth. Two weeks' pay minus those two things left me, after I squinted at my banking app and squinted again, two hundred and eleven dollars and forty cents.
Call it two hundred. The eleven-forty was going on milk.
Hector Ruiz from the pour line knocked on my window on his way out. He held up his own envelope. "They spell yours right?"
I showed him.
"Caldor," he said. "Sounds like a wizard." He turned his around so I could read it. Hector Ruis. With an s. "Eleven years," he said. "Eleven years, and I'm a Ruis."
He patted the roof of my car twice, the way you'd pat a horse, and walked to his truck, an old Ford with a peeling magnet on the door from some electrical outfit I'd always figured was a cousin's. I watched him sit in it, too. Neither of us drove off for a long time.
Maisie stays with Mrs. Ocampo on the first floor after school, and on work nights she sleeps on her couch until I get off at ten-thirty and carry her up. Mrs. Ocampo is eighty-one, watches game shows with the volume at forty, and believes children should be allowed one soda a day for the bones. I've stopped arguing.
I got there at three-fifteen, when I should have been on the pour line. Mrs. Ocampo opened the door, saw my face, and said, "Ay. No."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. Your shirt is inside out."
It was. I'd put it on that way at ten in the morning, when they called second shift in early for a meeting they wouldn't explain, and nobody at Brenner had said a word, not even the woman with the cold.
"She went up," Mrs. Ocampo said, before I could ask. "She said she had business."
We live in 3B at Linden Court, a brick building on Fourth Street that leans a little toward the river like it's listening for something. The stairwell smells like somebody's cumin and somebody else's wet dog. I climbed slower than I needed to. I was trying out sentences.
Maisie, Daddy's job is done. No.
Maisie, the factory doesn't need me anymore. Worse. She'd ask why, and I'd have to say I didn't know, and she hates it when grown-ups don't know things.
The door was unlocked. She was at the kitchen table in her school sweater and her knit hat, the green one with the lopsided pompom that she wears indoors because she says her ears get nervous. Her crayons were lined up in an order only she understands. Some kind of ranking, nowhere near rainbow, and the good orange always goes first.
"You're early," she said, without looking up.
"I am."
"Did you get fired?"
I stood there with my keys in my hand. "Who taught you that word?"
"Kayden's dad got fired. He came home in the daytime too, and Kayden got pizza on a Tuesday." She looked up at me with enormous hope. "Is it pizza?"
"It's not pizza."
"Oh." She went back to her drawing, unimpressed with my parenting. "Then you got laid off. Kayden says laid off is the nice one."
I sat down across from her. The pink slip was in my shirt pocket, which was on the outside of my shirt, and I could feel it there like a hot coin.
"Yeah, baby," I said. "I got laid off."
She drew for a while. Two people holding hands in front of a building with a lot of smoke coming out of it. One was very tall and had what I hoped was a beard. The other wore a green hat.
"Is that the factory?"
"It's a castle," she said. "The smoke is because there's a dragon. Don't worry, he's on our side."
"Good to know."
She switched to the good orange and colored the dragon's fire with her tongue poking out the side of her mouth. Then she said, in exactly the voice she uses to tell me a permission slip needs signing:
"Mom called."
The room went very quiet. Even the fridge seemed to hold off humming.
Dana had been gone eleven weeks. She'd left a note on the fridge about needing room to breathe and a phone number in Tucson. She called Maisie on Sundays, on the old tablet with the cracked corner. It was a Thursday.
"What did Mom say?"
Maisie pressed down hard with the orange. It snapped. She looked at the two halves for a second, and I watched her decide not to cry about it, which is a thing I've seen her do more in eleven weeks than in the whole seven years before.
"She said she's not coming back this time," Maisie said. "She said to tell you she means it." She held up half a crayon, inspecting the break. "Can we have pancakes for dinner?"