"It means we're closed today," I told her.
Maisie looked at the pink sheet in my hand. "That's the same thing with a different hat on."
Gloria Mendel heard that. She paused with her car door open, then got in and drove off down Tannery Road, using her blinker at an empty intersection.
I spent the rest of the morning turning people away. Bernadette from the core room. The bike kids with their folded dollar. The bus driver, who'd brought his supervisor. Every one of them looked at the closed hatch and then at me like I'd been caught doing something.
At two o'clock Walt came across the road with the shift behind him, and I had to stand on the step and tell forty people to go home.
Nobody yelled. That was the worst of it. They just nodded and went.
That night we stayed at Teddy's because I couldn't face the stairs at Linden Court. Maisie went to sleep in the treadmill room after all, with a sheet hung up, exactly like Teddy had said. I went out to the shed and sat in Pamela's driver's seat with a coffee can in my lap.
One hundred and forty-three dollars. That's what four weeks of pancakes had left after rent and flour and propane.
I did the list on the back of the pink sheet. Permit, two hundred. Expedited inspection, seventy-five. Fire suppression tag, sixty. Food handler card, fifteen. And a commissary, a licensed kitchen to prep in, at whatever one charged.
Teddy came out at ten with no beer, which had never once happened.
"Brenner's hiring temps," he said. "First shift, packing. Fourteen an hour, no benefits. Starts Monday."
"Teddy."
"Keep the truck. Run it on weekends like a normal insane person." He leaned on the door. "You've got a kid sleeping behind a bedsheet next to my treadmill, Ben."
He wasn't wrong. Teddy almost never is, and he always says it like he's sorry.
"I'll think about it."
"Think fast. They fill those by Wednesday."
He went in. I sat there under the cab light and thought about Rudy's rule two. The fourth Saturday had come, all right, and it had quit me.
The passenger door opened.
Maisie climbed in wearing her pajamas, the purple ones with the cartoon toast on them, and her hat, and Jo's slippers, which were about nine sizes too big. She was carrying her piggy bank in both arms. It's a ceramic pig in a little painted army helmet, and its name is Sergeant, and it is the most serious object in our home.
"You're supposed to be asleep."
"The treadmill made a noise." She set Sergeant on the dashboard, turned him over, and pried the rubber plug out of his belly with her thumbnail. "I heard Uncle Teddy."
"Mais."
"Shh. I'm counting."
She tipped him out. Quarters, dimes, a lot of pennies, one Canadian coin she was very proud of, a button. She counted it twice on the dashboard in the cab light, moving each coin from one side to the other with one finger, her lips moving.
"Four dollars and twelve cents," she said. "The button doesn't count." She pushed the whole pile toward me. "It's a start."
I couldn't say anything. I put my hand over the coins, and she put her hand on top of mine, sticky, and we sat there.
Somebody knocked on the driver's window.
It was Walt. Behind him in Teddy's driveway stood about twenty people. Bernadette. Hector. Guys from the pour line I hadn't seen since the lanyard woman. Darrell Hobbs was not among them, and I noticed, and I'm not proud of noticing.
"Somebody passed a hat in the break room," Walt said. "Then somebody passed a hat at the union hall. Then my wife passed a hat at church, which is technically illegal, I think."
There were envelopes, and bills held with paper clips, and a pickle jar of coins with masking tape on the front, in black marker: FOR THE PANCAKE GUY.
Hector put the jar on the hood. "I wrote the label," he said. "I spelled it right."
Six hundred and twelve dollars. Maisie counted that, too. It took her until nearly midnight and she wouldn't let anybody help.
Gloria Mendel's office was on the second floor of the county building, and she did not seem surprised to see me Monday morning.
"I don't make the rules," she said, before I'd even sat down. "But I know where all the doors are."
She walked me through it. Mrs. Ocampo found the commissary in one call to her friend Lupe at the senior center on Mill Street, who wanted three months up front. All of it came to one thousand and forty dollars. The jar, the can and Sergeant made seven fifty-nine and twelve cents.
"There's no waiver for any of it," Gloria said. "I checked."
That afternoon I walked back through Brenner's gate and signed on as a temp. Same HR office, same loud clock. The kid at the desk printed a badge that said B. CALDOR. I clipped it on. For three shifts I packed brake housings I'd poured into crates while men I'd trained pretended not to see me. The agency paid daily. By Thursday I had two hundred and ninety-four dollars, and Lupe got every cent.
She inspected Pamela on Thursday, after my shift. She checked the hood, the sink, the fridge temperature, the extinguisher tag. She knocked on the generator panel with one knuckle.
"Who did your electrical?"
"I did."
She frowned. "Electrical isn't my department. But get somebody to look at that, Mr. Calder."
"I will," I said. I meant it the way you mean things you plan to do after the next thing.
The permit went in the window on Friday, beside Maisie's crayon sign.
That Saturday the line went past the bus shelter, past Hobbs's Diner, and around the corner onto Mill Street. Gloria Mendel came at ten, in jeans, and paid for one plain pancake and ate it in her car with the windows up so nobody would see.
At ten-forty every phone in the line went off at once.
It made a sound like a flock of birds. People pulled them out of their pockets. The talking stopped from the front of the line to the back, one person at a time, like lights going out down a hallway. Across the road a man came out of Brenner's front office and stood on the step, looking at nothing.
Teddy was in line. I saw him read his screen. I saw his face.
It was an email from corporate. Brenner Castings would be closing its Kessling plant on the last day of December. Production was moving south. Every shift was done, and every job with it.