Fire and ice

7:58 a.m

Shelly wrestled a fifty-five-gallon drum full of Fire onto an oak pallet. The guys in production usually palletized the drums, but this one was a stray that had come from the end of a batch, and it had come up a little light on the scales. It would have to be sent back and either topped off to the proper weight or repackaged into smaller containers. She climbed onto her forklift and guided the forks under the load. She had backed up and started to turn around when a voice behind her said, “Hey!”

It was Drew Long, the Shipping and Receiving supervisor. “Meeting in my office in two minutes.”

“Okay,” Shelly said. “You want me to take this drum back over to-”

“Just leave it there. You can get it after the meeting.”

Shelly eased the pallet to the concrete floor, switched off the electric forklift, and walked to the water fountain. She slurped and swallowed and slurped and swallowed and thought about Matt and the great time they’d had in bed last night. Matt was kind and gentle and attentive to her needs, and he didn’t gripe that she insisted on total darkness. Why couldn’t she have met someone like him fifteen years ago? Instead she pissed her youth away with a string of bad boys whose sole good feature was that they pissed off her mother. That seemed fun at the time, less so now that life kept insisting on teaching her that Mom had been right all along.

“What are you, part camel or something?” Drew said. “We have a meeting, remember?”

She wiped her mouth with her hand and followed him to the office. She was wet from sweat, and the sudden drop in temperature gave her a chill. She hoped the meeting wouldn’t last long. Drew held them only once a month, but he tended to talk a lot. That’s where he got his nickname. Drew Long-winded. People called him that to his face sometimes. It was good-natured teasing, and he didn’t seem to mind. Drew was a nice guy. He was the kind of guy who would say things like don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, or one in the hand is worth two in the bush, or a hundred other corny cliches. Even so, Shelly liked him a lot.

If you counted Drew, there were four full-time employees who worked the first shift in Shipping and Receiving. On very busy days, HR would sometimes send them a temp, but today was not one of those days. Shelly, Hal Miller, and Fred Philips sat on steel folding chairs as Drew wrote topic points on his dry-erase board. There were six topics to be covered. Looked like it was going to be a long one.

She thought again about what Matt had said. A vacation. She hadn’t taken a vacation in so long. When she’d just started at the plant, she and a couple of girlfriends used to take long weekends every couple of months and trek off to find some beach where there was nothing but white sand, warm water, and cold margaritas. When she came back, she’d feel fresh and happy and relaxed for weeks.

But her girlfriends got married and then they got pregnant and they couldn’t get away anymore. Then Shelly bought the double-wide and then the bastards who ran the plant slashed her pay when the market tanked, and now she couldn’t even pay her bills on what she made. Staying here was killing her slowly, but taking even a day off would kill her quickly. Someday that might seem like the better option, but that day wasn’t here yet.