Chapter 9 - The First Winter
Winter came to the Hudson Valley in the second week of November with an early, wet snow that stuck to the bare oak branches and turned the gravel roads to gray slush.
In the warehouse on Dock Street, the temperature never rose above fifty-five degrees. The space was enormous—forty thousand square feet of corrugated steel, filled with ten-foot racks of cast-iron impellers, brass prop nuts, hydraulic hose couplings, and drums of marine lubricant that smelled of sulfur and dead fish.
At the small plywood desk near the overhead loading door, Dalia Holt sat on a metal stool that had lost one of its rubber feet, causing it to wobble with an irritating clack-clack whenever she shifted her weight.
She was wearing three layers: a thermal undershirt, a gray fleece jacket with a grease stain across the left pocket, and a pair of fingerless knit gloves that were black with carbon dust around the thumbs.
In front of her sat a stack of carbon-copy packing slips, a clip-board, and an industrial electronic scale.
“Holt!” a voice barked from the aisle.
Frank Miller—sixty-two years old, with a belly like a beer keg and a gray beard trimmed close as wire—walked up, dropping a twenty-pound crate of bronze shaft couplings onto the scale with a deafening thud.
“Check the lot numbers on those four-inch sleeves,” Frank said, wiping his nose with the back of a greasy canvas glove. “The distributor in Jersey says they sent the marine grade, but the weight looks light. If they’re the commercial brass, send ’em back on the five o'clock truck.”
Dalia didn't roll her eyes. She didn't sigh dramatically. She didn't mention her migraines, her visual communications portfolio, or the gallery review in Brooklyn that had taken place three weeks ago without her.
She picked up the digital calipers from the desk.
Her hands—once so pale, so manicured, with their eighty-dollar acrylic tips and diamond dust polish—were red and chapped from the cold air and the solvent she used to clean the parts. Her cuticles were rough. There was a thin, dark line of grease beneath the nail of her left index finger that hadn't come out in three weeks of scrubbing with Lava soap.
She measured the outside diameter of the first coupling.
“Three point nine eight,” she said, her voice raspy from the cold air. “It’s the light alloy, Frank. It’s not the marine bronze.”
Frank looked down at her through his grease-smudged safety glasses. A slow, tiny nod of approval moved his chin.
“Good catch,” Frank muttered. “Mark the slip ‘Rejected – Non-Spec’ and stack ’em on the pallet by the dock. You’re getting faster at this, Holt.”
“Thanks, Frank,” she said.
He walked away, his steel-toed boots thudding against the concrete floor.
Dalia reached into the pocket of her fleece jacket and pulled out a small, crumpled piece of paper: her pay stub from the preceding Friday.
GROSS PAY (40.0 HOURS): $760.00
FEDERAL WITHHOLDING: $58.40
FICA / MEDICARE: $58.14
NYS TAX: $28.12
NET DIRECT DEPOSIT: $615.34
Six hundred and fifteen dollars.
She stared at the numbers.
Four months ago, six hundred and fifteen dollars was what she spent on a Saturday afternoon in SoHo: a pair of leather boots, two cocktails at an outdoor café, and an Uber back to White Plains because her feet hurt.
Now, that slip of paper represented forty hours of lifting fifty-pound boxes of bronze pipe, forty hours of breathing the sulfurous stink of hydraulic fluid, forty hours of being yelled at by truck drivers who didn't care that she had a fine arts concentration from a private college.
She had three thousand two hundred dollars in her checking account at the local credit union—an account her mother could not access because Arthur had personally walked her into the branch and insisted the signature card contain only Dalia’s name.
She was paying Arthur eighty dollars a week for the room in the basement. She had bought her own space heater with her second paycheck; she had spent two evenings scraping the water-damaged drywall behind the cot and painting it with white mold-resistant primer she had purchased at Home Depot with her own cash.
She didn't have an apartment with a dog-washing station. She didn't have an espresso bar in the lobby.
She had a twenty-year-old space heater that rattled when the fan reached high speed, and a shelf of paperback books she had bought for a dollar each at the public library book sale.
Her phone buzzed on the plywood desk.
It was an old iPhone with a cracked screen—she had dropped it on the concrete floor during her second week and couldn't afford the two hundred dollars to replace the digitizer.
Mom [02:14 PM]:
“Dalia, your Aunt Helen is coming over for tea at four. Please try to wash the grease out from under your nails before you come upstairs. It looks dreadful when she sees you like that. And wear that nice blue sweater Vera bought you two years ago.”
Dalia looked at the text.
She looked at her grease-stained thumb.
She picked up the phone, her fingers moving across the cracked glass.
Dalia [02:16 PM]:
“I’m working until five, Mom. And I’m not changing my sweater. Tell Aunt Helen I’m fine.”
May you like
She set the phone face down on the carbon slips.
She picked up the black grease pencil, took the next bronze sleeve from the crate, and marked the polished metal with a heavy, permanent line: REJECTED.
