Chapter 7
Seven
Faye
“Sorry to hear about your dad.”
“Thanks, Oscar. Thanks.”
“Yeah, he was a tough SOB. Gotta love that old school about him.”
She nodded. Oscar was right. Her dad was a tough SOB, she thought as she walked out of the plant after her shift.
Faye had made this walk every working day for the last twenty-nine years at Jeep.
It was so different from the now-demolished Parkway plant. That place had started as a bicycle factory. That plant was where Bruce had worked and Bruce’s dad Chet, before that.
Boy were they chuffed when Faye had announced she was going to follow in their footsteps.
But she’d done it. And almost thirty years later, she was a valuable member of the team that assembled Jeep Wranglers.
These days, she didn’t have to operate a machine or work a spot on the line anymore.
She also didn’t have to rely on her skills as a tool and die maker. Ha, she hadn’t used that hard-won skill in years. However, she was proud of it. She was a groundbreaker. And she knew it.
These days, Faye was valuable for what she knew, who she knew, and her knowledge of whether a problem was manageable without management.
And she knew how to talk to the guys.
That was her value. Institutional knowledge, they called it.
In the early days, Bruce Kelly’s “getting her in” at the plant was a strike against her. It was a hurdle. Maybe, thanks to being his daughter, she had fewer gross comments from the guys, but then again, they just said stuff quieter, so Bruce didn’t hear.
He was almost embarrassed that she’d gone into the trades. Old school that he was. But in the end, to his last breath, he’d said he was proud. That was something.
She’d started at the plant in 1996, but it may as well have been 1956. Her grandmother had worked on the line in the war, but somehow, that didn’t translate to her generation. By high school, her dad was expecting her to do something more “girly.”
But she hadn’t. Bruce hadn’t talked about his deceased wife, the girls’ mother, but there was an undercurrent that not having a mom meant Faye didn’t know what “girls” were supposed to do.
She hadn’t worried about all that. She’d learned how to talk to the guys by knowing how to talk to Bruce Kelly. He was tough. But also not without charm. He could have been a bigger boss at Local 12, but he always said he didn’t want to deal with all the drama. He was content to be a shop steward at different points.
Because it was drama. The inside of an auto plant was no different from any other workplace in that way.
Plus, there were plenty of other women here now. Though most of the ones she’d come up with were getting ready for retirement. Thirty and out. That was the goal.
Faye didn’t know if it was her goal, but it was a mantra for a lot of them.
She’d met her husband here, worked until she was eight months pregnant here, and divorced her husband here.
The Jeep Plant had changed hands over the years; she started out on Parkway, and that place was gone. These days, she worked at the Toledo North Assembly Plant, where Jeep Wranglers rolled off the line. It was a massive complex, humming with activity and constantly in motion with production and deliveries. But it was also exclusive. While this was a huge employer in their region, you couldn’t get inside unless you were supposed to be inside.
She was proud every time she saw a Wrangler on the road or in a movie. Or anywhere.
Faye didn’t know if thirty and out was her plan. She did know it was a different kind of plant that had become her obsession.
Faye loved to garden. She loved it more than just about anything except her family.
She didn’t mind working the second shift for that very reason. The daylight hours were hers to garden, weed, replant, rake, or do anything else her little patch of backyard seemed to need.
Faye had gone into this work, in part, to get Bruce Kelly’s attention. It was a middle-child move. And now that he was gone, she wondered, what was worth her attention? What did she want to do?
She had the little inheritance from that tough SOB, her dad, and she had a good income here, and a paid-off ranch house in a cute neighborhood. She was going to use some of that inheritance to get a little backyard greenhouse. That could take her seed starting to a whole new level.
That idea was running through her mind when the phone buzzed at nearly midnight as she drove home from work.
“Hey, Faye. You need to get over here.”
“Hey, sis. It’s late. Is everything okay? You’re usually long asleep by this hour.”
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s okay, but I found something while I was cleaning out Dad’s place. I think you need to come look.”
“Now? Tonight?”
“No, it’s not an emergency or anything. It's not life or death, but it’s odd. Crazy even. And there are pictures I think we need to look at together.”
“Odd like, Precious imprisoned in a secret hole in the basement, odd? Or odd, like dad has a secret collection of vintage dental floss?”
“Yeah, no, he’s not a serial killer, and the only thing he collected was coffee cans of nails. Like, why? So many coffee cans of nails. But anyway, yeah, I want to run some paperwork I found by you. And brace yourself for this one: he’s got a box of some of Mom’s stuff he never showed us!”
That last part felt like a bombshell. Ali was underplaying it—but Mom’s stuff!
“Oh wow. No way. Okay, I can do that; how about I bring a couple of bagels from Barry’s for an early lunch? We can eat before I head to work.”
“Perfect.”
They ended the call. Mom’s stuff? They just had that one picture. Faye had so little in her memory to hold onto when it came to their mom.
And this late call didn’t do anything to alleviate Faye’s worries about Ali. Usually, it was the other way around. Ali worried about Faye. Ali worried about Dad. Ali worried about Blair. But right now, Ali was making moves that were so out of character.
Was it Dad’s death that had unmoored the order in Ali’s life? Was it catching Ted in the act?
Ali had worked for years with very little praise and credit from their dad, and she’d replicated that with her husband and her boss. In Faye’s eyes, Ali was the sun, and the people around her all paled in wattage. Ali didn’t see it that way.
But now, her big sister, the responsible bedrock for all the Kelly Sisters, was making very drastic, un-Ali-like moves.
Faye pulled her car into the garage.
She was curious about the paperwork and what Ali found, but she was also tired. The death of their father was long, even though the funeral and services were short.
Maybe that was it. All the Kelly Sisters, from Ali to Blair and Faye in the middle, just needed a reset after a difficult year.
Faye got ready for bed and opened the book on container gardening she was reading.
She wanted to learn how to build a raised bed in her backyard before this spring. She was running out of space and needed to get creative.