The Pickle Works Uniform

My name is Kerri Malone, I am sixty-two years old, and I have worked at the Brine Hollow pickle processing plant for thirty-six years. Thirty-six years of running numbers, running schedules, and running interference between the owner and everybody who actually does the work. Next June I retire, and there is exactly one thing still stuck in my craw, and it happened at a harvest supper twenty-two years ago.

I was twenty-six when I started there, and I was forty the year I brought the idea to Warren Cutler himself. The pickle brine we dumped every season was going out as waste, and I had figured out a way to strain and repurpose it into a line of cooking brines and pickling spices that would cost us almost nothing to produce. I did the math three times. I made a folder. I practiced my speech in the car.

At the supper that year, Warren let me get about four sentences in before he waved his fork at me like I was a fly at a picnic. "That's cute, Kerri," he said, loud enough for two full tables to hear. "We make pickles. Let's leave the fancy stuff to people with fancy degrees." Then he turned back to his corn and my whole career deflated in front of forty people.

Two years later another company launched almost exactly that product line and made a fortune on it. Warren never mentioned it. I never mentioned it. But I kept the folder, and every June I took it out and looked at it, and every June it stung a little less and a little more at the same time.

This year, the last harvest supper before my retirement, I decided to do something about it. Nothing illegal. Nothing cruel. Just a small, pointed embarrassment, the kind a man like Warren would feel for years and could never quite explain to anybody.

***

The stage for the supper gets built every year by whoever the lodge hires, and this year the lodge hired a man named Russ Lane, who is forty-four and builds sets for the little theater in town. I knew his name because he dated my friend Maisie for about six months when he was thirty-two, and Maisie never stopped talking about how handy he was and how decently he treated her after they quit seeing each other, which in Maisie's book made him a unicorn.

I caught him on the lodge porch on a Wednesday in October, measuring the stage frame with a pencil behind his ear, and I laid out my pitch before I lost my nerve. Nothing dramatic. I wanted the sound cues scrambled so that when Warren stood up to give his little speech, the speakers would blast the recording of his own voice from a company training video, the one where he mispronounces the word gherkin four times. Petty? Absolutely. Proportional? Also absolutely.

He listened all the way through, which already put him ahead of Warren, and then he laughed. Not a mocking laugh. A real one, with his head tipped back.

"You've been sitting on this for twenty-two years?" he asked.

"Twenty-two years and eight months," I said. "I don't count the months out loud or it sounds obsessive."

"It is obsessive," he said, still grinning. "I'm in. Free of charge, too, before you get out the checkbook. Consider it a favor, and we settle that part now, before anything else, so there's no confusion later. You buy the coffee, that's the whole deal."

I want to note here that the money never entered the bedroom side of things, because there wasn't a bedroom side of things yet. There wasn't anything. He was a nice man with a pencil behind his ear and I was a woman with a grudge and a folder, and that was the entire relationship at that point.

Then he had to go and complicate everything by telling me about the clause.

"So there's one wrinkle," he said, tapping the measuring tape against his leg. "My lease on the lodge suite has this old stipulation in it. The owner's grandfather wrote it, apparently, back when the lodge did staff housing. Anybody renting the suite who's on the property during the harvest supper has to wear the vintage pickle works uniform. Period costume, full kit. It's in the lease. I read it twice because I thought it was a joke."

"The uniform," I repeated.

"The white jacket, the cap, the whole thing. It's hanging in the suite closet. It's actually in good shape." He shrugged. "A deal's a deal. I signed it, I'll wear it."

I thought about that for the rest of the afternoon, mostly because I was picturing it.

***

We met in the lodge back room on Friday night, the room where the feast gets prepped, all steel counters and good overhead light and the smell of onions from the day's chopping. I brought my folder and my scrambled-cue plan, drawn out on graph paper because I am a plant HR director and graph paper is my love language. Russ brought his tool bag and, because he is apparently a man who honors clauses the way other men honor sports teams, the uniform, folded over his arm in a dry cleaner's bag.

"Try it on now," I said, "so we know there's no surprises Saturday. Nothing worse than a sabotaged sound system and a ripped trouser seam on the day."

He grinned and stepped behind the rack of aprons, and I heard the ordinary sounds of a man changing clothes, and then he came out and I forgot, briefly, what I had been talking about.

The jacket was crisp white with brass buttons, the old Brine Hollow crest stitched on the chest pocket, and it fit him. Not sort of fit. Fit. He was broad through the shoulders and the tailoring of whatever era had cut that jacket flattered it shamelessly. The cap sat square on his head and somehow made his face look sharper, and the whole effect was a man from a company calendar, the kind they used to hang in the break room before anybody thought about calendars differently.

"Well?" he asked, turning around once with his arms out.

"You look like the cover of a pickle advertisement from nineteen fifty-something," I said. "It's honestly upsetting how well it works."

"That's the spirit."

"I mean it. If Warren sees you in that, he'll probably offer you a job on the spot, and then you can decline it loudly, which would improve my evening considerably."

He laughed and straightened the cap in the mirror over the sink, and I watched him do it and had the specific thought that I had not had a specific thought like that in some years. I am sixty-two, not dead, and I know what noticing is. I had noticed a man across a room a handful of times since my last real relationship, back when I was forty, and this was one of those times, and I filed it away the way I file everything, neatly and without commentary.

We spread the graph paper on the steel counter and went through the plan twice. He had improvements. Of course he did, he builds stages for a living, and his version of my sabotage was cleaner and funnier, a delayed cue so Warren would be standing center stage, mid-speech, hands raised, when his own recorded voice said gherkin wrong the fourth time. We timed it out with his phone. It was going to be perfect.

Somewhere in the second run-through I caught myself watching his hands on the counter, tapping the timing beats, and I had to reroute my attention back to the paper like a person pulling a dog back onto a sidewalk.

"So next Saturday," he said, capping the pen. "You do the cue swap during the dessert course, I keep Warren talking, which I'm apparently good at because I built his grandson a treehouse last spring and he thinks I'm fascinating."

"Everybody thinks you're fascinating," I said, before my brain could file that one too. "I mean. You're chatty. It's useful."

He looked at me then, and the look lasted a half second longer than a plan-review look usually lasts, and the back room felt about four degrees warmer than it had.

"Kerri," he said, and stopped, and adjusted the cap instead.

"Don't take that off yet," I said, mostly to fill the air. "I want to make sure it survives a dance floor. There's dancing at these things."

"Is that in the clause too?"

"No, that's in me. I haven't danced at a harvest supper in twenty-two years, as it happens."

"Well then," he said, and held out his hand in the middle of that steel-counter back room with the onion smell and the graph paper and the sound cues, "we should probably rehearse."

I looked at his hand. I looked at the cap sitting square on his head. I thought about my folder, my grudge, my thirty-six years, and the fact that in less than a year none of it would be mine anymore except the folder and whatever I managed to grab between now and June.

I took his hand.

We danced in the back room, or rather we shuffled in a small square between the steel counter and the rack of aprons while Russ hummed something with no particular tune in it. He held my hand and kept the other one respectfully at my shoulder blade, and we turned in slow half circles, and it was ridiculous, and I was enjoying it more than I had enjoyed a work event in about a decade, which is a low bar but still.

The problem with dancing that close to a man in a crisp white jacket is the collar. His collar was sitting crooked under the jacket, one edge folded in, and I reached up without thinking to straighten it, and my knuckles went along his jaw on the way. He stopped humming. I stopped moving. My hand stayed where it was about four seconds longer than a collar correction requires, and we both knew it, and neither of us stepped back.

"Sorry," I said, taking my hand off him like it had touched a stove. "Collar was folded."

"It was, probably." He was smiling a little. "You're good at that."

"At collars."

"At pretending that's what that was."

I laughed, which was the coward's move, and stepped back to the counter and picked up the pen like a woman with somewhere to be. He let me. The thing about Russ was, he let me have my exits, and every exit I took seemed to cost me a little more than the last one.

* * *

The rehearsal for the supper was the following Tuesday evening, which meant the lodge filled up with the usual committee people, the ladies who ran the pie table, the two men from the fire hall who argued about