The Last Job Was a Picnic

How it begins

The farewell picnic budget was forty-eight pounds and a box of paper flags left over from the company's most successful year.

Miriam Ward entered the figures in a fresh column. The spreadsheet made no distinction between celebration and closure. Both fitted neatly beneath Events.

Leonard Fox stood in her doorway holding a folding table.

'Where do you want this?'

She looked up. 'We haven't booked the field.'

'No one else has either.'

Behind him, the production floor was quiet. A conveyor belt rested beneath the lights, clean enough to suggest that work had never happened there. Miriam could remember the sound of it from her kitchen half a mile away.

The director's instructions lay beside her keyboard. Keep it positive. Acknowledge the family. Avoid discussing individual circumstances.

Miriam had processed those circumstances for thirty-six years: overtime, parental leave, sick pay, the small advances people requested quietly near the end of winter.

Leonard set down the table without unfolding it.

'They want speeches?'

'Three.'

'Who by?'

'People leaving first.'

He looked toward the empty belt.

'I've still got the bicycle I bought with my first wages.'

'Good bicycle?'

'Terrible. I loved it.'

Miriam thought of the washing machine her first promotion had paid for, and the piano she had rented when her daughter wanted lessons. None had come through the factory doors, but all of them had been made possible by what happened inside.

'Bring it,' she said.

'To the picnic?'

'Ask the others to bring something too.'

He grinned, then stopped. 'You mean trophies?'

'No. Things we bought. Things we built. Anything the wages became.'

Miriam opened a new document. The director had asked for a celebration of the company. She began writing an invitation to the people whose lives it had helped to pay for, which was a different accounting entirely.