Family First
The story ran at 6 a.m. under the headline THE LIST: HOW CASTELLAN FAMILY FOODS TIMED LAYOFFS TO DODGE PENSION BONUSES, and by nine, it was the most-read piece the paper had published in three years.
By noon, two other outlets had confirmed the spreadsheet independently. By two, a class-action firm out of the capital had a hotline number running under the story, and forty-one people had already called.
Naomi found out about the board meeting the same way everyone else did — a leaked internal memo, fittingly, that landed in three separate newsrooms within an hour of each other. Warren Castellan had not been calling the board to get ahead of the story. He'd been calling because three board members had already seen an advance copy and wanted him gone before it published.
By Wednesday, Castellan Family Foods announced Warren Castellan's "retirement," effective immediately, a phrase that made Naomi laugh out loud at her desk for the first time in two weeks. By Friday, the company's new interim CEO announced a review of "legacy pension timing practices going back eight years" and a restored bonus payout for every employee named in the spreadsheet, with interest.
Gerald's check came eleven days later. He drove to the newsroom to show her, actual paper in an actual envelope, like he didn't trust it to be real until she'd seen it too.
"Thirty years," he said, standing awkwardly by her desk the way he had at her college graduation, a place he'd shown up to twenty minutes late. "Feels strange, getting paid for it after all that."
"Feels right, though."
"Feels right." He turned the envelope over in his hands. "I got a text from Frances this morning. She wants to get a few of the others together. Some kind of dinner. Wants to know if I'll come. Wants to know if you'll come too — write the follow-up, she said, but also just... come."
Naomi looked at him — grayer than she remembered from six years ago, still in the same faded flannel, still smelling faintly of the plant floor even weeks after leaving it — and found, for the first time since she was young enough to sit on a dock and squint into the sun, that she wanted to say yes to something with her father in it.
"Yeah," she said. "I'll come."
Outside, someone was already taking down the FAMILY FIRST SINCE 1988 banner from above the factory gate, folding it into a box far too small for thirty-eight years.