“This is Ada,” a woman said. “Who wants the refrigeration fixed at this hour?”
June almost laughed. “We’re Nathan Brooks’s children.”
The woman went silent. Daniel heard a chair scrape over a wooden floor.
“Is Nathan all right?” she asked.
“He died four years ago,” June said.
Another silence. This one was heavier.
“He never told me,” Ada replied. “He used to call every November. Then he stopped. I thought he wanted to be left alone.”
June apologized, unsure what else to say. Ada told them the pin had belonged to a group of night-shift workers who met after midnight when the official union office was closed. There had been carpenters and cooks, truckers and mechanics, people paid by rival contractors who were told they had nothing in common. They called themselves the Knot because, as Ada put it, “a knot isn’t strong because all its pieces look alike.”
“And the man in the photograph?” June asked.
“Which one?”
Daniel described him. Ada said his name was Peter Lasko. He was the first worker fired for speaking against the meal deductions. He had moved away before the fire. Someone claimed he had become a foreman at the inland freight terminal, but Ada hadn’t heard from him in years.
“Why does it matter now?” she asked.
“Because the waterfront is using the cooperative’s name again.”
Ada swore, softly but with conviction. Then she gave them the address of her restaurant and told them to bring the picture tomorrow. She wanted to see what had survived.
For a moment after the call, Daniel stood holding the phone. Nathan had known so many people whose names had never entered family conversation. At dinner he had asked about school and complained about appliance manufacturers; on Sundays he walked to the park with June and Daniel, carrying bread for ducks he claimed were too aggressive to deserve it. He had acted as if nothing important had happened before they were born. The idea that his silence had been deliberate troubled Daniel more than discovering the pin.
“You think he was protecting us?” June asked.
“Maybe he was protecting himself.”
June considered that. “Both can be true.”
A car slowed outside. Its headlights swept across the shutter and moved away. June reflexively reached for the wrench she’d held during Marcel’s visit, then set it down with an irritated sigh. Daniel understood. Fear had entered their shop without paying rent, and it was already rearranging the furniture.
“Tomorrow we ask questions in daylight,” June said. “Tonight, we lock the door.”
Daniel put the metal pin back in its jar. For the first time, it seemed less like a relic than proof of people who had once met in an ordinary room and decided not to face their employers alone.
