Chapter 27: The Apprentices
The county program officer was named Ms. Okafor, and she arrived at the shop with a binder thick enough to stop a door and an expression that said she had been promised things by businesses before. I liked her immediately. People who have been lied to by paper learn to love paper done right, and she and I spoke that language. Two paid apprenticeships, she explained, for young people aging out of foster care. Real wages, posted hours, a named supervisor on every shift, school attendance required and verified. Nobody works alone. Everything signed in triplicate.
I signed the shop up before she finished the sentence about funding.
The program had rules older than my troubles and stricter than my habits, and I read every page of that binder twice at my kitchen table, the way I read everything now. I put my name under all of it with my eyes open, and the pen felt different in my hand than the one at that kitchen table when I was fifteen.
Ms. Okafor watched me read, which inspectors do, and at the end she said the shop would be audited twice a year, unannounced, and that most owners found that part insulting. I told her to bring a coat, because the bay gets cold, and that anybody who had survived Ruth Ann's standards would find the county's positively restful. She laughed for the first time that morning. Then she asked, careful as new ice, whether the motorcycle club would be part of the arrangement. I said no. The club is family, and family keeps its own ledger. The program would run through the shop, the county, and the school, every supervisor named, every hour posted. She wrote that down word for word. I intended to be the easiest audit in the state of Ohio, twice a year, unannounced, forever.
There was a budget line for tools. Each apprentice would get a starter set of their own — not loaners, theirs — wrenches and drivers and a box to keep them in, because a person starting out in a trade should own the means of it from the first week. I ordered the sets myself and put them on the bench the night before the apprentices started, with their names taped on the lids.
I had my reasons, and they were not complicated. At fifteen I had sat at a kitchen table that was not mine, in a house that was not mine, and signed a stack of placement papers a tired caseworker slid across to me, pen already uncapped. I signed where the little flags pointed. I did not read a single line. Nobody made me, and nobody stopped me, and I have thought about that pen for seven years — how easy it is to put your name under words you have never seen.
The apprentices were Cal Brooks, seventeen, tall as a door and quieter than one, and Tanya Reid, eighteen, who asked more questions in her first hour than Eddie had asked in his first decade. Both of them came through the county with their school counselors copied on everything. We set their hours around classes. We put their names on the schedule board in the same size letters as everybody else's, because Ruth Ann said a name written small is a promise made small, and she would not have it in her shop.
On their first day I sat them at the good desk and I read the entire agreement aloud. Every line. The wages, the hours, the safety rules, the part about school, the part about how either side could end it with two weeks' notice, in writing, no hard feelings recorded anywhere. It took forty minutes. Eddie stood in the doorway with his arms folded pretending he was not listening, and afterward he showed Cal how to check a tire for a nail with the back of his hand, patient as a grandfather, which he would deny under oath.
Cal wanted engines. Tanya wanted to know how the books worked, which made Ruth Ann look at the ceiling and thank a God she argues with regularly. We gave them real work — supervised, checked, signed off — because Ms. Okafor's binder said dignity was a program requirement. Their pay went in on Fridays like everybody's. Their questions got answered like everybody's.
At the end of the second week, Tanya stayed late five minutes — inside her posted hours, with Walt still on the floor — and asked me why I read the papers out loud that first day, when she could read fine herself. I told her the truth. That I had once signed my name under words I never saw, and it had taken me seven years and a courtroom to understand what my signature was worth. "It's worth reading for," I said. She nodded like I had given her a tool, and maybe I had. It is the best one I own.