I took one board seat as the representative of the Hail Trust. I did not become the chief executive and I did not become the chairman and I still open the shop in Cicero 4 days a week because eight people work there and because my hands are better than my speeches. The firstest distribution from the trust arrived in October. I cleared the notes, rebuilt the roof, gave everyone a raise, and put Ma's account where I could not reach it. Most of the rest went into a technical training program in three counties, tuitionfree, tools included, aimed at exactly the kind of kid my greatgrandfather had been in 1978.
We named it after Silus Hail, and we hung his photograph in the front hall of the building, the same picture that had been sanded out of 40 years of annual reports, and it is the only monument I have ever wanted. In November, the six-month term of the marriage contract expired. Evelyn brought the termination documents home herself. She set them on the kitchen island where she had once taken a call about a plant in Gary and she stood on the other side of it the way people stand when they have rehearsed something and no longer trust the rehearsal. You've completed your side of it, she said.
I signed both copies without reading them, which she noticed. Then I took an envelope out of my jacket and put it in front of her. She assumed it was a company document. It was not. Inside was a ring, a plain band.
Nothing anyone in that building would have looked at twice. Bought with money I earned by fixing a compressor in Joliet in the second week of September. The first time I said, "You paid me to marry you." She did not pick it up right away. If there's a second time, I'd like us to start with nobody owing anybody anything.
Evelyn Blackwood, who had negotiated a $4 billion transaction without changing her expression, stood in her own kitchen and could not produce a sentence. Then she reached past the envelope, picked up the original marriage contract that had sat in a folder on that island since the day the lawyers returned it, and tore it in half. We did not do anything extravagant. There was no ballroom, no 400 guests, nobody in green turning away to hide her face. On a cold Tuesday the following February, the three of us walked out of a small county courthouse with a certificate and a photograph taken by a clerk who did not know either of our names.
And Mila held the door because she had recently decided that she was the responsible one. No contract, no board, no million dollars. Evelyn once believed that money gave her the power to select a perfect husband. It took nearly losing an entire company for her to understand that the one thing I had never sold her was my loyalty.