“The Landlord may terminate this Lease upon ninety days’ notice in the event the Tenant is found by any court or agency to have made a materially false statement regarding the employment, compensation, or injury of any person working on the Premises.”
“She wrote that,” Cordelia told me, in month two, “in 2006.
Twenty years ago.
Toni, your mother wrote a clause about the mixer before there was a mixer.”
“She wrote a clause about him,” I said.
“She’d met him.”
Page one: the deed.
Page two: the lease, with the clause.
Page three: the hospital admission from the night of the mixer — eleven years ago — with Vincent’s statement to intake: “Wife.
Helps out sometimes.
Not an employee.
She fell at home; I brought her in.”
Page four: the workers’ compensation filing he’d made the same month, for the restaurant, listing eleven employees.
I was not on it.
I had been on that floor sixty hours a week for nine years by then, and I was not on it, because a woman who isn’t on the payroll doesn’t cost you when a mixer takes her.
Page five: the insurance claim on the mixer.
“Equipment failure.”
Not “guard removed by owner to speed up production.”
Page six: the guard.
Not the document.
The actual guard, photographed, in a box, in the basement, where Vincent had put it and forgotten it, and where I had found it in March, when I went down for the Christmas ornaments and found instead the one piece of steel that would have kept my ribs whole.
And page seven — Cordelia’s, not my mother’s — was the arithmetic.
Twenty years.
Fifty-eight hours a week, average.
Zero dollars of wages.
Zero dollars of Social Security credits.
Zero dollars of anything, because Vincent Costa had spent two decades telling the government I didn’t work there, and telling the dining room he was self-made, and both of those were the same lie wearing different clothes.
“Toni,” Cordelia said, in month nine, when the folder was done, “he’s going to call you a pack mule.
Or something like it.
He can’t help it.
