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.
