Return Tomorrow | A Warehouse, a Granddaughter, and a Great Society

Her eyes open at five twenty-eight. She lifts her head and switches the alarm off before it kicks on at five thirty.

She’s up and moving. Chores to do. Coffee, dishwasher, shower, lunchbox.

Their apartment is a one-bedroom in Lakewood, Colorado, on the west edge of Denver. Third floor. She starts the coffee maker and showers while it runs. On the refrigerator door, under a magnet, a printed listing for a two-bedroom on South Ammons Street. Four hundred ten thousand. Beneath the price, handwriting in blue ink: eighty-two thousand down. Below that a column of dates and smaller numbers, one for every month they’ve lived here. The paper has yellowed at one corner.

She pours coffee into a steel travel mug, grabs her lunch, takes the stairs, and scrapes frost off the windshield with a plastic dustpan she keeps behind the seat.

She drives west on Alameda with the defrost on high. At Kipling she turns north. On her right, Lakewood Park Tennis Center. On her left, a fence.

Chain link, eight feet, three strands of barbed wire on top. It runs past the first stoplight. It runs past the second. There’s a gate with a guard shack and a yellow crossing arm, and a white sign that says United States Government Property. The fence keeps going. It takes her a full mile to run out of fence.

She doesn’t look at it. It’s been there her whole life.

At six twenty, she badges into the warehouse. The reader beeps. Inside the break room, on the long table by the time clock, somebody has laid out nine folders in three neat rows. New hires start today.

She’s been here four years. She knows what’s in the folders.

Act I. The Wage

The safety video runs eleven minutes. She can hear it through the break room wall, the same narrator, the same music, while she tapes the first boxes of the morning. Nine new people in there with their folders open.

At seven forty, the break room door opens, and the trainer walks in. His name is Dave. He’s holding his own copy of the folder, open to the tabs.