I’m Bernadette Quill. I am seventy-nine years old, and for forty-six years I have poured tea in the canteen of the Harrow Point fish cannery. I started on the day they installed the long steel tables, and I have watched three owners, two strikes and one very small fire. I know how every one of the sixty workers takes their tea, and I know whose mother is sick before the workers themselves do.

Friday was to be my last shift. The cannery was changing hands again, and the new company had a policy about age. Nobody had said it to my face, but a letter had come, and I had folded it small and put it in my apron pocket.

The new foreman started in March. Her name is Roz Kettering, she is six feet tall, and she wears her hair in tight black braids that she has clearly never had cause to loosen. In eight weeks she had never greeted me. She gave orders to the room the way you give orders to a dog you do not like. I told myself it was nerves.

On Friday at noon the canteen was full. Sixty people in orange coveralls sat at the long steel tables under the tall gridded windows, the light pale and even, trays out, soup steaming. I was carrying the big tin teapot. I put it down on the end of a table and sat for a moment, as I do, with my cane hooked over the back of the chair.

I felt the cane lift away. I turned, and Roz was holding it above her head with one hand, grinning down at me from her great height. “Come and get it, Grandma,” she said. A few people near the back made a small sound, not quite a laugh. The rest looked at their trays.

I have never been a proud woman, but I was a stubborn one. I stood up. I reached for the cane and she lifted it higher. I stumbled along the table with one arm out for balance, and she stepped sideways with a little skip, laughing, keeping the wooden crook exactly one inch beyond my fingers. My knees have not been good for years. Twice I nearly went down.

That was when I heard the canteen door bang open. It is a heavy steel door and it has never banged in forty-six years. A young woman I barely knew came across that room without hurrying. Her name is Tamsin Okafor. She joined the line on Monday. She is twenty-four, she keeps to herself, and she eats her lunch standing at the sink, which I had noticed, and worried about.

She did not say anything to Roz. She knelt beside me, put her hand under my elbow, and eased me onto the bench as though I were made of the finest china. Then she stood up, and the whole canteen went quiet, and she looked at Roz Kettering, who was a full head taller, and did not blink.

“Give her the cane,” said Tamsin.

“Or what, new girl?” said Roz.

Tamsin did not answer. She put one boot on the bench, then the other, and stood there above the foreman, and reached up, and closed her fingers around the crook of my cane. She pulled it out of Roz’s hand as neatly as picking a plum. Roz stumbled backward, and her heel caught the leg of a steel table. It went over with a crash that rang against the windows. Trays skated across the floor. Roz sat down in the middle of the mess, with her braids in her face and her mouth open.

Nobody laughed. Then, slowly, someone at the back began tapping a spoon against a tin mug, then another, then twenty, and in a moment the whole room was tapping. It was the sound the canteen makes on the last day of a long season, and I have heard it only a handful of times in my life.

Tamsin came down off the bench, picked up my enamel mug from the shelf, the blue one with the chipped rim that I have used since 1979, and poured me a cup of tea from the tin teapot. She set it in front of me on the table, and put my cane in my hand, and stood behind my chair with her arms folded.

Here is what I learned afterward. Tamsin’s grandfather founded the cannery. She was spending her first month on the floor, unannounced, before taking a seat on the new board. She had read the letter about my retirement in a stack of documents on Thursday, and she had watched, all week, how Roz treated the older staff. On Monday the board met. Roz was moved to the loading dock, where nobody has to be spoken to, and the policy about age was torn up.

I am still there. They gave me a new title, which I refuse to say aloud. Tamsin comes to the tea urn every morning at ten, and I pour her a cup in the blue mug with the chipped rim. She is the only person I let touch it. The room taps spoons when she walks in. She pretends she does not hear.

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