Page 27 of Working for Him

"This is really happening," she says, wonder and fear mixed together. "I'm really staying."

"You're really staying," I confirm, pulling her closer. "How does that feel?"

"Terrifying. Exciting. Right. All of those things at once."

"Good," I say. "That's how the important things should feel."

CHAPTER 18

Rena

Marcus corners Caleb before we've even made it out of the parking lot after the council vote, one hand braced on the truck door like he's not taking no for an answer.

"Sunday. My place. Nothing fancy, just the crew and some burgers." His eyes cut to me. "You too. Officially invited this time, not just tolerated."

"I've been tolerated?"

"You've been respected," he corrects. "Tolerated implies we had a choice."

I laugh, and Caleb's hand finds the small of my back, warm and steady. "We'll be there," he says, before I can find a polite way to weasel out of a social obligation involving people who've watched me get flustered on a job site more times than I'd like to count.

Sunday turns out to be Marcus's backyard, a chain-link fence, a smoker that's clearly older than his truck, and roughly a dozen people who all seem to know each other's kids' names. Tommy's already got a beer in hand and a plate stacked higher than is structurally sound. Gus holds court from a lawn chair like it's a throne.

"You made it," Marcus says, handing me a burger before I've even found a place to sit. "Fair warning, my wife's going to ask you about a hundred questions. She's been dying to meet the woman who made her husband stop complaining about site oversight."

"I did not stop complaining," Marcus's wife, Dee, says, appearing with a bowl of potato salad and an unimpressed look aimed at her husband. "He just started complaining about different things. Mostly about how you were right and he hated it."

"That tracks," I say.

Dee sits beside me while the guys argue about something involving a grill thermometer, and after a while she nods toward Marcus. "He doesn't talk about it much, but his brother died on a site two counties over. Ten years ago now. Fall protection wasn't up to code, and nobody caught it until it was too late."

The information lands heavy, and I understand something about Marcus I hadn't before, it explains the way he'd stood up in that council chamber.

"He never told me that," I say quietly.

"He wouldn't. But that's why he pushes so hard on the little things. The harnesses, the guardrails, all of it. It's not procedure to him. It's personal." She glances toward the yard, where Marcus is now demonstrating something to Tommy with exaggerated hand gestures. "So when he says you're respected, he means it. That man doesn't hand that out easily."

Later, when the sun's dropping and the yard's gone gold and loud with kids chasing each other around lawn chairs, Caleb finds me by the fence with a beer I haven't touched.

"You disappeared," he says.

"I was having a moment. Dee told me about Marcus's brother."

Something shifts in his expression. "Yeah. That's part of why he's like he is on-site. He doesn't talk about it."

"I get it now. All of it. I understand why he stood up for me in that meeting the way he did."

"That's what this is," Caleb says, nodding toward the yard, toward Tommy nearly falling over a cooler, toward Gus holding a baby that belongs to somebody's daughter, toward the whole loud, sunburned mess of it. "Nobody signs up for a crew like this because the pay's incredible. You stay because eventually it stops being coworkers and starts being people who'd show up at your door at six in the morning if you needed them."

"Is that a warning or an invitation?"

"Bit of both," he says, echoing words I recognize, and I bump my shoulder against his, watching Tommy attempt and fail to flip a burger with one hand.

I came to Forge Creek expecting a job site.

I did not expect a family.

The project resumes on a Wednesday morning with the cautious optimism that comes after surviving the worst.