Page 26 of Working for Keeps

“Cardinal’s got twelve weeks.”

I stare at her. “Vera. That plant is seventy years old. Halvorsen built it after the war.”

“Halvorsen built the offices and the north bays after the war,” she says. “He built them on top of something. There’s a shear wall under the primary stamp floor that doesn’t match anything on the 1948 drawings, and there are arches under it, and I have had the survey overlays open since eight o’clock this morning. But the digitized county file starts in 1948 and the original plans were never scanned. To file, I need certified proof that those arches and those timber frames are prewar. Photographs won’t do it. I need original construction documents, and I need a licensed engineer’s affidavit, and I need them in the permits office before Cardinal’s clearance window closes.” She stops. “And I don’t have any of that. I don’t have anyone in this town who will open a door for me. I’m the woman with the hatchet.”

The room goes quiet, and then I start to laugh.

It is not a good laugh. It’s the cracked one that comes out of a man who has been holding something too heavy for too long, and it startles her.

“Mick?”

“Wendell Pike,” I say.

“Who?”

“Wendell Pike is ninety-one years old and he lives in the yellow house on Sumner Street with four thousand pounds of paper in his garage.” I am already reaching for my keys. “His father was the foundry engineer. Not for Halvorsen. Before Halvorsen. The old Forge Creek Iron Works, and Halvorsen bought the shell of it in fifty-two, and Wendell has never thrown away a piece of paper in his life. I’ve been in that garage. I fixed his water heater in February. There are rolled drawings in there with cloth backing, and every single one of them is stamped.”

Vera is absolutely still.

“And Lila Moreno runs permits,” I say, “and her brother Danny runs the number two press, and she was the one who called me when the culvert on Sumner backed up last spring, and if you walk in there with a corporate badge she will smile at you and lose your paperwork for six weeks. And if I walk in there with you, she won’t.”

I stop with my hand on the keys, because to do this I have to keep it from them.

Not for an hour. For days. I have to walk onto that floor tomorrow morning and look Artie in the face, and he’s going to ask me how the negotiation is going, and I’m going to have to say fine. I’m going to have to sit in the break room and eat my sandwich next to Toby, who bought a house in March, and say nothing. I’m going to have to be, for as long as this takes, exactly the thing I’ve spent my whole life not being: a man who knows something the crew doesn’t and decides for them.

The exact thing I called her a coward for. The exact thing I told her, a week ago, in that concrete box at the back of the plant, that I could never forgive.

“How long?” My voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a well.

“Three working days if the documents are clean. It goes in Thursday.”

“Thursday.” I look at the door of my own union hall, and I do the count, and it’s not three days. “Four days of lying to four hundred men.”

“Yes,” Vera says. “That’s what it costs, Mick. That’s the actual price. And you’re the only one who can decide whether it’s worth paying, because you’re the one who has to look at them.”

I think about the men in that plant, and I think about how much every single one of them has trusted me with, and I think about the fact that if I do this and it works, they will still have their jobs, and if I do this and it fails, I will have spent the last four days of their working lives lying to them, and they will never, ever forgive me. Nor should they.

Then I think about Artie’s wife.

I put my palm over the union pin on my henley and hold it there like a man taking an oath he already knows he’s going to break.

“Four days,” I say. “We work it. And on Thursday night, the second the paper’s stamped, before Chicago knows, before anybody knows, I call a meeting, and I stand up in that hall and I tell them everything. Every hour of it. What I knew and when I knew it and what I decided and why.” My jaw is so tight it aches. “And then they can have this pin, and I’ll hand it over standing up.”

Vera looks at my hand over the pin. “Mick, they’d never⁠—”

“They might,” I say. “That’s the point. It doesn’t count if they can’t.”

She’s quiet for a second. Then she nods once and stands up and picks the folder off the desk, and she holds her hand out to be shaken, like a partner.

I take it. Her hand is small and cold and steady inside mine.

“Wendell Pike,” she says.

“Wendell Pike.” I grab my coat. “Bring your good boots. His garage floods.”

Eleven

Vera