Page 39 of Working for Keeps

Mr. Halvorsen looks at me down the length of the mahogany. “And that fight. Can it be won?”

“I don’t know,” I say, pausing. “I think so. I know who I’d have to convince and I know what they’d need to see.” I look at Mick. “What I know for certain is that nobody in this valley gets a letter in August. That’s what this morning buys. It buys August, and it buys the next one after that.”

Red sits down heavily.

“By God,” he says, to nobody, “she pulled the pin out of their grenade.”

And then Mick stands up.

He doesn’t celebrate. He doesn’t shake anybody’s hand. He walks around the end of the table with the badge in his fist, and the men part for him, and he stops in front of Artie Vasquez and holds out his hand.

Artie looks at it, and the whole room is watching, and Artie knows it, and whatever the last eleven days were for, it is happening now and it has nothing to do with me at all.

“The eleventh,” Artie says.

“I’ll be there at seven,” Mick says. “I’ll bring the bad coffee.”

Artie stands up. Then he takes Mick’s hand and pulls him in and grips the back of his neck the way an old man grips a young one he loves, and says something in his ear too low for anybody else to hear, and Mick shuts his eyes.

And Red takes a small silver union pin out of his shirt pocket and holds it out on his flat palm.

“Put it back on,” he says, “before I change my mind.”

Later, much later, when the boardroom has emptied out and the men have gone back down to their lines and Mr. Halvorsen has run off to call his accountant, I stand at the podium with my hands braced on the wood. The adrenaline has worn off and I’m shaking.

I have no job.

I have no title.

I have an NDA I’ve shredded, a career that is over, a rental car due back in Denver on Sunday, and a duplex I have to be out of in forty-eight hours.

Mick comes and stands next to me. “You tore your whole life down,” he says as he looks out the grimy window at his valley.

“I tore a lie down.” My voice cracks. “And I’d have done it in the dark, Mick. Four days ago. I’d have handed you the win at the end like a present, and you’d have loved me for it, but it would have been the same thing I did to you three years ago. Just me making the decision meant for both of us to make.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to be able to stop wanting to do that,” I say. “It’s how I’m built. You need to know that about me.”

Mick turns his head. “So tell me when you catch yourself,” he says. “That’s it. That’s the whole deal, Vera. You don’t have to stop wanting it. You just have to say it out loud, and then we decide.”

“Like we did last night.”

He nods. “Like we did last night.”

I look at him, and the union hall parking lot is still sitting in the room with us, and I am not going to be the woman who leaves it there and hopes.

“You hated me,” I say.

“For about an hour.”

“Is it gone?”

Mick doesn’t answer right away. “No,” he says. “Ask me at five.”

I frown. “Five?”

“My shift ends at five.” He steps back from the podium. “Go back to the duplex. Pack your corporate clothes. All of them. The blazers, the whole gray army.” His voice lowers. “Because at five o’clock, I’m coming to get you, and we’re not doing this in a rental car.”