Page 42 of Working for Keeps

She rests her chin on my chest, looking at me quietly for a moment.

“I want to ask you something,” she says, “and I want you to notice that I’m asking first.”

“Okay.”

“Halvorsen found me in the lot this afternoon,” she says. “He wants me on the buyout team. Somebody has to build the financial case that this plant can stand on its own, take it to a bank, and then take it to whoever at Vantor is stuck holding a factory they can’t knock down. It’s two years of hard work, and there is nobody else in this valley who can read a term sheet.” She swallows hard. “That’s a job I could actually do, Mick. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, and it would finally be pointed at something I want to keep. But it puts me in an office at the top of your line for two years, setting the labor numbers. Across a table from your union local.” Her eyes hold mine. “Across a table from you.”

I think about it.

I think about it for a long, quiet minute, because she asked me out loud in the dark before making the move, and I’m not going to disrespect that by answering fast.

“Any chance you’d go easy on me at that table?” I ask.

“None whatsoever.”

“Then take it.” I feel her entire body relax against me, melting into my side. “Take it. I’ll fight you on every single clause, and then I’ll bring you dinner after.”

A wet, beautiful laugh breaks from her lips, her face pressing into my collarbone.

“Kare-kare?”

“Don’t push your luck,” I say, smiling into her hair.

She’s asleep on my chest inside a minute. I lie there in the dark for a long time, holding her close, listening to the steady, quiet rhythm of her breathing.

Eleven days ago, a woman got out of a silver rental car in my parking lot, and I thought the worst thing that could happen to me was that she’d leave again.

Turns out the worst thing that could have happened is that she’d have stayed, kept deciding my life from behind a locked door, been right about everything, and I’d have loved her anyway without either of us ever saying a word.

We said it.

We stood in a union hall, a permits office, and a boardroom, and we said it out loud in front of the whole world. It took everything from us that it was always going to take, and we’re both still standing.

I pull the heavy comforter up over her bare shoulder, lay my hand flat across her back over her beating heart, and finally let myself sleep.

Epilogue

Vera

Six months later, my grandmother’s house smells like cinnamon, roasting ham, and fresh-split cedar, and there is not one square foot of it that isn’t full of people.

I stand near the fieldstone fireplace with a copper mug of cider warming my palms and watch the house fill up. No floodlights, no blue glare off a projection screen. Just oil lamps, dry pine on the hearth, and the noise of a town that stopped counting the seconds until I left it.

“You’re doing it again, Vera. You’ve got that look like you’re calculating the structural tolerance of the floorboards.”

Hank Mullins steps up to the hearth with a mug of black coffee, twenty-eight years as public works foreman written in the lines around his eyes. Tonight those lines are smooth.

“Old habits, Hank.”

“Well, the habit’s working where it’s needed.” He nods toward the window and the moonlight on the snow. “Those culverts you mapped in the fall are holding the water table exactly where you said. First time in eighteen years the east intersection didn’t flood on the first hard freeze.”

My shoulders come down off my ears, and they did not do that on the forty-fifth floor in Chicago.

“And the county money?”

“Came through Tuesday. Not much of it.” Hank almost smiles. “Enough for the water mains and the grading by the rail spur when the ground thaws, which is more than this town has had for a culvert in my working life.” He looks at me sideways. “That culvert grid runs eleven miles, Vera, and I put that same application in four times before you sat down at my kitchen table with it.”

“I used to do this for shareholders who couldn’t find Colorado on a map,” I say. “I spent three years thinking I had to leave the valley to do work that mattered.”