Page 43 of Working for Keeps

“Strategy’s just working out how to keep things from breaking when the weather turns heavy.” He gives me a short, respectful nod. “Forge Creek’s glad you stayed.”

Across the room, through the wide dining archway, my grandmother is ruling her kitchen with a wooden spoon held like a scepter.

“Vera! If you and Henry are done restructuring the public-works budget in my dining room, somebody needs to carry the sourdough to the table!”

At eighty-one, Nana Warden has her silver hair pinned in a loose twist and her cheeks flushed from the heat of two ovens. She is not an administrative variable, and she is not anybody’s charity case. She is what she has always been: the most stubborn woman in this valley, living on her own terms in the house she refused to let the winter take.

“Arthur Vasquez,” she says, without turning around, “if you touch that ham before the blessing, I will report you to the sheriff for larceny.”

Artie snatches his hand back from the ham like a scalded cat, and Maura Statham sets the potatoes down beside him and laughs so hard she has to grab the counter.

And on the long sideboard, wedged between the glazed ham and a landslide of roasted potatoes, is a deep clay pot that has no business in a Victorian kitchen in Colorado. Oxtail fallen off the bone, eggplant, long beans, a sauce the warm stubborn orange I would know blindfolded.

Kare-kare.

Mick made it. He made it the way he made it the first night on the ridge, and he set it down next to the gravy boat like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and then he went out to the woodpile because he cannot stand to be in a room while anybody notices him.

Reyna catches my eye across the table.

My sister got our mother’s mouth and our father’s flat stubborn chin. She drove up from Denver on Monday and has been in this kitchen three days arguing with Nana about brining, and she doesn’t say anything now because she doesn’t have to. We spent most of our lives being the girls whose mother died. The careful ones. The grateful ones. The ones Nana raised to never turn out soft, which is another word for never asking anybody for anything.

Tonight there’s a pot of our mother on the sideboard, made by a man who’s currently freezing on the back porch because he couldn’t stand to let the woodpile run low.

For once I am not managing it. I am letting it be true.

Nana doesn’t turn around. “Stop hovering by the fire. Your man has been stacking cedar for twenty minutes and the frost is setting. Go fetch him before the gravy skins.”

“Going, Nana.”

I set my mug down and cross the crowded living room. The gaps the town used to open around me are gone, and there’s nowhere to walk that isn’t somebody’s elbow. Kayla Brooks winks at me from the sofa. Red is in the armchair by the window talking shop with old Mr. Halvorsen, and I catch the words bank and April and term sheet and keep walking, because I have read that document more times than either of them and I wrote most of it.

Halvorsen Works is running three shifts. In April we sit down in a room in Denver and try to buy a factory away from a company that cannot knock it down and does not want to own it, and I put our odds at a little better than even, and it is the first number in nine years I have not shaded for somebody. Under the primary stamp floor, seven river-stone arches go on holding up this valley the way they have since 1911, and every spring they will move their two inches, and nobody is going to pour a footing under them, because nobody in this valley has that kind of money.

I push the heavy kitchen door open and step onto the back porch.

The cold hits my face, clean, smelling of wet pine and resin, and Mick is at the woodpile, bareheaded, snow in his dark hair, sleeves shoved up to his elbows in November. A split log of cedar balanced in one hand. The silver union pin catching the light on the front of his flannel.

He stops the second the door clicks. His eyes come up and find me.

“Shift’s over, Mr. Hayes,” I say. “My grandmother says if you don’t come inside she’s locking the dining room doors.”

He drops the log and puts his hands on my waist, and the cold rolls off him and the heat comes through it, and my whole body goes where it always went.

“Let her lock them,” he says.

He kisses me on my grandmother’s back porch with the whole town on the other side of the door, unhurried, entirely unbothered that Kayla Brooks is almost certainly watching through the window, and I come apart in his hands the way I have every time since I was nineteen.

When he lets me breathe he keeps me there, his forehead against mine.

“Hank told me the winter funding cleared,” he says.

“Came through Tuesday.”

“Two years ago that culvert took my neighbor’s truck.”

“I know. It’s in the file.” I curl my fingers into his collar, into the flannel, over the pin. “Mick. Denver called.”

He goes still.