Page 5 of Working for Keeps

“Vera.”

She freezes with her hand on the latch, but she doesn’t turn around.

“You can do your studies,” I say. “Bring your stopwatches and your city metrics. But remember where you are. In this town we build things to last. We don’t break them down for a quick profit. You might have forgotten how this place works, but these men haven’t. And neither have I.”

She stays still for a beat, her head bowing, and that’s all she lets me have before she pushes the door open and leaves.

Three

Vera

Ihaven’t slept.

I spent the night in the company duplex on Elm Street trying to scrub the memory of his heat off my skin, and every time I closed my eyes, the steel door in Mick’s office clicked shut in my head.

The phantom warmth of his chest was still an inch off my skin, iron filings and industrial soap and him still in my lungs.

By four I gave up and got in the car, the valley buried under a fog that traps the smell of coal smoke and pine against the pavement.

I went in there yesterday to establish corporate boundaries. Instead Mick dismantled me without once putting his mouth on mine.

Now it’s Tuesday, my timing walkthrough starts in less than an hour, and I need coffee.

Kincaid’s Early Bird Diner is a long brick building that has been on this corner of the highway for as long as I can remember, its windows fogged. When I push the door open, the bell chimes and the warmth hits me: bacon grease, burnt sugar, a Formica counter worn smooth by decades of elbows.

A few early-shift men from the road crews look up. Sharp, tired eyes take in the wool coat and the briefcase, the unmistakable aura of an outsider. The murmur of conversation dips, then resumes.

I know that dip.

I knew that dip at fourteen in a cafeteria with my mother’s food in a thermos, and I knew it at nine when a substitute teacher asked me twice where I was from and didn’t mean Colorado, and I have spent most of my life telling myself the blazer is what does it now. The blazer helps.

But the blazer isn’t the whole of it.

“Sit wherever you like, honey.”

Marlene Kincaid, exactly as she was the day I left, is behind the counter with a coffee pot in her fist. Late fifties, silver-streaked hair in a practical bun, a face like a map of sharp lines. She has kept this town fed through two strikes and a layoff.

I slide into a booth in the back corner and set my briefcase on the table. My hair is pinned into a knot that’s already giving me a headache.

Marlene is at my table before I get the iPad open. She flips the mug and fills it to the brim.

“You look like you’re about to faint, throw up, or fire somebody.” Her eyes go over my face and stop on the circles my concealer didn’t hide. “Vera Warden. Word said you were back in town, carrying a hatchet for the Chicago office.”

“It’s a standard facility audit. An efficiency study.”

She snorts and wipes the table with her towel. “Efficiency. That’s the word they use right before they turn off the lights and lock the gates. This town has just about got its feet under it again. We don’t need a corporate vampire draining the blood out of Halvorsen’s just when things are turning around.”

“I’m not a vampire.” It comes out thinner than I want it to. “Marlene, if that plant misses its numbers one more quarter, Chicago walks away from it. I’m trying to find a middle ground.”

And I can find one. I want to put that on the counter between us, but I can’t, because there is no way to say it in this diner that doesn’t sound like a woman defending her own paycheck.

I kept a stamping plant open in Rockford for eleven months past the date a board had already written down, and I did it by finding four hundred thousand dollars in a scrap-recovery contract nobody had renegotiated since 2011, and nobody in Rockford has ever known my name. The work is the one thing I have never been bad at.

Marlene looks at me for a long beat, and the sarcasm goes out of her face and what’s under it is a woman who fed this town through two strikes.

“A middle ground doesn’t exist on a spreadsheet, honey. It exists in the families who buy groceries across the street.” She taps the rim of my mug. “But you always were a runner when things got heavy. Breakfast is coming. You look like you haven’t eaten a real meal since you crossed the state line.”

She’s gone before I can protest, shouting a ticket for eggs and hash browns at the cook.