Page 7 of Working for Keeps

Mick

The clank of my socket wrench against the housing of the main assembly line is the only sound in the plant. It’s nine o’clock on a Friday night, the end of her first week on my floor.

Five days of her.

Second shift cleared out an hour ago and left behind the smell of hot oil and the chill that settles into the steel walls once the machines go quiet.

I should be at the cabin. Instead I’m kneeling in a puddle of hydraulic fluid, trying to reset a frozen pneumatic feeder before the Monday bell. If this line stays down, forty men lose their hours.

I’m doing it with a shim I cut myself out of a scrap plate, because the requisition I put in three weeks ago came back stamped DEFERRED, and so did the one before it. Two hundred and eleven dollars of hardened steel for the guide-pin housing on a line they say they’re about to spend six figures automating.

I put that in the grievance folder on Tuesday, and I haven’t stopped turning it over since.

A shadow moves across the concrete under the high-bay lights and my hand stops on the wrench. My body registers her before my brain does and I look up.

High above the floor, on the rusted grating of the western catwalk, is Vera.

The blazer’s gone, her blouse open at the throat and the sleeves pushed to her elbows. And her hair, that severe knot she wears like a helmet, has come undone. Dark waves fall loose over her shoulders, catching the amber of the safety lights.

I drop the wrench on the mat, and the clang goes out through the empty building as I stand and hook my thumbs in my belt.

“Working overtime, Ms. Warden?” My voice carries up into the rafters. “Figured you’d have cleared out of this valley the second the offices locked up.”

She doesn’t move from the rail. “There was a discrepancy in the third-shift maintenance logs. I stayed to reconcile the data. I didn’t realize you’d still be down here.”

“The machines don’t care about the clock.” I step out from under the conveyor. “Line Three jammed because that electronic sensor you people love couldn’t handle the grit. Takes a man to clear the track every two hours.”

She tilts her head. “You think I’m afraid of the reality of this floor, Mick?”

“I think it’s easy to optimize a factory from twenty feet in the air. Come down to the concrete. Come see what it looks like when it’s broken.”

She holds still up there long enough that I expect her to say something clinical and walk back to her trailer.

Instead she lets go of the guardrail and heads for the spiral staircase.

Every step down rings off the metal like a countdown, and I stay where I am while she comes.

When her feet hit the concrete, she doesn’t hesitate. She walks straight into the yellow safety lane, arms crossed, eyes on mine, and stops close enough that all that silk and jasmine cut through the smell of the shop floor.

As her hand goes to the pocket of her coat, I hear the sound of a paper creasing.

“Mick,” she says, her voice steady as my gaze slides down to her coat pocket. Whatever’s in that pocket, I’d bet the truck she’s been carrying it awhile.

But whatever it is, she doesn’t say it.

“Show me,” she says instead. “Show me what the sensor missed.”

“Right here.” I turn to the open housing of the pneumatic cylinder. “I’m looking for a workaround before Monday. If we alter the mechanical alignment before the lens takes the staging feed⁠—”

She leans in, her shoulder brushing my arm, and that whole side of me goes to attention. Her gaze moves over the greasy interior of the machine.

“If you put a mechanical sweeper on the line ahead of the sensor…” she mutters, her gaze moving over the greasy interior of the machine as she takes a step backward to look up the feed track.

The orange pneumatic cable is coiled snake-thick across the floor behind her, but she doesn’t know it’s there.

“Vera—”

As her heel catches the rubber, her foot slips on hydraulic oil, and her balance goes, and she comes down hard toward the steel edge of the conveyor bed.