Page 6 of Working for the Mountain Man

She shakes her head. "Which drawer?"

"Third one down, behind the survey maps."

She gets up, goes to the filing cabinet, opens the third drawer. Finds the survey maps and finds the report behind them, slightly crumpled and with a coffee ring on the corner.

She holds it up without saying anything, I say nothing, so she sits down again.

"I need ground rules," I say.

She looks at me. "Of course you do."

"You stay in the office unless I clear it. Job sites are active and I don't have time to supervise."

"I wasn't planning to operate a forklift."

"You don't go onto the road closures without telling me first."

She raises a perfectly sculpted brow, but nods. "Fine."

"You don't move active files without telling me what you did with them."

"Also fine."

"And you don't drive the upper mountain roads in bad weather. If the forecast turns, you stay in town."

She is quiet for a moment, the furrow in her brow is deeper than before. "Is that a work rule or a personal one?" she asks.

"Both."

She studies me for a second. I don’t know what she is looking for, but whatever it is, she doesn’t say whether she found it or not.

"Do you come with subtitles," she says, "or is grunting the main management style?"

I bite back a smile. "You'll learn."

"I run a business," she says. "It just happens to involve fictional people making better choices than I do. I know how to manage files, deadlines, and organized chaos. I'm not going to cost you the grant."

I look at her for a moment; she returns the gaze without blinking.

"The south bridge folder is the red one," I say as I get to my feet. "Cross-reference everything in it against the spreadsheet column marked SB-1 and tell me what's missing."

"And if a lot is missing?"

"Then we get started on fixing it."

She nods once, then opens the red folder and starts reading.

I go to get more coffee. When I come back she has the folder, both tablets, the spreadsheet on screen, and her notebook open to a fresh page that already has three columns drawn on it. She’s muttering to herself very quietly; something about categories and whether date or site should be the primary sort.

I stand in the doorway for a moment and just watch her, she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and it falls forward again immediately. She doesn’t fit here, she’s soft where this office is hard, she’s warm where the job is cold, and she has a look about her like someone who is carrying something heavy and has decided the best way to manage it is to stay busy.

I know that feeling all too well. I go back to my desk and sit, but Elsie doesn’t look up.

She is temporary, I tell myself while she pulls a sticky note pile from somewhere in her bag and starts flagging the folder tabs.

Temporary, short-term, here for three weeks and then gone back to wherever she came from.

The problem is I have spent twenty years fixing things that other people considered temporary. Roads wash out, bridges crack, and culverts collapse. I go out in the dark and cold to fix them anyway, because someone has to, and because walking away from a problem has never once been something I know how to do.