Page 2 of Working for Keeps

“Can I help you?”

“Vera Warden. Vantor Industries, Chicago office. I’m here for the initial facility walkthrough.”

Her fingers stop over the keyboard. She looks up slowly, taking in the blazer, the hair, the briefcase. Whatever she was going to say next, she doesn’t say. News travels fast in a small town, and inside a factory it travels at light speed.

“Mr. Halvorsen says you’re clear for your floor assessment.” Her voice has gone clipped and hostile. “You’ll need a badge and safety glasses.”

She slides both across the counter. She doesn’t offer a hardhat.

“Thank you.” I clip the badge to my lapel, the plastic feeling heavy for its size.

I make my way to the end of the hall where reinforced steel doors separate the quiet of the admin wing from the heart of the plant. The moment I put my hand on the push-bar, the sound hits first, a wall of it, coming up through the soles of my shoes.

Thump-hiss. Thump-hiss.

The presses are the building’s pulse. Overhead fans cut the heavy air yet do nothing for the heat. Floodlights buzz in the rafters and throw long shadows across a labyrinth of assembly lines and stacked pallets of iron castings. The men move with a synchronized fluency no spreadsheet has ever captured: canvas, steel toes, grease-stained shirts, hands stained dark with oil that never fully washes out.

I open the efficiency log on my iPad.

Line Two is running eleven percent under its rated cycle, and I know it before I’ve finished the first column. The bottleneck isn’t the press but the pallet handoff at the far end, and the fix is right there. Six years I did this from a bedroom in this valley, and nobody in my division ran the models better.

Optimize. Find the redundancies. It’s what you’re paid to do.

But the stares press in. Welding masks come down, sparks dying to smoke as the suit invades their floor. Conversations stop, and the whispers that follow me are legible in every squared shoulder I pass.

I’m the enemy, the threat to their mortgages, their groceries, their kids’ shoes.

I keep my chin up and turn the corner past a hydraulic shear the size of an animal caught mid-bite.

Three men stand at the foreman’s desk over a blueprint. Two of them are silver under their hardhats.

The third is not.

He’s broader than I remember. A gray henley clings to his shoulders, damp, dusted with iron shavings. His forearms are corded from twelve years of the same eight hours. He wears no watch, no ring, nothing that could catch in the jaws of a machine.

Pinned over his heart is a silver union steward pin.

Mick Hayes.

The floor goes on roaring but I stop hearing it. And the moment he looks up, the universe shrinks to the concrete between us.

His eyes are the same dark blue I’ve been seeing in my sleep for three years, but there’s a hardness in them now. The reckless heat has been burned off and replaced with patience, which is worse.

He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t show a flicker of surprise, and takes a slow step back from the table to wipe his hands on a rag, every movement deliberate.

One of the older men mutters something and spits into a trash can.

I keep my chin up and follow the yellow line, heels clicking against concrete, my iPad held like armor against my chest.

Even in the drafty, ice-cold air of the plant floor, the heat radiating off him is an immediate, physical wall. It cuts straight through the wool of my charcoal blazer and the thin silk of my blouse. Every vibration of the heavy hydraulic press beneath my shoes suddenly matches the erratic thudding in my chest. The floor thumps; my pulse hits back twice as hard.

“Ms. Warden,” he says. “Welcome to Halvorsen Works. I hear you’re here to look at our efficiency.”

“Two weeks of it.” I bring the iPad up between us, which is the only shield I brought with me. “Time-motion on all three lines, then the workforce deployment model. I’ll want an hour with the steward before I put a single number in writing.”

“You know where to find him.”

Behind him the two older men have stopped pretending to read the blueprint.