Page 12 of Working for Keeps

“Vera.”

She turns around, her back hitting the wet siding, her hands coming up flat against my chest as I close the distance and put her in the corner of the porch. The overhang keeps the worst of it off us, but the air is full of cold mist and the wind is whipping her wet hair across her face.

“What do you want from me, Mick?” It comes out cracking as she shoves at me, both fists closed on the flannel. “You corner me in your office, you treat me like the enemy, you look at me like you want to rip me apart, and then I find out you’ve been feeding my grandmother for a year. If you hate me so much for leaving, why didn’t you let me go? Why didn’t you let the memory die?”

“Hate you?” My hands clamp onto her waist and pin her against the siding. “I tried, Vera. God help me, I tried every day for three years. I woke up in that cabin looking at the empty space where you used to sleep and I tried to build up enough hate to wash the taste of you out of my mouth. It never worked. Not once.”

I step in until there’s nothing left between us.

“I don’t hate you. I’m furious with you. I’m furious that you left me nothing but ink on a piece of paper, that you thought a career in a city could replace what we built here,” I say. “But I could never hate you. I’ve been guarding what’s yours since the second you crossed the county line, because in my mind you still belong to me. You always have. And there isn’t a spreadsheet in the world that changes it.”

Vera stares up at me. Suddenly, the resistance goes out of her hands and her palms soften on my ribs as her fingers curl into the wet fabric of my shirt.

As her head tilts back, I pull her off the siding and bring my mouth down on hers, my kiss rain-slicked and furious.

She doesn’t pull away but comes up into it, her hands in my wet hair.

The air around us is freezing and the rain is a roar two feet away. I slide my hand down her thigh and hook her knee around my hip, pressing her back into the wood of the duplex until she knows exactly what she left behind.

Hell. She tastes like home.

I get my mouth off hers with an effort that feels like taking my own skin off and stay where I am, my forehead on the wet siding behind her ear, breathing like I’ve run up the ridge.

Vera is breathing just as hard, her eyes closed and her fingers still in my hair.

“Mick.” Her mouth is still an inch from mine.

I make myself take a slow breath of the freezing air. I drop her leg and step back into cold.

I pick up her keys off the boards and hand them to her. “Get inside,” I say. “Get warm. I’ll see you Monday. Sober, in the daylight, with your shoes on.”

And before she can answer, before she can see what’s on my face, I go back down the steps into the storm and get back into my truck.

Seven

Vera

My first thought Sunday morning is my rental car, boxed in by a subcontractor’s flatbed in the mud of The Foundry’s lot, with my keys in Kayla Brooks’s till.

But when I pull back the blinds, the sedan is in my driveway, clean of mud, square on the pad, my car keys sitting on the porch rail under a stone.

No note. No text. Mick went back at dawn, made the man move, and drove it up here while I was dead to the world.

So I drive it, at nine in the morning, to my grandmother’s house.

Six days I’ve been in this valley and I haven’t gone to visit her. Six days.

The house looks the same, which is what I was not ready for. White clapboard gone gray at the north corner, the porch swing chained up for the season, the boot scraper my father set in concrete the summer we came. What’s different is the roof. The whole south run of shingles is new.

Nana Warden opens the door before I knock. “Well,” she says.

In her eighties and standing five foot one, she gives me the look she gave me when I was nine and broke a window and tried to blame it on my sister.

“Hi, Nana.”

“You’ve been in town since Monday.”

“I have.”