Page 14 of Working for Keeps

Reyna was born here. That’s the difference between us and always has been. I came into this valley on my father’s hip with the other side of the world still on me. Reyna arrived four years later in the county hospital on Third Street, and she has never in her life had to decide whether she was from somewhere.

“Reyna knows what I let her know. Same as you.” Nana pushes the bowl an inch toward me. “Eat. If you’re going to sit in my kitchen and be sad at me, you can do it with a full stomach.”

I eat, and she watches me do it the same as she has watched every meal I have ever eaten in this house, and when I’m halfway down the bowl, she gets up and sets the red tin on the table between us.

“Take one.”

“I don’t need it yet⁠—”

“You have your mother’s hands and none of her patience, and if I die with that tin full, you’ll have to learn it off the internet, and the internet doesn’t know about the peanuts.” She thumbs the lid off. The cards are soft at the corners, the ink brown, the handwriting small and slanted and so familiar.

But I don’t take one. I close the lid instead.

“Not yet,” I say.

Nana Warden takes a long, level moment with that. Then she nods once and closes her fingers over the lid of the tin and leaves them there.

“Then don’t take three years about it,” she says.

At the door, with my coat on, I stop and turn around. “If the plant closed. If it went away. What happens to this town?”

She doesn’t soften. It isn’t in her.

“What happens is Marlene closes at two instead of eight, the Kowalskis take the girls to Pueblo, and the man on the corner sells the house he was born in for whatever a stranger with cash offers him. And in six years there’s a fence around a lot of concrete out there, and nobody remembers what the noise sounded like.” She reaches up and straightens my collar the way she has since I was four. “And I’ll still be here, and you still won’t be. Go to work, Vera.”

Row 417 of the efficiency spreadsheet has been open on my screen all afternoon but I have not touched it.

Go to work, Vera.

I’m trying. The ache of my grandmother’s kitchen is still sitting under my sternum, and under that, lower and hotter, is the other thing.

My lower lip stings. Even with my eyes open, the weight of Mick’s mouth is still on it from the porch last night, and I trace my thumb over it, swollen, sensitized.

The weekend turnaround shift is thrumming below me, the thump-hiss of the presses coming up through the floorboards and into my legs.

He’s down there. Running the line. In a building I am being paid to take apart.

Boots on the steps outside, and the door swings open without a knock. Mick steps in, carrying a stack of laminated safety sheets, his expression carved from the same granite he wore before he kissed me senseless in the rain.

He said Monday. He stood on my porch last night with his hands shaking on my hips and told me Monday, in the daylight, with my shoes on, and it is Sunday afternoon.

Without breaking eye contact, he reaches behind his back, hooks his thumb over the lock, and twists.

The click is very loud but I don’t cower. I set my knuckles on the edge of the desk and square my shoulders.

“Mr. Hayes, company policy requires administrative doors to remain unlocked during shift hours.”

“Company policy didn’t account for the transition timeline you dumped on my desk.” He crosses the room and slams the sheets down over my neat stacks. “Line Three cannot transition to the automated feed by Monday. It’s a structural impossibility, and your metrics are going to get someone on my crew killed.”

“The timeline was approved six weeks ago.” I stand so I don’t have to look up at him. “The feed has a triple-redundant laser override. If your operators are properly cross-trained, which is your responsibility as steward, the risk drops to zero. I’m not changing the date.”

“The foundation settles two inches every spring, and the lasers lose alignment. I told you that the first day you walked onto my floor.” He leans his hands on my desk, crowding my perimeter until the smell of him fills the room. “You wrote it down. I stood there while you wrote it down. And then you went back to your trailer and left the deadline exactly where it was. You look at your little glowing screen and tell forty men to bet their fingers on an algorithm you already know is wrong.”

“Don’t you dare question my commitment to safety.” My palms come down on the wood opposite his. “I spent twelve hours on the mechanical specs before I ever set foot in this valley. You’re using the foundation as an excuse because you’re terrified of what happens to your control over this floor if my optimization works.”

“You think I care about control?” His jaw flexes. “I care about their lives. I care about this town. And I care that you’re standing there in your perfect clothes acting like a stranger when less than twenty-four hours ago you were holding on to me on your porch like the wood was coming out from under you.”

“You locked the door, Mick!” I come around the desk and meet him face-to-face. “Don’t lecture me about OSHA regulations when this is an excuse. You came up here because you’re losing your mind, just like I am, because you can’t look at me on that floor without remembering exactly how I taste.”