Page 17 of Working for Keeps

For a while there’s nothing in the room but our breathing and the plastic clock on the wall, four minutes fast since 1998.

“Fuck. We’re in trouble, Ms. Warden,” he says into my skin, a dry trace of his old humor sneaking back into his voice.

I let out a shaky laugh and look at the ruined efficiency logs scattered across the floor. “The timeline is definitely ruined, Mr. Hayes.”

So much for professional boundaries.

Eight

Mick

The gravel of the ridge road clicks under the truck as my headlights cut through the pines on the last climb to my property, and beside me Vera is quiet, her profile lit green by the dash.

Neither of us said a word about where we were going when I put her in this truck at the end of the day, because we both already knew.

Three hours ago she was on the edge of a laminate desk in that trailer with my hands in her hair and the presses running under us. Then we straightened the papers, she fixed her blouse, I walked out first so nobody would count us leaving together, and we got through the rest of the afternoon like two people who hadn’t.

I reach over and cup her knee with my hand, just leaving it there, a weight, letting her feel the calluses through the fabric.

“You bought a place all the way out on the ridge?” she says. “You used to want to be in the middle of things.”

“Town gets small when you’re the one everybody comes to when something breaks.” I move my hand from her knee to drop a gear. “Down there, there’s always a set of eyes on you. Up here the only thing watching is the trees.”

We come over the crest, the high beams washing across the cabin, and kill the engine. The ticking of it is the only sound on the ridge, and Vera goes still.

It isn’t a prefab kit and it isn’t a hunting shack. It’s two stories of hand-hewn pine on a foundation of river stone, the porch running the length of the front, the timber pillars squared with an adze over three months of evenings, to a tolerance that outlives a century of Colorado winters.

“You built this,” she whispers.

“Every log. Come on. Let’s get you out of the cold.”

Inside, the soapstone stove has kept the chill off. I flip a switch and low amber light comes up over the pine floors, the stone fireplace, the shelves of mechanical manuals and old valley blueprints and a few paperbacks we read together as kids.

Vera walks into the middle of the room, and without her blazer, with her hair down, she looks like she has always been standing there.

“It’s beautiful.”

“I didn’t want a house that creaked every time the wind changed.”

There’s a pot on the back burner that’s been going since before I drove down to get her. I started it this morning, low and slow, the way it has to be done: the oxtail first, hours of it, then the ground peanuts and the annatto until the sauce went that deep, stubborn orange. The whole cabin smells of it.

She stops, her head turning toward the stove, and her eyes fill before she can get in front of it.

“Mick,” she says. Just that.

“Kare-kare,” I say, like it’s nothing. Kah-reh kah-reh, just the way she taught me to pronounce it.

But it’s not nothing.

I don’t tell her about the four hours of highway it took to find oxtail and banana blossom and a jar of shrimp paste I had to ask a stranger in the Denver market how to use. I don’t tell her I copied the recipe off the stained card in the tin in Nana Warden’s pantry, Vera’s mother’s handwriting starting to fade, while Nana ran the tap and pretended not to watch.

I lift the lid and let the steam roll up between us. “Figured you hadn’t had it in a while.”

She presses the back of her hand to her mouth and looks at the floor, and I let her have the minute.

Some things I can’t say out loud, so I cooked it.

Then I put her to work on the eggplant and green beans. She needs something for her hands, and for twenty minutes the cabin fills with the sounds of a routine we used to have. The thump of her knife on the board. Elk steaks searing in butter. We move around each other in the small kitchen with a choreography that scares me more than anything in this valley, because it would be so easy to get used to it.