Page 18 of Working for Keeps

Her phone goes off on the slate counter.

It’s faceup and I’m three feet away with a knife in my hand, and I read it before I can stop myself.

ROLAND KELLER. 9:47 p.m.

Vera stops with the salt cellar in her hand.

She doesn’t jump. She doesn’t explain, and she doesn’t look at me. The phone gets two seconds and a look I have only ever seen her use on the plant floor, and then she turns it facedown on the slate and goes back to the vegetables.

The phone buzzes once more against the stone. Then it stops.

“He works Sundays,” she says.

“Does he?”

“He works every day. He’ll have sent an email too.” She’s cutting the eggplant in neat slices. “It’ll keep till morning.”

I could ask. The question is right there, and she’s standing in my kitchen with her sleeves pushed up and her hair down, and out the black window is a valley with four hundred men asleep in it.

But if I ask what he wants, this stops being the best night of my life.

So I don’t ask.

Whatever this turns into, she never lied to me tonight.

I just didn’t ask.

We eat at the oak table, and Vera eats like she has been hungry for a year, all the corporate elegance gone. She goes back for the kare-kare twice, and the second time catches me watching and doesn’t bother to fix her face.

She looks happy.

When the plates are in the sink, I stand with my hands on the edge of the counter and my back to her. I hear her chair go back as she crosses the floor and stops behind my right shoulder, not touching me but close enough to be warm on the back of my neck.

“Mick,” she says. “Stop hiding from me.”

I turn around. “I’m not hiding,” I say. “I’m trying to take my time with you because if I act like I did in that office, I’m going to break you.”

“You’re not going to break me.” She rests her hands flat against my chest. “I don’t want the frantic version of you tonight. I don’t want the one driven by anger and everything you’ve been carrying either. I want you, all of you. Take your time.”

“I’m not hiding,” I say. “I’m trying to take my time with you. Because if I act like I did in that office, I’m going to break you.”

I cradle her face in my hands, my thumbs at her temples and kiss her. It’s slow and deep, and partway through it, Vera makes a sound against my mouth I haven’t heard in three year and my chest tightens.

How I’ve missed that sound.

How I’ve missed her.

On the way to the bedroom she stops me.

“I’m on the pill,” she says, quiet and steady, her eyes on mine. “Have been for three years. In the office I didn’t want that conversation. Tonight I do. I don’t want anything between us.”

It takes me a second to get my voice to work. “You sure?”

“I’ve been sure since Tuesday.”

The bedroom is the last room I finished and the plainest one in the house. Bare pine, one window with the whole black valley in it, a lamp I wired myself. I’ve walked in here every night since I hung the door and turned that lamp off without looking at anything.

She stops in the doorway and takes all of it in, then she puts her hand out behind her and finds mine.