Page 29 of Working for Keeps

“Look there,” Mick whispers, his breath warm against my ear as he nudges the beam an inch higher. “The third arch. See the keystone?”

“I see it,” I say softly, but I’m not looking at the river-stone. I’m looking at his profile in the amber glow—the strong line of his jaw, the carbon worked into the creases of his skin, the quiet, fierce devotion that has kept him standing guard over this valley and my family while I was a thousand miles away running from my own life.

He catches me watching him and turns his head. In the dark, six inches apart, our eyes lock, and the silence between us turns profoundly domestic.

There are four hundred jobs on the line, a corporate machine trying to level this building, and my own career about to go up in flames by Thursday, but inside this dusty crawlspace, with his arm pressed against mine, I am entirely, completely home.

“Nobody’s been down here in years,” Mick says. “I used to bring a light down when I was twenty-two. Just to look.”

“At what?”

“At the work.” He is quiet a second. “Men poured those by hand in 1911 and never got their names on a thing. There’s a whole town walking around four feet over them, and in ninety years nobody up there has come down to look. Seemed to me somebody ought to.”

Then, above us, a door bangs.

Boots on the concrete. Two sets. Coming across the stamp floor toward the tool crib, four feet over our heads, and Mick’s hand closes over my wrist and the flashlight goes out.

We lie there in the dark on our stomachs, not breathing.

“—swear to God his truck was outside City Hall,” a voice says. Red Holloway, right above us on the arch. “Middle of the day. Doing what? He hates that building. He wouldn’t walk into it if it was on fire.”

Somebody answers. I can’t make out the words.

“I know what she is,” Red says. “I know exactly what she is, and I’ve known Mick Hayes since he was nine years old, and if that woman is turning him around, somebody in this local better say it out loud before we’re all standing in a parking lot.”

The boots move off, a tool cabinet opens and closes, and the door bangs again.

Mick lets go of my wrist. In the pitch dark, six inches from my face, he lets out a breath that shakes.

“Two more days,” he says. “That’s Red. He’s not wrong, either. That’s the thing. Everything he just said is true.”

I put the light back on. The scale rule jumps in my fingers and I have to set it down and pick it up again.

“Then let’s get it stamped,” I say.

I take my photographs. Forty-one of them, with a scale rule, and the ink stamp of the 1911 elevation lying flat beside the actual stone so an engineer four hundred miles away can swear to it.

And then, on my stomach in the dust, with the light off, I lie there in the dark next to him and I hold his hand and I don’t say anything for a long time.

“I called my sister,” I tell him.

“Reyna.”

“Four years. We talk on birthdays.” I press my forehead against his shoulder. “I told her about Nana’s roof. She didn’t say anything for so long I thought the call dropped. And then she said, I sent money in October and it came back. Nana sent it back.”

Mick laughs, low, and the arches take it and give it back to us.

“Sounds about right,” he says. “Your nana was always stubborn.”

“She’s coming for Thanksgiving,” I say, and I hear how it sounds, and so does he: like a woman planning a November in a valley she is supposed to be leaving in seven days.

His thumb moves once across my knuckles. He doesn’t say anything about it. That is the single kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.

I walk into the permits office on Thursday afternoon with a hundred and forty pages under my arm, nine minutes ahead of myself.

Lila Moreno reads it standing up. She reads it for thirteen minutes while Mick sits on the bench under the rubber plant with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging, not moving, and I stand at the counter and watch a clock.

At 3:04 she picks up the stamp.