Page 3 of Working for Keeps

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” I say, and I turn the corner past the tool crib and don’t let myself look back.

Two

Mick

The sound of her heels on the concrete stays with me long after she turns the corner past the tool crib. It doesn’t belong here. It belongs on polished marble in a glass tower, anywhere but here.

But it’s all I can hear over the presses.

“Mick? You still with us?”

Artie says my name again. He and Toby are staring at me with their hardhats pushed back, their foreheads lined from thirty years of squinting at blueprints and worrying about the price of propane.

“Yeah.” My voice comes out like I’ve been swallowing iron filings. “What were you saying?”

Artie taps a callused finger on the layout sheet, right where the new automated feed ties into the old main line. “I was saying that if the suits think we can run this line with two fewer guys because they bolted on an optical sensor, they’re out of their minds. That sensor clogs with metal dust every two hours. Without a man watching the feed, the whole track jams.”

“They don’t care about the jam. They care about the payroll.” Toby spits into the trash can and looks down the hall where she went. “That was her, wasn’t it? The hatchet lady.”

I hook my thumbs into my tool belt, pinning my hands before they can make fists. “Her name is Ms. Warden. She’s here to do an audit. She doesn’t make the final calls.”

“Bullshit. Those types come in with their tablets, and two weeks later five guys are staring at a pink slip. You’re our steward. This town is finally getting its legs under it. We can’t have some city slicker gutting the biggest employer in the valley.”

“I know what’s at stake, Toby.” My voice drops into the register I use when a negotiation is about to turn ugly. “Nobody’s getting cut on my watch. Keep your tolerances tight. Don’t give them a single metric they can use.”

Artie shifts his weight, and the question crawls up his face before he can stop it. He’s known me twenty years; subtlety was never his trade. “Mick. Didn’t you and her⁠—?”

Toby clears his throat, and Artie’s mouth closes around whatever he was about to dig up. The three of us stand there in the fluorescent buzz, not saying what the whole town already knows.

She lived here for years. She was mine for most of them.

There isn’t a man on this floor who didn’t watch it happen, and there isn’t one who’s forgotten how it ended.

I keep my face still, the seventeen-year-old poker face, load-bearing as ever, and say nothing, which is not a denial and isn’t meant to be one.

“Focus on the tolerances,” I say as they nod, old, tired gestures of trust I have no business accepting, and I head for the windowless concrete box at the back of the plant we call the union office.

Three years.

Three years of waking up in an empty cabin, looking at the spot on the table where her letter had been. Three years of scrubbing her out of my sheets and throwing myself into union work until my hands split at the knuckles and my brain went quiet.

I’d convinced myself the boy who loved Vera Warden had been worked out of me the way you work a burr off a casting.

Then she walks around a hydraulic shear in a charcoal blazer, and I’m nineteen again and bleeding out on the floor.

I shut the office door behind me. The roar drops to a hum that shakes the metal desk. The fluorescent tube flickers twice before it catches, throwing hard light over the filing cabinets and the labor binders and a bulletin board of faded flyers. It smells like old paper, stale coffee, and the industrial soap I use to get the grease out of my knuckles.

I drop into the chair and put my face in my hands. My palms are stained dark around the cuticles, my nails cracked.

And here’s Vera, looking like Chicago.

I pull the folded memo out of my back pocket, the one the courier brought yesterday. The preliminary restructuring proposal, signed at the bottom in a sharp, elegant hand, still slanting left.

Vera Warden, Lead Optimization Strategist.

She’s targeting night-shift differentials. She wants the forklift operators cross-trained into logistics, which eliminates two warehouse positions. She’s looking at our healthcare contributions like they’re columns that need rebalancing.

She doesn’t see Artie, whose wife is going through chemo. She doesn’t see Toby, who put a down payment on a house by the river. She sees inefficiencies.