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I settled in my tiny office that was dingy like most offices in the mill. I’d tried making it cheerier by putting up pictures of family, friends, and the Colorado landscape, but nothing helped. If Sawyer’s face didn’t make a place look better, you knew it was a lost cause.
I was ready to face my day armed with Dr. Pepper and a protein bar, the breakfast of champions. On my screen was the data for a recent corrosion test I had been conducting. I had barely started my analysis when I had a welcome interruption.
Wallace Hodge walked in wearing an old, worn-out smile on his weathered face. He was not only my boss, but one of the reasons I decided to be a metallurgist in the first place. Wallace had been around long enough that he was once my biological father’s boss. He thought the world of Anders Loveless and had made sure to keep in touch with Mom over the years. I remembered Wallace taking me on tours of the plant when I was a girl. Something here called to me. I thought maybe it was Anders. Like he wanted me to get to know him and working here would help me. I had to say it had. Wallace wasn’t the only guy from back in the day still around. The old timers all loved to tell me stories about how Anders worked harder than anyone they knew but played just as hard. Kind of like his daughter. He was the resident prankster on top of being the melt shop electrician. He was infamously remembered for setting up mannequins in each stall in the men’s bathroom. It took them hours to figure out why the stalls were never unoccupied. They’d also been wary of any food he brought to share. Caramel apples could have been caramel onions. He sounded like my kind of guy.
I learned more about my funny first father working here than I had my entire life. It wasn’t that Mom had been keeping him from me. We talked about him, but I don’t think she ever wanted to make Dad feel as if he had someone to live up to, so I never knew a lot. And I don’t think she ever wanted me to feel as if I was loved any less by either her or Dad because Dad’s blood didn’t run in my veins. Dad never treated me any different than my sisters. Well . . . until Josephine entered the picture. Marlowe and Macey had a lot in common with Josephine, like running up Dad’s credit cards and preening for hours, so my sisters embraced the new marriage.
I didn’t have a good poker face or mouth. Dad knew I was unhappy about the union. I felt a distance between us that had never existed before. I knew I bore some of the blame. I resented Dad for not only marrying Josephine, but Sawyer’s mother. I knew that sounded silly as they were one and the same, but in my mind the only marriage that should have happened between our families was the Sawyer and Emma one. Which was absolutely ridiculous when you considered we had never been on a date and he thought of me as a friend.
I smiled at Wallace instead of continuing to contemplate my bizarre family relationships.
“Morning, Emma,” Wallace’s rumbly voice filled my small corner of the plant. If you didn’t know him, you would have thought he’d smoked all his life, but his voice was naturally rough.
“Good morning. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He scrubbed his face filled with salt and pepper scruff. “I wanted to see how it was going with the interns. I heard some crying in the men’s bathroom yesterday.”
I tried not to smile. “That was probably Carson; he gets a little emotional when he doesn’t get over a hundred likes in the first hour of his Instagram post. Yesterday it was only thirty. An all-time low for him.”
Wallace shook his head. “What’s Instagram?”
“It’s a social media site where you can post pictures of your life and people can like it.”
“How do they like it?”
“By clicking on a little heart.”
Wallace’s eyes narrowed. “Guys do this too?”
“Yep. It’s a whole a new world.”
“What was the picture of?”
“His lunch.” I grinned.
“Are you yanking my chain?”
I laughed. “I’m afraid not. Carson fancies himself an amateur chef and photographer. He spent hours making a dish made with SpaghettiOs, not to mention all the time staging it in the break room. The low stats were a real blow to his fragile ego.”
Wallace crinkled his brow, not sure what to say. “Well . . . huh. Maybe . . . I got nothing.”
“I think I might need a raise after this year’s batch of interns.”
Wallace leaned against the door frame and gave me a contemplative smile. “If you can keep the tears out of the men’s bathroom, I’ll think about it.”
