Page 10 of Working for Keeps

“You shouldn’t be drinking doubles alone back here.”

Mick isn’t in factory gear tonight. Dark flannel, sleeves rolled, a heavy leather belt. He doesn’t sit across from me. He slides into the booth beside me, his thigh pressed hard against mine.

“I needed to clear my head.” I stare into my glass. Then I make myself do what I haven’t been able to do since Tuesday. I take the yellow paper out of my coat and slide it across the wood. “Marlene gave me this on Tuesday. It’s been in my pocket ever since. It was in my pocket last night, on your floor.”

Mick puts one finger on it and doesn’t pick it up. “Marlene has a big mouth.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I turn my head and make myself look at him. “Why did you let me walk into your office thinking you hated me, when you’ve been keeping my grandmother’s house from falling down around her? You paid her tab. You fixed her roof in the freezing rain. Why?”

Mick looks down at his hands. His nails are still stained with carbon from Line Three.

“Because she’s Nana Warden,” he says, his voice carrying a raw, unpretentious weight that shatters the last of my walls. “And because when you left three years ago, you took my whole world with you in that letter. But you left her behind. And I couldn’t let the only piece of you I had left go hungry or freeze in the winter. It wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about the union. It was about taking care of what’s yours. What should have been ours.”

A tear gets down my cheek before I can stop it, and I look at this stubborn man who spent three years carrying the weight of my ghost while I chased a bonus in Chicago.

I didn’t run because I didn’t love him. I ran because of how much I did, and of how completely he could undo me.

And now, in a dark booth with his thigh against mine and his thumb coming up to wipe my cheek, there’s nothing of me left standing.

His thumb moves across my lower lip, once, and then his hand leaves my face.

Under the table it comes down on my knee, and then it slides, slow and deliberate, up the inside of my thigh until it stops exactly where he means it to, and my breath goes out of me. He hasn’t turned toward me and he hasn’t shifted his weight, and anybody looking over here would see a man sitting still in a booth.

My fingers flatten against his thigh. “Please.”

His eyes are heavy and he isn’t hiding it.

“I’m not letting you run this time,” he says. “We’re going to fix what’s broken. Starting tonight.”

His hand comes back up. He folds the yellow paper once and puts it in his shirt pocket, and he does it without asking.

Then he’s out of the booth with his hand down to me before the words are all the way out of his mouth.

I look at his open palm, at the grease worked into the creases and the stripe across the knuckles where the wrench slipped on Line Three, and every instinct I have built in nine years tells me to stand up on my own and let him watch me do it.

I take it instead.

Which is when the sky rips open.

It’s a late-spring deluge that rolls off the peaks and comes down on the valley all at once, and the roar of it on the old metal roof takes the jukebox and the pool tables and every conversation in the building with it. A hundred heads come up at once. The welders at the rail turn to the windows, and for about fifteen seconds this room forgets there’s a woman from Chicago standing in it.

Fifteen seconds is all he needs. He has my coat and he has me moving and nobody watches us go.

“My car,” I say at the door. “I need to get back to Elm Street.”

“You aren’t driving that toy sedan anywhere tonight. Look out the window.”

The lot has turned into a brown lake, and somebody in a dual-axle flatbed has backed up to the rear bumper of my rental, boxing it against the retaining wall with three inches to spare.

“You have got to be kidding me. Who parks like that?”

“A subcontractor who’s had four pitchers and doesn’t care about Chicago rental cars.” Mick pushes the door open an inch and the cold comes through it smelling of wet pine. “The lower creek road washes out when it hits this hard. You’d be in the ditch before you cleared the first intersection. You’re riding with me.”

I look from the lake to his face, hunting for the argument, but there isn’t one. And I know this valley too well to know he’s right.

“Fine. But you’re bringing me straight back to the duplex.”

I put my car keys on the bar and tell Kayla Brooks I’ll be back for them. She takes them without looking up and drops them in the till like she’s done it for half this valley.