Page 6 of Working for Keeps

I sink back into the cracked vinyl and wrap my hands around the mug.

Marlene’s words are an echo of Mick’s. You ran because things got hard.

Is that what everyone here thinks?

That I’m a coward who fled to the city to escape the dirt? They didn’t see the nights I spent crying myself to sleep in an empty apartment, wondering if I’d thrown away the one good thing I had for a career that treats me like a line item.

I turn the mug in my hands and let the heat burn into my palms until it hurts.

Marlene comes back to the table. She sets down a platter with a clack that rattles the silverware, eggs and hash browns and bacon, and next to it she drops a crumpled piece of yellow paper.

“Eat.” She puts her hands on her hips.

The food smells exactly like my childhood, but my eyes drop to the paper.

It’s an old diner receipt, the ink faded, the numbers at the bottom bold and clear. A statement for a tab.

For a few moments, I stare at the name, realizing I’m looking at my grandmother’s tab for a year of grocery and meal deliveries, totaling nearly six hundred dollars.

Across the bottom, in a jagged hand that presses through to the back of the paper, three words, and beneath them a signature.

Paid in Full.

M. Hayes.

The diner goes out from under me.

“What is this?” My voice is shaking so badly I can barely shape the words.

Marlene softens and pulls the towel out of her apron.

“Your Nana is prideful, Vera. You know that,” she says. “When her roof started leaking last winter and the heating bills went through the roof, she stopped coming in. She stopped her weekly delivery because she couldn’t pay the balance. And she wouldn’t call you in Chicago, because she didn’t want to be a burden. Didn’t want you thinking she couldn’t take care of herself in the house she’s lived in for fifty years.”

I called her every Sunday. Every Sunday she told me everything was fine, the weather was beautiful, she was doing just great. And I was so busy proving I’d made the right choice by leaving that I didn’t hear one word of it.

“Mick found out,” Marlene says. “Walked in here one morning before shift, asked for her ledger, and put six hundred dollars cash on that counter. Told me if I ever let her go hungry, or ever told her where the money came from, he’d come back and dismantle my griddle. Then he spent a weekend in the freezing rain patching her roof, telling her he was doing volunteer maintenance for the county.”

She taps the paper. “He’s been doing it for a year. Keeping her warm, keeping her fed, making sure she doesn’t lose that house. He didn’t do it for praise, and he didn’t do it so I’d tell you. He did it because she’s your grandmother, and in his mind that means she’s his responsibility, whether you’re in this town or three thousand miles away.”

Suddenly I can’t breathe, the air already in my lungs turning to lead.

I look at the signature again. M. Hayes. The man who cornered me in his office yesterday and called me a coward and a runner is the same man who has been keeping my family alive while I sat in a temperature-controlled high-rise in Illinois.

He didn’t only guard his own heart. He guarded everything I left behind.

“He’s a good man, Vera.” Marlene folds the towel over her wrist. “He’s a Forge Creek man. We don’t walk away when the winter gets hard. Remember that when you walk onto that floor today with your metrics.”

Then she leaves, the food in front of me steaming and untouched.

Outside the window, the fog is finally lifting off the mountains, and the silhouette of Halvorsen Works hums in the distance.

I leave a twenty on the table, take the yellow paper, and walk out into the freezing air. The walkthrough starts at six. I have to face him again in twenty minutes.

And as I pull onto the highway, the labor contract is not the thing in this valley that frightens me.

It’s Mick Hayes and the fact that I’m falling for him all over again.

Four