Chapter 3
Three
Vera
Ihaven’t slept.
I spent the night in the company duplex on Elm Street trying to scrub the memory of his heat off my skin, and every time I closed my eyes, the steel door in Mick’s office clicked shut in my head.
The phantom warmth of his chest was still an inch off my skin, iron filings and industrial soap and him still in my lungs.
By four I gave up and got in the car, the valley buried under a fog that traps the smell of coal smoke and pine against the pavement.
I went in there yesterday to establish corporate boundaries. Instead Mick dismantled me without once putting his mouth on mine.
Now it’s Tuesday, my timing walkthrough starts in less than an hour, and I need coffee.
Kincaid’s Early Bird Diner is a long brick building that has been on this corner of the highway for as long as I can remember, its windows fogged. When I push the door open, the bell chimes and the warmth hits me: bacon grease, burnt sugar, a Formica counter worn smooth by decades of elbows.
A few early-shift men from the road crews look up. Sharp, tired eyes take in the wool coat and the briefcase, the unmistakable aura of an outsider. The murmur of conversation dips, then resumes.
I know that dip.
I knew that dip at fourteen in a cafeteria with my mother’s food in a thermos, and I knew it at nine when a substitute teacher asked me twice where I was from and didn’t mean Colorado, and I have spent most of my life telling myself the blazer is what does it now. The blazer helps.
But the blazer isn’t the whole of it.
“Sit wherever you like, honey.”
Marlene Kincaid, exactly as she was the day I left, is behind the counter with a coffee pot in her fist. Late fifties, silver-streaked hair in a practical bun, a face like a map of sharp lines. She has kept this town fed through two strikes and a layoff.
I slide into a booth in the back corner and set my briefcase on the table. My hair is pinned into a knot that’s already giving me a headache.
Marlene is at my table before I get the iPad open. She flips the mug and fills it to the brim.
“You look like you’re about to faint, throw up, or fire somebody.” Her eyes go over my face and stop on the circles my concealer didn’t hide. “Vera Warden. Word said you were back in town, carrying a hatchet for the Chicago office.”
“It’s a standard facility audit. An efficiency study.”
She snorts and wipes the table with her towel.
“Efficiency. That’s the word they use right before they turn off the lights and lock the gates.
This town has just about got its feet under it again.
We don’t need a corporate vampire draining the blood out of Halvorsen’s just when things are turning around. ”
“I’m not a vampire.” It comes out thinner than I want it to. “Marlene, if that plant misses its numbers one more quarter, Chicago walks away from it. I’m trying to find a middle ground.”
And I can find one. I want to put that on the counter between us, but I can’t, because there is no way to say it in this diner that doesn’t sound like a woman defending her own paycheck.
I kept a stamping plant open in Rockford for eleven months past the date a board had already written down, and I did it by finding four hundred thousand dollars in a scrap-recovery contract nobody had renegotiated since 2011, and nobody in Rockford has ever known my name.
The work is the one thing I have never been bad at.
Marlene looks at me for a long beat, and the sarcasm goes out of her face and what’s under it is a woman who fed this town through two strikes.
“A middle ground doesn’t exist on a spreadsheet, honey.
It exists in the families who buy groceries across the street.
” She taps the rim of my mug. “But you always were a runner when things got heavy. Breakfast is coming. You look like you haven’t eaten a real meal since you crossed the state line. ”
She’s gone before I can protest, shouting a ticket for eggs and hash browns at the cook.
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.