Chapter 7
Seven
Vera
My first thought Sunday morning is my rental car, boxed in by a subcontractor’s flatbed in the mud of The Foundry’s lot, with my keys in Kayla Brooks’s till.
But when I pull back the blinds, the sedan is in my driveway, clean of mud, square on the pad, my car keys sitting on the porch rail under a stone.
No note. No text. Mick went back at dawn, made the man move, and drove it up here while I was dead to the world.
So I drive it, at nine in the morning, to my grandmother’s house.
Six days I’ve been in this valley and I haven’t gone to visit her. Six days.
The house looks the same, which is what I was not ready for. White clapboard gone gray at the north corner, the porch swing chained up for the season, the boot scraper my father set in concrete the summer we came. What’s different is the roof. The whole south run of shingles is new.
Nana Warden opens the door before I knock. “Well,” she says.
In her eighties and standing five foot one, she gives me the look she gave me when I was nine and broke a window and tried to blame it on my sister.
“Hi, Nana.”
“You’ve been in town since Monday.”
“I have.”
“Six days.”
“Yes.”
She holds that a moment longer. Then she turns and walks back into the house, leaving the door open. In my family that’s what forgiveness looks like.
The smell hits me before my coat is off. Chicken, bay leaf, vinegar, pepper, garlic gone soft and sweet in the pan. Adobo. She’s been cooking since before I got up.
“Sit. You’re thin,” she says as she spoons white rice in a bowl and tops it with chicken adobo. “The city makes you thin and you think that’s the same as doing well.”
She puts a bowl in front of me and stands over me until I pick up the spoon. Only then does she sit down across from me and fold her hands.
“So. They sent you to close the plant.”
“They sent me to do an audit.”
She gives me that look again. “Vera.”
I put the spoon down. “They sent me to find a way to cut labor costs, yes.”
“Mm.” She nods slowly, as if I’ve confirmed the weather. “And you’re staying in that duplex on Elm Street with the bad furnace.”
“It’s fine.”
“It has a bad furnace. It’s always had a bad furnace.”
Behind her, on the windowsill, is the same row of things that’s been there my whole life. A jar of dried bay leaves. A chipped ceramic bird. A photograph of my mother at twenty-six in front of a Quonset hut in a yellow dress, squinting, one hand up against the sun.
And on the counter under the window, the tin. Battered, red, with a lid that never fit right. My mother’s recipe cards.
“Nana. Why didn’t you tell me about the tab at Kincaid’s?”
Her hands don’t move, not one finger of them.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Six hundred dollars. A year of deliveries you stopped taking. The heating bills. The roof.”
“The roof was county maintenance.”
“The county doesn’t do roofs.”
“The county,” she says with enormous dignity, “does what the county does.”
“Nana…”
“He asked me not to tell you,” she says to the table. “Michael. And I let him think I didn’t know he was doing it, because letting a man think he’s gotten away with something is how you keep him doing it.” Her mouth twitches. “He is not a subtle boy. He came to fix a step that wasn’t broken.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because you were building something.” She looks up.
“Because you called every Sunday, and every Sunday you sounded like a woman about to ask if I needed anything, and I was not going to be the anchor that pulled you back down into this valley. I raised two girls in this house who were never allowed to be a burden to anybody. I was not going to start being one at eighty.”
My throat closes. “I would have come.”
“I know,” she says. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.”
The clock over the stove ticks.
“Reyna knows,” I say. It isn’t a question. My sister has been in Denver four years, and she and I haven’t had a conversation longer than eleven minutes since our father’s funeral.
Reyna was born here. That’s the difference between us and always has been.
I came into this valley on my father’s hip with the other side of the world still on me.
Reyna arrived four years later in the county hospital on Third Street, and she has never in her life had to decide whether she was from somewhere.
“Reyna knows what I let her know. Same as you.” Nana pushes the bowl an inch toward me. “Eat. If you’re going to sit in my kitchen and be sad at me, you can do it with a full stomach.”
I eat, and she watches me do it the same as she has watched every meal I have ever eaten in this house, and when I’m halfway down the bowl, she gets up and sets the red tin on the table between us.
“Take one.”
“I don’t need it yet—”
“You have your mother’s hands and none of her patience, and if I die with that tin full, you’ll have to learn it off the internet, and the internet doesn’t know about the peanuts.
” She thumbs the lid off. The cards are soft at the corners, the ink brown, the handwriting small and slanted and so familiar.
But I don’t take one. I close the lid instead.
“Not yet,” I say.
Nana Warden takes a long, level moment with that. Then she nods once and closes her fingers over the lid of the tin and leaves them there.
“Then don’t take three years about it,” she says.
At the door, with my coat on, I stop and turn around. “If the plant closed. If it went away. What happens to this town?”
She doesn’t soften. It isn’t in her.
“What happens is Marlene closes at two instead of eight, the Kowalskis take the girls to Pueblo, and the man on the corner sells the house he was born in for whatever a stranger with cash offers him. And in six years there’s a fence around a lot of concrete out there, and nobody remembers what the noise sounded like.
” She reaches up and straightens my collar the way she has since I was four.
“And I’ll still be here, and you still won’t be. Go to work, Vera.”
Row 417 of the efficiency spreadsheet has been open on my screen all afternoon but I have not touched it.
Go to work, Vera.
I’m trying. The ache of my grandmother’s kitchen is still sitting under my sternum, and under that, lower and hotter, is the other thing.
My lower lip stings. Even with my eyes open, the weight of Mick’s mouth is still on it from the porch last night, and I trace my thumb over it, swollen, sensitized.
The weekend turnaround shift is thrumming below me, the thump-hiss of the presses coming up through the floorboards and into my legs.
He’s down there. Running the line. In a building I am being paid to take apart.
Boots on the steps outside, and the door swings open without a knock. Mick steps in, carrying a stack of laminated safety sheets, his expression carved from the same granite he wore before he kissed me senseless in the rain.
He said Monday. He stood on my porch last night with his hands shaking on my hips and told me Monday, in the daylight, with my shoes on, and it is Sunday afternoon.
Without breaking eye contact, he reaches behind his back, hooks his thumb over the lock, and twists.
The click is very loud but I don’t cower. I set my knuckles on the edge of the desk and square my shoulders.
“Mr. Hayes, company policy requires administrative doors to remain unlocked during shift hours.”
“Company policy didn’t account for the transition timeline you dumped on my desk.
” He crosses the room and slams the sheets down over my neat stacks.
“Line Three cannot transition to the automated feed by Monday. It’s a structural impossibility, and your metrics are going to get someone on my crew killed. ”
“The timeline was approved six weeks ago.” I stand so I don’t have to look up at him. “The feed has a triple-redundant laser override. If your operators are properly cross-trained, which is your responsibility as steward, the risk drops to zero. I’m not changing the date.”
“The foundation settles two inches every spring, and the lasers lose alignment. I told you that the first day you walked onto my floor.” He leans his hands on my desk, crowding my perimeter until the smell of him fills the room.
“You wrote it down. I stood there while you wrote it down. And then you went back to your trailer and left the deadline exactly where it was. You look at your little glowing screen and tell forty men to bet their fingers on an algorithm you already know is wrong.”
“Don’t you dare question my commitment to safety.
” My palms come down on the wood opposite his.
“I spent twelve hours on the mechanical specs before I ever set foot in this valley. You’re using the foundation as an excuse because you’re terrified of what happens to your control over this floor if my optimization works. ”
“You think I care about control?” His jaw flexes.
“I care about their lives. I care about this town. And I care that you’re standing there in your perfect clothes acting like a stranger when less than twenty-four hours ago you were holding on to me on your porch like the wood was coming out from under you. ”
“You locked the door, Mick!” I come around the desk and meet him face-to-face. “Don’t lecture me about OSHA regulations when this is an excuse. You came up here because you’re losing your mind, just like I am, because you can’t look at me on that floor without remembering exactly how I taste.”
“Yes.” He takes a step forward and traps me against the edge of the desk. “I’ve been losing it for three years. Do you have any idea what it was like? Walking into that cabin every night and finding nothing but silence, knowing you were in some city living a life that didn’t include me?”