Chapter 12 Useful Hands
Nora POV
The hydraulic lift had been losing pressure since before I arrived, and I’d put it off long enough.
I lay on my back on the cold concrete with lake wind cutting through the open bay door, staring up at the base cylinder’s corroded fitting while rust flakes fell on my safety glasses.
Autumn had sharpened Pine Harbor’s mornings.
My breath came out white. The concrete under my shoulders had frosted overnight, and I could feel the chill seeping through my coveralls and the thermal shirt beneath them.
Two weeks of engines, lake wind, and oil, and I was still here. I could have left. Instead, I stayed because the work needed doing and I was good at it and nobody in this yard pretended otherwise.
I tightened the wrench and the fitting groaned.
The old hydraulic fluid still in the line had turned dark with age and metal particulate.
Bad seals and corroded fittings had caused months of pressure loss, including a slow leak at the base cylinder.
I’d restored the proper warning circuit before I started on the leak.
The fitting came loose with a metallic pop, and I caught the drip pan before the old fluid could pool on the floor.
I pulled the cylinder’s lower seal assembly free, examined it under the work light, and set it beside the replacement seal kit I’d ordered from Marquette.
The old seals were cracked and hard. They should have been replaced six months ago.
Hank appeared at the bay door holding two thermoses. He set one beside my toolkit without a word.
“Thanks,” I said from under the lift.
He left. That was Hank. He never wasted words or lingered to watch. Pine Harbor’s wolves trusted each other to work without an audience. It had taken me a week to stop bracing for a catch that never came.
I drained my thermos of black coffee between pulling the second seal and seating the first replacement.
The new seals went in clean. I torqued each fitting to spec, bled the air from the lines, and ran the lift through three full cycles while checking every joint for weep.
Nothing. The warning light on the panel stayed dark, and the lift was ready for the afternoon haul-outs.
Bette leaned into the bay as I was wiping down my hands. “Pete Rasmussen called. His plow truck won’t start. Wants to know if you do house calls.”
“I do if he pays mileage.”
“I told him sixty for the visit plus parts and labor.” She waited, one eyebrow up.
“Seventy,” I said.
Bette’s mouth twitched. “I’ll tell him seventy.”
That was the other thing that had changed.
Pack members had started bringing me their trucks and small motors, and then word got out, because in a harbor town everyone’s truck is old and everyone’s outboard is older and the nearest dealership is an hour and a half south on a good day.
Nora at Karlsson’s can fix it. Nora at Karlsson’s is fair but not cheap.
Nora at Karlsson’s doesn’t do the job twice because she does it right the first time.
I’d repaired two snowplow rigs, a generator that powered somebody’s fish house, an ancient Mercury outboard that should have been scrapped but its owner loved it, and a Ford van with a transmission leak that had been misdiagnosed by a shop in Houghton.
I set my own rates. Nobody argued. The money was real, and I put half toward household costs and half into a jar in my dresser drawer for the proper repairs my truck still needed.
The jar was getting heavy. My hands were getting rougher.
? ? ?
My phone rang during my lunch break.
I was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket outside the bay, eating the sandwich Jules had left in the kitchen with my name on a sticky note, when the screen lit up. I tightened my grip on the sandwich when I saw the name.
Rafe Sutherland.
This time he was calling instead of texting. The rejected bond stirred as a faint ache, much weaker than the connection I felt to Wade. Rafe’s determination pressed through it like someone leaning on a door I’d locked.
I could have let it ring. I almost did. But two weeks of silence hadn’t made him stop, and ignoring a thing didn’t make it smaller. I’d learned that from Gordon.
I answered.
“Nora.” His voice came through clear and strained. He’d rehearsed the opening but not the follow-through. “Thank you for picking up.”
“I’m on my lunch break, Rafe. Say what you need to say.”
A pause. I heard wind on his end, the faint sound of an engine. He was in his truck somewhere.
“I’m getting worse,” he said. “The bond is making me sick. I can’t keep food down most days. I’m losing weight and I can’t sleep, and my father says it will keep getting worse until we resolve this.”
“So I drive back to Copper Point and say the words, and you can go back to sleeping with my sister.” I set the sandwich down beside me. My appetite was gone. “You called to tell me you’re sick. I heard you. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Come home. Please.” The last word came out rough. “We can end this properly. Face to face. And then you can go back to wherever you want to be.”
“I’m already where I want to be.”
Silence. The wind on his end picked up. I waited.
“Is that what he tells you?” Rafe asked. His voice had shifted. Harder now, pride pushing through the rehearsed patience. “Your new Alpha? That you belong up there fixing boats while two packs wait for you to do the right thing?”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but it came out anyway, short, sharp, and humorless.
“There it is,” I said. “I knew it would take about two minutes.”
“Nora.”
“You called me to beg and you couldn’t even get through the begging without blaming someone else.
” I stood up from the bucket. The bay door was open and I could see the harbor and the flat gray lake beyond it, and none of it belonged to Rafe Sutherland.
“Wade didn’t tell me a damn thing. Wade doesn’t tell me what to do.
Nobody up here tells me what to do, Rafe, and that’s why I’m staying. ”
“You know what I mean.”
“You’re trying to make me feel guilty because the bond you broke is hurting you.
You rejected me. In front of everyone. You chose Delia and you expected me to smile and disappear, and I didn’t, and now you’re sick.
” I kept my voice level even though my hands were shaking.
“That sickness is yours. You earned it when you said those words. I didn’t put it on you and I am not driving six hours to take it off. ”
“The bond is hurting both of us.”
“Then we’re both carrying something we didn’t ask for. The difference is that I’m carrying mine without calling you to fix it.”
He said nothing for a long time. I could feel his frustration and fear through the bond. Beneath both, his wolf kept reaching for mine. My wolf stirred at the contact and I pushed her down before she could reach for him.
“You can’t keep punishing both of us for one mistake,” Rafe said.
“You made your choice in front of both packs. I’m not driving home because the consequences have become inconvenient for you.”
I hung up before he could answer. My hand was shaking, and the old ache of the rejected bond tightened in my chest. I breathed through it. The autumn wind off the lake cut through my coveralls and carried the smell of cold water and pine, and after a minute the trembling stopped.
I picked up my sandwich, finished it standing, and went back under the engine I’d been working on before lunch.
? ? ?
The text came forty minutes later.
I’ll be there by the end of the week. We’re doing this, Nora. Whether you agree to see me or not.
I read it once, set the phone on the workbench face down, and torqued the next bolt.
? ? ?
That evening, Jules made chili with whatever had been in the pantry and somehow turned a can of kidney beans and some ground meat into something worth eating.
He had the radio on in the kitchen, tuned to a station out of Marquette that played old country, and he sang along under his breath while he stirred. His voice was better than the radio’s.
“Rasmussen confirmed seventy for the house call,” Bette said from the table. “He asked if you could look at his wife’s car while you’re there.”
“Depends on what’s wrong with it,” I said.
“She says the starter makes a clicking sound.”
“I’ll bring the multimeter.”
Arvid ate in silence and passed me the bread basket.
Jules set a bowl in front of me and leaned against the counter, still singing the chorus under his breath. “I heard the lift ran clean all day. No leaks?”
“No leaks.”
“And the warning circuit?”
“Working the way it should.”
Jules flashed his crooked grin. “I knew we kept you around for a reason.”
“Several, I hope.”
“At least three. I’m still counting.”
I almost smiled. He turned back to the stove, humming as he filled his own bowl, and some of the strain I’d carried home from the yard eased.
The meal wound down. Bette cleared her plate and said goodnight.
Hank followed. Toivo rinsed his bowl at the sink and disappeared toward the bunkhouse.
Arvid was last, pausing at the kitchen door to say something quiet to Wade about a dock cleat that needed replacing, and then it was the three of us.
Jules washed dishes. Wade sat across the table from me with his hands around a mug of coffee. He hadn’t asked what had happened at the yard. He’d watched me come back from lunch with tight shoulders and grease on my knuckles, and he’d said nothing, which was exactly the right amount.
Jules dried the last pot, hung the towel on its hook, and looked at both of us with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “I’m going up,” he said. “Don’t stay up too late.”
He touched my shoulder on his way past. The contact was brief, light, and friendly. His hand was warm through my shirt. Beneath the kitchen spices, I recognized his own scent, which I’d started noticing more often over the past two weeks.
Then he went upstairs, and I heard his door close.
Wade waited. The kitchen was quiet except for the wind against the windows and the old house settling around us.
“Rafe called me today,” I said.
Wade looked at me across the table. Patient and alert.
“He says the bond is making him sick. He wanted me to come back to Copper Point so we could end it in person.” I turned my coffee mug in my hands. “I told him no.”
“All right.”
“He accused you of telling me what to do. Of keeping me here.”
Wade’s expression cooled, his anger held under tight control. “And what did you say?”
“I told him nobody up here tells me what to do. That’s why I’m staying.”
Wade nodded once. He let me decide how much to say.
“He’s coming,” I said. “End of the week. Whether I agree to see him or not.”
Wade’s hands tightened around his mug. I saw the knuckles whiten and then ease.
“Then he comes,” Wade said. “And you decide what happens when he gets here. Same as everything else.”
I looked at him across the worn kitchen table with its ring stains and knife marks and the faint smell of Jules’s chili still in the air, and felt the bond between us pulse in answer.
“The sauna’s hot tonight,” Wade said. “Hank and Arvid already used it. I was going to go in after the house settles.” He held my gaze. “You’re welcome to join me.”
“Yes,” I said.
Wade took both our mugs to the sink. I watched his broad back and the way his flannel pulled across his shoulders, and something low in my stomach tightened. He rinsed the mugs, set them on the rack, and turned back to me.
“Give it an hour,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
He went upstairs. I stayed at the kitchen table with the wind outside, the still house around me, and Rafe’s open bond pulling somewhere far west.
I had an hour to let the day settle. I thought about the need Rafe had struggled to hide on the phone. He had accused Wade because he still couldn’t imagine me choosing for myself. His text said he was coming no matter what I wanted.
I pressed my palms flat on the table and felt the grain of the old wood under my calloused fingers. My hands smelled like hydraulic fluid and cold metal and coffee. Good smells for a woman who fixed things for a living, set her own price, and answered to no one.
The sauna would be hot. The cedar would smell like it always did. Wade would be there, and whatever happened between the heat and the dark would be mine to choose.
I went up to my room to wait out the hour.