17. Beckett
BECKETT
The lot shipped on the nineteenth day.
Twenty-two pallets, stacked and shrink-wrapped, loaded onto the state transport at four in the afternoon. I watched Ray drive the forklift out the bay door and back again until the floor was empty.
Hazel signed the manifest herself.
Nobody said a word.
The test results came back thirty-six hours later.
Two hundred washes. Clean pass.
Hazel read the printout to the floor and folded it into her pocket and went back to running the next order. Ray turned the machines back on. Kiana went to get coffee.
There was no celebration.
Just relief with a piece missing.
Because the contract was still sitting unsigned on a desk in Raleigh, and nobody knew when the call would come through.
Or if it would.
I found Nell at the end of the floor three days later, checking a hem on one of the smaller blankets.
She didn't look up when I walked over.
"Can you show me how to do a felled seam?" I asked.
She stopped.
Set the blanket down.
Looked at me.
"You've been sewing them for a month."
"I've been doing them wrong for a month," I said. "Nobody corrected me."
Her face didn't change.
"Because you were fast enough that it didn't matter," she said. "And because nobody here gets paid to teach the night hand how to hold a needle."
"I'm asking you."
She looked at me for another second.
Then she pulled a scrap of fabric off the stack beside her and handed it to me.
"Fold it over twice," she said. "Pin it flat. Then run the stitch."
I'd bought companies. Flown people to Paris on twelve hours' notice. Put her mother's name on a building in letters six feet tall if she'd asked me to.
I was asking a woman to show me how to fold a piece of cloth over twice.
I folded it.
Pinned it.
Started the stitch.
She watched me for about ninety seconds.
Then she took it out of my hands.
"Not like that."
She pulled the pins, shook the fabric flat, and folded it again.
Her fingers moved so fast I couldn't follow the sequence.
"You're locking the tension too early," she said. "It pulls. See?"
She held the fabric up to the light.
There was a pucker running along the seam I'd started.
"The whole point of a felled seam is that it's flat," she said. "If it pulls, it's not doing its job."
She handed it back.
"Start over."
I tried again.
She took it back after three inches.
"Still wrong."
"I can see that."
"Then stop doing it wrong."
"I'm trying."
"Try better."
It was the first real edge I'd heard in her voice in months.
And it was the closest thing to our marriage either of us had had since September.
She made me do it six more times before she let me keep the piece.
"Better," she said.
Not good.
Better.
I was worse at it than Kiana had been in her first hour, and we both knew it.
"How long did it take you to learn this?" I asked.
"Three days," she said. "When I was fourteen. My mother showed me once and then watched me do it wrong for eight hours straight until I got it right."
She folded the blanket she'd been checking and set it on the stack.
"You've got time," she said. "You're doing fifteen-dollar work. Nobody's expecting sixteen-dollar speed yet."
It was the first time she'd acknowledged the wage out loud.
"Ray makes sixteen," I said. "After nine years."
"I know what Ray makes."
"And Dorcas makes seventeen."
"After thirty-one years and a shoulder that's never going to be right again."
She looked at me.
"You negotiated for fifteen and Hazel gave it to you because you were fast enough to be worth it. That's how it works here."
I didn't know what to say to that.
So I didn't say anything.
I shopped at the grocery in Ardis on a Saturday morning because it was the only one open and I didn't know the hours anywhere else.
I walked in and half the town turned to look.
I'd stood in front of five hundred people at the Met in a suit that cost more than most of them made in a year and I'd never felt watched.
Here I felt it.
I put eggs in the cart. Butter. A loaf of bread that looked like the kind she used to buy when we lived in the apartment on Lafayette.
I didn't know what else to get.
A woman I didn't recognize came over and smiled at me.
"You need help finding anything?"
"No. Thank you."
"You sure? Because you've been standing in front of the dairy case for about five minutes."
I looked at the cart.
Eggs. Butter. Bread.
"I'm fine," I said.
She looked at the cart too.
"You planning to make breakfast?"
"Yes."
"You might want some coffee," she said. "It's on aisle three."
"I don't need coffee."
"Everybody needs coffee," she said.
She walked away before I could answer.
I picked up potatoes because I could see them and they looked like something a person could cook. Then I stood there trying to remember what else went into a breakfast and came up blank.
The woman came back with a bag of coffee and put it in my cart.
"On the house," she said. "Welcome to Ardis."
At the register the cashier scanned everything twice as slowly as she needed to and asked me how I was settling in.
"Fine," I said.
"That's good. Real good."
She looked at the eggs.
The butter.
The bread.
The potatoes.
The coffee I hadn't asked for.
"You cooking for Nell?"
I didn't know how to answer that.
"Yes," I said.
"That's real nice," she said.
She bagged everything in paper and handed it across.
I paid in cash and left.
The kitchen in the glass house had been built to a specification sheet I'd signed off on four years ago and never actually looked at.
Nell had unpacked exactly three things into it in all that time. A cutting board. A single pot. A wooden spoon.
The rest of the drawers were empty.
I put the groceries on the counter and stared at them.
I'd watched people cook. I understood the theory.
I cracked the eggs into a bowl and beat them with a fork because I couldn't find a whisk. Put butter in the pan. Waited for it to melt.
The heat was too high.
The eggs seized.
I turned it down. They kept cooking too fast on one side and not at all on the other. I scraped at them with the wooden spoon until they looked like something that had survived an accident.
The toast burned.
I pulled it out of the toaster and stared at it.
Black on one side. Barely warm on the other.
I heard her come in behind me.
Didn't turn around.
She walked over. Looked at the pan. Looked at the toast.
Looked at me.
"What are you doing?"
"Cooking," I said.
"No. You're not."
She took the spoon out of my hand.
"Move," she said.
I moved.
She pulled the pan off the heat and tipped the eggs onto a plate. Opened the trash and scraped the toast into it.
"The heat was too high," she said.
"I turned it down."
"After you'd already ruined them."
She put two new slices in the toaster and stood there with her arms crossed, waiting.
"You didn't have to do this," she said.
"I wanted to."
"Why?"
I didn't have an answer for that.
Or I did, and I didn't know how to say it.
The toast came up golden.
She buttered it without looking at me. Set it on the plate with the eggs. Handed it to me.
"Eat," she said.
Then she made her own.
Six years of drawers with nothing in them.
The first meal made in that kitchen was made badly by me and rescued by her. I didn't argue and she didn't comment. We ate standing up at the counter like we used to.
"The coffee's good," she said after a minute.
"I didn't buy it. The woman at the store put it in my cart."
"Which woman?"
"I don't know her name. She said it was on the house."
Nell almost smiled.
"That's Betty. She runs the place. She's been trying to get you to shop there for six years."
"I didn't know there was a there to shop at."
She looked at me.
"You never asked."
I didn't have an answer for that either.
I gave her the second contract analysis the next morning.
Twenty pages. Printed and stapled.
I'd spent two weeks on it, working through the structure the way I'd worked through a thousand manufacturing bids over twenty years. I knew exactly how these deals were built. What the state needed. What they'd pay for. Where the margin was.
I handed it to her in the hallway outside her office.
She looked at the cover page.
"What is this?"
"You wanted a second contract," I said. "So fourteen jobs aren't sitting on one state signature. I worked out what it would take to bid on the hotel supply contracts in the region. You don't have to use it."
She turned the first page.
Read.
Turned another.
I watched her face.
She wasn't reading the way someone reads a proposal.
She was reading the way someone reads a map.
"Where did you get the supplier numbers?" she asked.
"Called them. Most of them answered."
"And the pricing structure?"
"Industry standard. I've seen it a thousand times."
She kept reading.
Turned another page.
"This is detailed."
"You need detail to bid. You know that."
"I know," she said. "But this is?—"
"It's work that needed doing," I said. "That's all."
She looked up at me.
"Beckett—"
"Don't," I said.
Because if she thanked me it would turn into something else.
A gesture instead of work.
A gift instead of what she'd needed from the beginning.
She held the folder against her chest.
Didn't say anything for a long moment.
Then, quietly: "Winston told me something."
Her voice changed.
Careful now.
Quiet.
"When?" I asked.
"Twelve days ago. He drove down to tell me in person."
I waited.
"The record you released," she said. "The one that priced the princess. There was a line in it that named a heritage supplier. Somebody at the state flagged it and sent it up the line. That's what triggered the re-bid."
I stared at her.
The hallway was empty.
I could hear the machines running through the wall.
"You're sure," I said.
"Winston worked it out the day before he drove here," she said. "He said it took him ten minutes once he started looking."
The air went out of the room.
I'd released that record myself. Checked every line. Signed off on it.
I'd thought I was answering Talia.
I'd nearly destroyed her instead.
"I didn't know," I said.
"I know."
She said it so quietly I almost didn't hear it.
"If I'd known?—"
"I know," she said again.
She didn't defend me.
She didn't tell me it was fine.