9
Silver Lining
The bios all stood in a circle for their weekly meeting, shoulders hunched beneath hoodies against the predawn bite of the crisp desert air.
“First,” Marcus said, “I think we ought to have a round of applause for Mari, who survived not one, not two, but three weeks on Wyatt’s crew. Without medication. Or illegal drug abuse.”
“That we know of,” Hotaka added.
Everyone laughed as they began to clap. Lisa slung an arm over Mari’s shoulders and gave her a little side hug.
“Lisa . . .” Marcus tugged at his beard. “Sorry, but it’s your turn.”
She nodded. “I swear that Wyatt won’t make me cry this time.”
There was a conspicuous silence.
“At least not more than twice,” Lisa amended.
Marcus sighed. “Well, that would be an improvement.”
Something dark twinged in Mari’s belly, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to join in the laughter. It wasn’t fair of them to talk about Jack that way. It wasn’t that he was mean, like they were making him out to be. He liked animals, and he watched out for his men. Granted, he did have a tendency to raise his voice more than strictly necessary, but everyone was acting like he was going to lay into Lisa like he wanted to make her feel bad. Jack wasn’t like that.
She took a small step forward. “Lisa doesn’t have to go. I’ll stay with Ja—with Wyatt’s crew.”
Hotaka frowned. “You know they drug test on this job, right?”
“You don’t have to,” Marcus said. “You’ve proven you’re willing to do more than your share of the dirty work around here.”
“I’ll be fine, honey,” Lisa said as she touched Mari’s arm. “It’s sweet of you to worry.”
Mari shrugged. “I really don’t mind. Wyatt and I have come to an understanding.” She did not feel that was the strict truth, but it was at least in the same zip code as the truth.
She was getting better at figuring out the right approach to take with him, and the shouting matches were getting a little shorter, perhaps losing a decibel or two. She didn’t shrink these days when he got mad.
Marcus made a mark on his clipboard. “Well, I’m not going to stop you if you’re offering. Next up, I need volunteers for monitoring the helicopter crew.”
After the meeting, Lisa tagged along with Mari when she headed back to her truck, her sparse eyebrows low over narrowed blue eyes. “I appreciate you trying to save me, but I don’t know how you can stand it. He’s so loud and mean, I just get all flustered.”
That dark feeling twisted in her stomach again and she resisted the urge to snap at Lisa. Instead, she shrugged. After all, she couldn’t claim he hadn’t flustered her a time or two. Or twelve.
“He’s just under a lot of pressure from his boss. That’s why he gets impatient with the slowdowns from following the environmental mitigation measures.”
Lisa took her arm and turned Mari so they were face-to-face, lowering her voice. “Listen, I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I know you’re divorced, and I’ve seen the medical bills. It’s not healthy, you thinking you have to take it from another guy who yells and screams at you. I don’t know if I’m comfortable with you volunteering to take that on for the rest of us.”
Mari stiffened, but it wasn’t like the other woman was wrong, even if it wasn’t her business. “Hey, at least I’m used to it,” she joked, trying to lighten the mood a little.
“That’s my point. You shouldn’t ever get used to that, from men. You don’t deserve to be treated that way. You know that, don’t you?”
“It’s not like that.”
Lisa looked unconvinced, so Mari took a breath and tried to explain.
“Jack’s not cruel. He wouldn’t hurt me. And when he yells at me, I don’t feel like he ever really means it.”
Lisa sighed. “Oh, honey, they always say they ‘didn’t mean to’ and ‘don’t take it like that’ and whatever they have to say to get away with doing exactly as they please. But the proof is in the pudding.”
Mari’s skin prickled with annoyance. It wasn’t like she couldn’t tell the difference between a guy like Brad and a decent man. And it wasn’t as if Lisa would know the difference, when her main complaint about her boyfriend, Marcus, was that he was too nice to argue with her. She squinted against the rising sun, taking a long breath scented with creosote and the hint of dew.
“Jack never yells at me when we’re not at work,” she said. “That’s how I know he’s not really like that. He just gets stressed out, because of his jerk boss and the responsibility of all his men’s safety.”
Lisa had started to braid her dark hair over one shoulder but she paused at that. “Um . . . when exactly do you see him when you’re not at work?”
She paused, feeling vaguely guilty. “We stay at the same motel. And he helped me out, when I got that flat tire the other day. So you see? He’s not as bad as all that.”
Lisa snapped a tie onto the end of her braid. “The construction company bought out a block of rooms at the Best Western. If he’s staying elsewhere, he’s doing it on his own dime.”
Mari glanced away. Apparently he’d lied about doing it to save money. Once he’d seen Ricky’s truck at her motel, he didn’t even wait for the next day off to move, when he would have had more time.
She looked down to hide the warmth that suffused her. He was paying out of pocket to live in a far crappier place, all so he could be there if Ricky harassed her.
Not to mention he’d nearly broken down her door to get to her when he heard her scream. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had gone to such lengths to protect her.
But he also flew off the handle and cursed a blue streak whenever she told him he couldn’t do what he wanted on the job site, and she remembered the look in his eye when he’d stepped toe to toe with Ricky at the kit fox burrow. Jack clearly wasn’t a stranger to using his fists.
She’d found him at that roped-off bird’s nest, too. What would he have been there for, alone and that early, if it weren’t to destroy the nest? Maybe she’d been wrong, and he would have smashed the eggs if she hadn’t shown up just then.
Mari tugged at the ends of her sleeves, hiding her hands inside of them.
“I don’t like you making excuses for a guy who treats you bad,” Lisa persisted, apparently taking her silence as tacit agreement. “Especially if he’s following you after work, to your motel no less. Mari, you know you can move into the house a bunch of us are renting. If it’s about money, you can have the couch for free.”
She’d worked on other jobs with Marcus and Lisa. When they all got hired on here, Marcus had offered to let her move in with them, renting one of the smaller rooms at a suspiciously discounted rate. Mari shook her head, just like she had then. If she really wanted a chance at that biologist-in-residence job, she should take the practice living near coworkers, but the idea of being in the same house with so many other people made her throat go tight. It felt safer to stay at her seedy motel, with Jack next door. He hated all people equally, so she couldn’t really disappoint him.
“I, uh . . . snore.” She smiled ruefully. “I wouldn’t have many friends left if you had to put up with all the noise I make at night.” She gave Lisa’s arm a gentle squeeze, equal parts annoyed and touched at her new friend’s misplaced concern. “Listen. I know abusive men. Jack isn’t one.” She took a breath. “And I’m equally aware of my many shortcomings, one of which is—clearly—my taste in men. I’ll be careful, both of him and my own instincts. I promise you I won’t take any crap from him, at work or otherwise.”
Lisa hesitated, then nodded, and Mari tried not to be offended at how unconvinced the other biologist appeared. But no matter how calm she kept her face, her stomach was churning as she got into her truck.
Mari’s strides were pensive as she made her laps around the construction site. The sun warmed her back, and the sharp scent of creosote made everything smell fresh and interesting. The birds were active today, calling to each other as they flitted from bush to bush. She absently dodged the reaching spines of cactus, too many things on her mind to pay them much attention.
She kept thinking about the concern in Lisa’s expression, and how when Jack lost his temper about the bird’s nest, she’d shrunk down to a smaller version of herself. And then how she’d been able to straighten and hold her ground, when it was to protect the eggs.
Then again, it hadn’t been the first time. She went up against Rod to protect Jack. She could be tough, if she had someone to stand up for.
Mari paused a moment, staring out at the construction site without really seeing it. Even though the nest argument with Jack had kicked loose one of her old nightmares, when she woke back up, she felt different. Not helpless like the woman in the dream. Something in her had shifted in a tiny and fragile way that she wasn’t ready to talk about to anyone yet. Just in case she was wrong.
But then again, she’d felt like that before. There had been so many times with Brad when she was sure that things had turned a corner, and this time he’d really resolved to change.
Lisa was concerned, and she had a much better track record with choosing men than Mari did. Was facing Jack’s temper doing her good, or exactly the opposite?
The crew was climbing off the tower, streaming out toward the trucks for lunch, and Mari watched Jack unbuckle his tool belt and shuck it off by the base of the tower.
He’d seemed so sad since that morning she’d found him alone inside the bird nest buffer. She’d second-guessed a hundred times why he’d been out there by the nest. He hadn’t said, and she hadn’t asked, but whatever it was, it had left his shoulders dragging and heavy for days.
Despite her worries about him, it was hard to see him unhappy.
Even now, the rest of the crew was grouping up under their EZ-Up awning, laughing and giving each other a hard time, but Jack was headed off to his foreman’s truck without a word to any of them.
He shouldn’t be alone, not when he was already feeling low. But she just so happened to have something stashed in her truck that she hoped would fix both those problems.
Jack was halfway through wolfing down his dry bologna sandwich when he sensed that something was wrong.
He checked the tower, but everybody was already down and on break. Checked behind him to make sure Rod hadn’t snuck in without his noticing. Nothing. Huh. But then, slowly, it sank in what was different.
It smelled . . . good.
Nothing ever smelled good on a job site. They smelled like sweaty, ugly men and hot metal. Sometimes like animal shit, because so many of their power lines went through pastures. Right now, it smelled like a bakery, all vanilla with a tang of melting chocolate.
What the hell?
He got out of his truck, half convinced he was having a brain aneurysm, or one of those seizures where you smelled oranges and jet fuel right before you fell down and started flopping like a trout. But no, it smelled like brownies. About forty miles from the nearest kitchen.
He nosed around, checking where his guys were eating lunch—and not failing to notice how the conversation faltered and died when he got close—and then over to Mari’s truck, just for lack of anywhere better to look. She must have heard him coming, because she abandoned her chair in the shade and came around the truck with a smile.
“How’s it going? Lots of progress on the new tower this morning.”
He nodded, and shoved the back of his hand across his chin. “Hey, you smell . . . something?” He didn’t want to get specific. If his brain was finally breaking from all those years of inhaling Leroy’s secondhand crack smoke, he’d rather his pretty bio didn’t know about it.
“Something like brownies? Sure. They should be done baking in about three more minutes.”
His brain was fucked for sure. She had definitely just said she was baking brownies in the middle of sandblasted nowhere. “But, um . . . how?”
Her smile turned knowing and she cocked her head toward the far side of her truck. He followed her to a propped-up box with a Plexiglas front and angled tinfoil-bright wings sticking out the sides. They reminded him of the reflective panel his mom used to lay out in her lap when she was suntanning in front of their old trailer, back when he was a kid.
“Solar oven,” Mari said. “I like to bake, but living in my truck for the past couple of years made that a little tough. I made the batter last night and brought it in my cooler this morning.”
“You been living in this thing for two years?” He stared at her tiny pickup.
“It’s got everything I need. Bed, water, stove. Especially when we’re doing remote research jobs, it just makes more sense to camp. It’s fun, like summer camp.”
“Summer camp with no AC.”
She laughed. “I have missed AC.”
She moved back to her chair and he came around into the shade, too, the relief of being out of the sun immediate. He leaned one shoulder against her truck and folded his arms, tucking his hands against his sides. “Used to camp a lot, back in Alabama. In a tent, though, not a pickup. I go back for bow-hunting season, usually.”
As soon as he said it, he wanted to bang his head against the truck. The last thing you wanted to tell a nice tree hugger lady was that you killed cute, furry animals for sport.
“You’re a bow hunter?” She let out a low whistle. “Wow. I’d like to try that someday, but I don’t think my stalking skills are up to getting that close yet. I’m lucky if I don’t scare them off even at rifle range.”
“You . . . hunt?” He perked up.
“Deer hunt. We tried elk, but didn’t get anything.” She peered in the window of her solar oven. “Just last year. Marcus taught me when he needed someone to go with him, because Lisa hates to hunt. He’s a great shot, but he’s even louder on the stalk than I am.” She smiled at Jack. “Don’t tell him I said that.”
“But you—” He gestured out at the desert, at all the creatures hidden in shadows and burrows that she had dedicated her life to protecting.
“Sure, but these are endangered animals. I’m not a vegetarian. There are plenty of deer. What sounds more fair to you, eating an animal that’s been stuck in a tiny, manure-filled pen its whole life, eating food that makes it sick to fatten it up faster? Or eating an animal that lived its whole life roaming free, that you stalked and shot in a fair fight. That had a good life and a quick, humane death?”
She warmed to her topic, gesturing passionately.
“How about an animal that’s native to the landscape rather than one we introduced in unsustainable numbers and whose hooves destabilize streambeds? Besides, since we killed off a lot of the natural predators like wolves and cougars, deer have proliferated in numbers that can send the whole ecosystem out of balance. Culling a few through hunting can help keep the population to healthier numbers that the grazing can support and—” She paused, her cheeks pinkening. “Oops. I’ll just tuck my soapbox away, then.”
“Nah.” He couldn’t stop staring at her. “Nah, you’re right. Deer are like rats in some parts of the country. There are too many of them and they’re good eating. Just didn’t think a bio would hunt, that’s all.” He glanced down and back up, hoping he hadn’t offended her.
“Maybe you need to get to know more bios. There are a few down here from Alaska who could give you a run for your money in the bow-hunting department. Hotaka makes all his own sandals from elk leather he tans himself, and he could build you a beautiful coffee table, too.”
“I’d like to learn how to tan hides,” he said. “My older brother didn’t know how, so I never learned.”
She got up to open the solar oven. “I can introduce you to Hotaka, if you like. If you haven’t worked with him already, I mean. Hey, can you help me with something?”
“Sure, what do you need?” He stepped forward. “I could take one or two of those brownies off your hands, if you needed me to.”
She grinned, way brighter than he expected for his lame little joke. “Hold up your hands.”
He hesitated for a minute, his stomach clenching. Whenever Leroy said shit like that—Close your eyes, little brother. Hold out your hand—it never went well. But Mari wasn’t Leroy. Didn’t have that mean streak down deep in her. So he held up his hands, feeling stupid but doing as she asked anyway.
She slid oven mitts onto his hands. The one on the right had sunflowers on it. The one on the left read “Live! Love! Dance!”
He scowled at them.
But then she put on her own oven mitts and placed a pan of brownies in his hands, and he felt a little better about things.
“Fu—I mean, damn these smell good.”
“I use my mother’s recipe with very dark chocolate, and a touch of hazelnut flour, plus some secret stuff you’d have to torture me to get me to tell you. Come on, help me make friends with your crew.” She led the way toward his men. He grimaced, following a reluctant step behind.
“They all already pant after you like a bunch of puppies. You don’t need to feed them.”
“Maybe not. They’re already following me home,” she teased, but her voice was so light he could tell she wasn’t trying to say she didn’t want him in her motel.
Though he really couldn’t figure why she was letting him carry her brownies after he’d busted through her door in the middle of the night like a crazy person. Bad enough that he had, as she said, followed her home without an invitation.
Some home it was, too. Tape on the cracked windows, and the bedspreads pocked with cigarette burns and musty with dust, just like his daddy’s trailer. This morning, he’d almost shut off his alarm without getting up, with just the hazy thought that he’d lose this job anyway, the next time Leroy went on a bender and wrecked Jack’s work truck, or Jack had to ditch a shift to bail his brother out of jail. Why get up when it was only a matter of time?
Good thing he blinked himself awake and remembered he’d left Alabama and that life, even if right now he was in a motel that felt like he’d never even made it across the state line.
His steps faltered at the memory, but once you had oven mitts on your hands and a pan on top of them, there really weren’t too many choices about what you could do next. So Jack kept following Mari.
The men perked up when Mari came into sight, and they all sat up a little straighter when they saw Jack behind her.
“Dessert, anyone?”
“Wow, are you serious? Don’t mind if I do,” Kipp said.
Toby pretended to consider. “I don’t know . . . are these fat-free?”
“Better not be,” Mari said, and the whole crew burst into laughter.
“Didn’t know you made deliveries, boss,” said Joey, the only one who dared to approach Jack’s pan.
“Don’t get used to it,” he snarled, dropping the pan with a bang on the nearest tailgate and shucking off the oven mitts. Mari pulled a pie server out of her pocket and busied herself cutting and passing out desserts. He threw a longing glance at the peace and quiet of his truck, but the aroma of chocolate was too enticing to ignore. He grabbed one, blowing on his fingers when it burned them. Besides, he didn’t trust these idiots not to say the wrong thing to Mari if he wasn’t around to chew them out for it.
Silence descended on the rowdy bunch, but he hardly noticed because the batter of these brownies was like . . . He gobbled a second one, then a third, trying to pin down what it was about them that hit the spot so directly.
“Whew-ee!” Kipp said finally. “Sure is a hot one today.”
Jack snorted, his mouth still full of his fourth brownie when he grabbed a seat on the tailgate. “You think this is hot, you never been to Alabama.”
“I worked in Alabama once,” Gideon said. He was a quiet lineman and only had a few friends on-site, but Mari couldn’t tell if the others avoided him because they didn’t like that he was gay, or because he could climb nearly twice as fast as any of them. “So humid you needed to dry the air off with a towel before you could breathe it.”
Jack chuckled. “Damn straight. Lungs like to shrivel up like burnt paper, coming from there to here.”
“Yeah. Miss the grits, though.”
“Mmm-hmm. And the fried chicken.” Jack glanced at the half-empty pan, feeling bad he’d eaten so many of Mari’s snacks.
“Go ahead,” she said, intercepting the glance and airily waving a hand. “My hips don’t need them anyway.”
“Your hips are fine,” he grunted, then flushed when he realized he’d commented on her figure in front of all his crew. “I, uh—”
“Whew, these are about the best brownies I’ve ever had,” Kipp jumped in, and Mari smiled. “Don’t you boys think?” he prodded the others, and a few more voices piped up in agreement.
Jack kept his eyes on his brownie, not wanting to admit that the annoying, chatty lineman had just rescued his ass. Maybe he wouldn’t fire him this week. Next week was fair game, though.
“You know, the desert has a silver lining,” Mari said. “Watch this.” She took one of the brownies that had cooled in the shade and cupped it in her slim palm, extending it out into the direct sun again. While they all waited, the chocolate chips went shiny and started to melt, so that by the time she pulled her hand back in, it was as warm as fresh baked all over again.
Jack just watched her, the light in her smile drawing every eye while she stood in a circle of dirty old construction workers who he’d never once seen watch their mouths for this long at a stretch.
This desert had indeed come with quite the silver lining.