Breathe the Sky

by Michelle Hazen

  When he saw her chopping vegetables on a flattened cereal box, he’d made her a beautiful hand-sanded cutting board, sized to fit perfectly in her box of cooking utensils. Though Mari still always put a cereal box on top of it when she cut things so that she wouldn’t mar its surface.

  “Sorry, Hotaka. I need you on the east end of the project, finishing the rare-cactus survey.” Marcus fussed with his clipboard a little more. “Maybe . . . but no, then . . .”

  Shit. But then, if she didn’t take Wyatt, someone else would have to, and he’d made most of the female bios—and Jorge—cry.

  Mari put on a placid smile. “Of course, Marcus. Don’t worry, I can handle him.”

  That was not, as it turned out, strictly true.

  On Monday, it was about his crew checking under their tires.

  On Tuesday, they got into it because he was driving too fast. He claimed his eyes weren’t so damn slow that he couldn’t see a tortoise when it was right in front of his face, no matter how fast he was going.

  On Wednesday, the drip pan under the forklift cracked, he refused to pause work to get a new one because his boss was “all up his ass to get this tower done,” and she had to write him up for a secondary containment violation.

  On Thursday, his crew read the plans wrong and put part of the tower together backward. And, of course, they hadn’t yet gotten that fixed when Jack’s boss showed up.

  Mari hated the big boss on sight. He parked in the middle of the road and left his truck running for an hour and a half. He had shiny boots that kept scuffing Jack’s already-scuffed ones when he got up into his space, forcing Jack to back away time and again. Calling him “son,” repeatedly reminding Jack to call him “sir.”

  She overheard the words “lazy” and “slow” and “half-assed,” and it made her cringe.

  It was cruel, and it didn’t even make any sense because the only other tower assembly crew on this section was still working on the same tower while Jack’s crew had finished several. Lisa was the other crew’s monitor, and she always joked that it took them until eleven thirty to get warmed up enough to pick up a wrench and then they needed a two-hour lunch to recover from the trauma of doing actual work. Mari didn’t understand why they weren’t getting this chastising from the big boss. Or at least she didn’t until she got a close look at the boss’s face.

  He had a slab of a jaw and heavy brows, like an older version of the foreman in charge of the slower crew. Ah. Well, now she got why Junior was getting special dispensation and Jack was being lectured despite picking up Junior’s slack and then some. They’d been getting the tallest tower assignments, the ones that started in low-dipped washes and had to be built higher and with more-complicated shapes so they could get up high enough to draw even with the towers built on high spots. They still built three of those for every one of the other crew’s shorter ones. And yet this jerk seemed determined to make Jack apologize for it.

  The next time the word “lazy” drifted over to her, Mari had had it. Her mother had always warned her that if she didn’t learn when to hold her tongue, it’d cause her a world of trouble. Mom sure hadn’t been wrong, but right now, Mari didn’t care.

  She marched right up onto the pad, the crew stopping to stare because she was always so careful to stay out of their way. She went up to the boss and inserted herself into the conversation, even though he didn’t even turn to acknowledge her when she approached. His shirt buttons nearly brushed her breasts before he finally, grudgingly, gave way and stepped back—from both her and Jack.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Your truck is parked in the road, and if it’s going to be stored on-site, it needs to have secondary containment underneath to catch any engine leaks,” she said crisply.

  “Uh, sorry about that, little lady,” he said, sounding anything but. “I don’t happen to have a pan with me to put under the truck. Wasn’t expecting this crew to need so much supervision.”

  She wasn’t looking at Jack, but she could feel his chagrin at this latest passive-aggressive swipe. It was probably taking a lot for the normally explosive man to keep from defending himself. She’d already heard the supervisor suggest to Jack that he use a particular method that Jack had discarded last Monday as being too slow.

  “In that case,” she told his boss, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go. We don’t have extra containment pans on-site.”

  Jack shifted beside her, and she hoped he wouldn’t blow her cover. He knew all too well she had three shiny new pans in her truck, because she’d shown them to him this morning. She brought them from the yard after the forklift argument, explaining that now they wouldn’t have to lose work time to get a new pan if one of theirs broke, because she’d keep extras on hand for them.

  “Listen, darlin’, if you could just look the other way just this once, that’d be real nice. I need to stay and talk to my crew a little more.”

  She didn’t smile. “I’m sorry. State and federal regulations don’t have leeway for that. You’re welcome to come back after you get a pan from the construction yard.”

  “Well, somebody’s got a stick up their lady parts,” he muttered, and Jack took a sharp step forward. The boss’s eyes widened and Jack reluctantly backed off, his jaw clenching. Something in her stomach curdled at him being forced to back down, like she’d seen something private and too vulnerable.

  Mari turned and walked away, not dignifying the boss’s comment with a response. Men like him wanted you to laugh off their poor behavior, and she’d be damned if she would. Behind her back, she heard the supervisor growling something to Jack that sounded like “keep your bio bitch on a leash.”

  She walked out toward the road, stooping to check under his tires for animals. Which turned out to be a good thing because the boss didn’t check at all when he jumped in and screeched away a second later, leaving them all to choke on his dust.

  She tucked her hands in her pockets and forced herself to keep casually strolling along, even though she wanted to crawl into her truck and gobble the last of her brownies just to wash the taste of that encounter out of her mouth. Why didn’t she call him on that “lady parts” comment? She ought to report him to HR. Darlin’ indeed. What a jerk. Telling Jack to “control” her like she was his property instead of an educated professional.

  Jack barked something to his crew and stalked back to his truck. She watched out of the corner of her eye as he pulled his dusty lunchbox cooler out of the back seat. Good. He’d worked through lunch again, and he was even grouchier when he was hungry. She pulled her shoulders back, taking a deep breath. Somehow, she’d slouched right into her old posture from when she was married, her back already aching with the unfamiliar curl of it.

  But she’d stood up to that man. She hadn’t just folded up and let him abuse Jack when he’d done nothing wrong. She had no reason for the shame that clung dark and sticky in her belly. No reason to feel like that supervisor had touched her in a place where she couldn’t push his hand away.

  That guy put her on edge in a way that none of her clashes with Jack ever had.

  Jack ripped his sandwich out of its bag with such force that the meat flew out of the center and landed on the ground, the mayonnaise immediately going black with dirt. “Fuck!” he hissed, looking at the bread in his hand, then into the cooler, which seemed empty from her angle. He balled his fist, crushing the bread into a doughy ball, and dropped it on the floorboard of the truck, chucking the cooler back in after it.

  Mari ducked her head. Did he feel the same shame after the encounter as she did? Probably worse, since it was his work the man had criticized. His livelihood.

  Jack yanked the tower blueprints out of his truck and laid them on the tailgate, dropping a hammer on one end and a chunk of discarded metal on the other to hold them down in the wind. Then he went still and glared at the paper, no doubt trying to decode the fastest way to t
ransform his crew’s backward-tower fuckup without having to take every last screw out and start from scratch.

  A faint growl traveled her way on the wind, and she wondered if it came from his stomach or his mouth.

  Mari turned and slipped away, retreating to her Toyota. Even two long years after her divorce, she still wasn’t the best at making friends. But she did have one trick that never failed to soothe people.

  * * *

  —

  Jack slapped a hand down on the tower plans. That piece. They could leave that whole section intact if they just took off the struts to the east and north and rotated the shape 240 degrees, then reattached—

  His thought broke off half-formed when a small shoulder nudged his arm. He flinched away, a curse rising to his lips before he recognized the faint vanilla scent of Mari. She was the only thing in a world of sweat and sand that smelled good. Or maybe that was just the brownie she was holding out to him. She tried a smile, but it looked a little weak today.

  “What an asshole, right?”

  He choked, coughed, then laughed. “Yeah. Yup, he really is.” He stopped laughing. “Sorry about what he said.” He nodded to her to indicate which comment, not wanting to repeat the man’s filthy remark.

  She shrugged. “I’ve heard worse. Brownie?” She offered it again.

  He took it hesitantly, not sure why she was being nice to him.

  She nodded at the plans. “You know, I’m not totally clear on what you’re doing here, but this piece”—she pointed at the section in the middle that he was going to leave intact—“looks like that piece up there.” She pointed up at the partially finished tower. “Maybe you could leave that piece and just take off the stuff around it, and still use that part?”

  He slanted her a sideways look, trying not to look impressed. All lattice towers looked the same to greenhorns, but there were actually thousands of permutations of metal bars to match the towers to the contours of different landscapes. It had taken him years of reading the land and the towers to figure out how to fit them to each other without just following the plans blindly.

  He grunted. “Yeah. Maybe we might do something like that.”

  She passed him another brownie. He popped it into his mouth and chewed. No idea where she bought these things but he ought to track it down, because they tasted homemade. Which just made him feel worse about what had just happened.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.” He jerked his chin toward the road. “Threatened to write him up like that. Rod holds a grudge. He’ll take it out on you any way he can.” His lips twitched. “Was ballsy, though. Damn. Lying about those pans.”

  She made a small, disgusted noise, her pert nose crinkling. “Fuck him.”

  Jack damn near grinned.

  “Huh” was all he could manage, looking at her with new respect. Some part of him really wanted to watch her chew out Rod. The rest of him was worried his fist would find his boss’s mouth fast enough to get himself fired if Rod talked to Mari like that again.

  She tossed him a protein bar, and he barely managed to catch it before she strolled away. “Better get started. Looking like it might be a late shift for us tonight.”

  A moment ago, he hated his job and everything about it. And now, he didn’t want to admit it, but he was almost looking forward to working overtime.

  5

  The Cottage

  The horned lizard tickled Mari’s palm as she carried him away from the construction site. Jack’s men were making good time disassembling the backward tower, and his grouching had eased considerably after he’d eaten the protein bar she gave him. She made a mental note to add snacks to her biologist’s tool kit. Whatever she could do to make the crews more cooperative, it only benefited the animals.

  “Find your way home, little guy,” she whispered to the horned lizard as she stooped to let him scurry off her hand. It was a baby, no bigger than a quarter, and it stopped to cock its little head at her when her phone rang. “It’s not for you,” she informed the lizard, a hint of a smile curving her mouth. She was riding high after chasing off Jack’s terrible boss.

  She straightened and checked on her workers before she answered the phone. It was Lisa, from the other tower assembly crew.

  “How did you not tell me you got the biologist-in-residence job?” she half shrieked.

  Mari flinched, pulling the phone a little away from her ear. “Hold on, it’s loud here.” She walked a little farther from the workers so that the blast of impact wrenches and beeping of the forklift wouldn’t interfere. There was no background noise coming from Lisa’s end, though.

  “Is your crew at lunch?” she asked, checking her watch. Two o’clock, far too late for lunch. “Or is it just mine who can’t do a thing without making enough noise to wake the Yellowstone supervolcano?”

  Lisa snorted. “On Junior’s crew? They started lunch at ten forty-five and haven’t managed to put in a single bolt since. Though he did lose about two hundred bucks on some kind of tailgate dice game. And don’t think I didn’t notice you changing the subject.”

  Mari kicked at the dirt. “It’s not final yet, so I can’t say I got it.”

  “Bullshit. Hotaka interviewed for the botanist-in-residence job, and he said the national park staff mentioned your name and said they’d offered it to you, so there’s no need to be modest. Don’t worry, I’m not jealous at all. Even though it pays better. And goes year-round. And comes with free freaking housing.”

  Mari almost smiled, even though her stomach still squirmed. “If you’re so not jealous, why don’t you apply yourself? The program doesn’t officially roll out for three months, so they don’t have to make a final decision until then.”

  “Well, they weren’t exactly looking for two biologists in residence, and I’m not sure Marcus would appreciate me dumping him for a job. Even one that comes with an adorable little cottage. Did you see the houses when you were there? Hotaka showed me pictures on his phone. I guess it was some kind of postwar religious commune that was donated to the park system, and they remodeled them for the interpretive team.”

  “They might have mentioned something about it.” Mari stopped to pick up a scrap of trash so it wouldn’t attract the ravens that preyed on the hatchling tortoises.

  “So?” Lisa practically squeaked. “You’re single. You need the money—I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to know about that, but come on, Mari. This power line will wrap up before June, and I haven’t heard of any work coming up after that. No work means no rent money, which means no AC. It’s gonna be a long, hot summer in the truck. Again.”

  Her fingers tightened on the phone. Lisa had come by one time when Mari had papers all spread out on her tailgate under rocks, trying to reconcile her health insurance statements with the amounts on the medical bills. In the moments before Mari had managed to snatch up all the papers from their makeshift paperweights, Lisa had gotten an eyeful of all the injuries Mari was paying off. Which meant she knew more about Mari’s past than Mari ever would have shared, and she didn’t exactly appreciate Lisa’s bringing it up now.

  Her voice was a little sharp when she said, “Well, maybe I didn’t think Marcus would like me taking it, either. This job came up at the same time, and he said he was really short-handed. He was so sweet, taking me hunting last year, and I didn’t want to let him down.”

  “You mean you were so sweet, going hunting with him when everybody else bailed, even though you don’t even hunt. Marcus would have understood if you turned this gig down for permanent work.”

  She fought the urge to make an excuse and hang up on the other woman’s prying. Lisa had her faults but she’d been friendlier than any of the rest of the bios, and Mari didn’t take that lightly. Her friends had never stuck. Not the ones from high school, and not the ones from her old job in an insurance office, who used to avoid her with such discomfort every time she turned up with
long sleeves in the middle of the summer.

  After her car accident, when Brad wanted her to stay home and let him take care of her, she’d been happy not to go back to their stares and awkward silences. By the time she reinvented her career as a biologist, she’d been too worn out to try again, and Lisa was the only one who continually tried to drag her off the sidelines.

  Mari took a breath and tried to explain, without getting too personal. “Turned out in the interview they’re not just hiring a bio. It’s a full interpretive team: botanist, artist, writer, and historian in residence, all living side by side. ‘Interpretive team’ meaning they expect me to give speeches and interact with tourists, which would mean I would have to be good with people.”

  “You’re great with people, when you’re not avoiding them.”

  “Oh yeah?” Mari turned back to sweep the construction site with her gaze, ignoring the workers in favor of searching for the telltale coil of a snake or the bump of a tortoise. “Who was it who had to write their crew up yesterday because she couldn’t get them to follow one of the simplest rules? And who took a week to get the crew to accept the training we’re supposed to carry out on the first day? Because as they say, I had one job . . .”

  “Wyatt doesn’t count. I’ve met badgers with sweeter personalities. We’ve all had months to work on him, and he’s never let us give the environmental awareness training before. Seriously, though, Mari, the park asked Hotaka to put in a good word with you. I think they really want you to say yes.”

  “Seriously, though, Lisa,” she echoed, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice. Lisa may have been the friendliest of the bios, but she was also the nosiest. “I didn’t specialize in the most remote species in the lower forty-eight because I wanted to settle down and have neighbors.”

  What she did want was that sunshine-yellow cottage, with vanilla-creamy trim, and a little porch with its own rocking chair. A table just big enough for a paperback and a sweating glass of iced tea.