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 ou
t 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.
10
Hello, Neighbor
The week had gone by slowly, and mostly in silence. Mari felt weird about talking to Jack, their every interaction seeming fraught with implications once she’d analyzed them through the filter of what Lisa would think. Whether he was being nice, or maybe just acting nice to get close to her, or being the kind of nice Brad was when he felt bad for a fight they’d had.
She wasn’t sure about anything anymore, and it left her feeling dizzy, so she just kept to herself. Which wasn’t hard. Jack didn’t exactly seek her out to engage in small talk. When they crossed paths at the motel, he’d just duck his head and mumble something that sounded like a gruff, rumbly Alabama version of hello. Or maybe just hi. Or maybe some kind of nonsyllabic acknowledgment that they vaguely knew each other in a professional sense.
It was entirely possible he was simply living there out of thrift, and Lisa was wrong about how the linemen’s housing allowance was paid. He certainly didn’t seem to have any interest in her or in being near her any more than necessary. The only exception had been when she made him brownies at work, but what man didn’t like brownies?
On their one day off, she dreamed of the roar of motorcycles, and when she woke up, his bike was already gone. Jack didn’t return until sunset, his hair tangled when he took off his helmet before he shoved it back into its normal knot—too rough to be called a man bun. And Mari let the curtain fall before either one of them had to acknowledge why she had been peeking out the window.
On the first day of the fifth week, everyone had waited when Marcus brought up the assignments for Wyatt’s crew. She felt odd and squirmy, unable to hold eye contact with anyone. She wasn’t entirely sure Jack wanted her on his crew after the whole bird’s nest argument, but she didn’t want to make anyone else go when they’d be uncomfortable and probably upset Jack in the bargain, when the last thing he needed was more stress. Except she also knew Lisa would worry if she went back to Jack’s crew.
She felt like there was no right decision that wouldn’t backfire on her, and that made her feel so caged it was like being married all over again. So she volunteered for Wyatt’s crew twice as loudly just to drown out all the competing voices inside of her.
Then she spent all day regretting it, because the only words Jack said to her weren’t even to her. They were just in her general direction, when he was blasting one of the guys for chatting her up when he was supposed to be stacking the wooden pieces of cribbing into the work truck.
The evenings, though, were different.
It started weeks ago, the first night after he moved in, when she was watching HGTV. It was fun to have TV again after so long in her truck. Her favorite guilty pleasure was a zombie show, but it came on only once a week, and HGTV had programming all the rest of the days. Simple, sunny shows about house buying and remodeling that appealed to her so much that she, perversely, didn’t want anyone to know she watched them.
But that first night, the sound on her program was weird. Echoey, or hollow sounding. She eventually shut the TV off in frustration, only to get a chill when the sound kept going after the screen went blank. It took her a second to work out that it was coming from the room next door. Jack’s room must be a mirror image of hers, his TV mounted on the other side of the same wall as hers. He was watching HGTV, too.
That made her smile. She had cozied back into her pillows, and flipped the TV back on.
The same thing happened the next night, and the next. The echoing sound became a comfort, as if she wasn’t watching alone for once, even though being alone was what she’d long since decided she wanted. On Sunday, when her zombie show came on, she felt a pang when she flipped the channel. Like she was abandoning him.
He probably hadn’t even noticed. She was just being silly.
That Monday, after she volunteered for a fifth week on his crew, she felt lonely all day . . . until she got home and turned the TV on. Not three minutes later, she heard his come to life, and it made her laugh out loud. They must have been working together long enough to be on exactly the same schedule, as predictable as an old married couple. Or maybe, did he look forward to the echo of that sound just like she did?
She quieted, thinking about it. He was awkward, in his own snarly, terrifying way. He still ate lunch alone on most days. He hadn’t seemed to know how to act when she thanked him for helping with her tire, and he was even more uncomfortable when she paid him back the money for it.
What were the chances he was sitting on the other side of that wall, feeling stupid, like she didn’t want him at her motel? But also unwilling to move as long as Creepy Ricky still occupied a room down at the end of the row. What if he’d come here at least partially because he wanted to talk to her, but he didn’t know how?
She sat with the thought, staring unseeingly at the TV until the show switched and the theme music of her favorite house-shopping show started, on both sides of the wall.
And then she pushed off the bed. When she left Brad, she swore she’d change, let herself have a new life, be the opposite of everything she’d been before. It was easy when it came to picking clothes she actually liked, getting to wear earrings now and again. It felt a lot harder when doing the opposite meant being egotistical or cocky, or putting herself
out there to try to make friends. Because what if people weren’t interested, but they were just too polite to turn down her invitations?
Mari stopped to smooth her hair in the bathroom mirror. “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked herself. “You embarrass yourself?” She snorted. “Been there, done that.”
The minifridge was her last stop before she let herself outside. She didn’t realize her feet were bare until she felt the heat of the gritty sidewalk. Looking down, she winced as she registered her yoga pants and ancient “Geology rocks but biology grows on you” T-shirt. Too late to change, and it didn’t matter anyway. Seduction wasn’t her aim here.
Breaking a cycle. It was as giant and minuscule as that.
She threaded the long necks of the two glass beer bottles through her fingers and rapped the bottom of one on his door.
Jack opened it, his man bun a little mussed and shirt crooked like he’d just pulled it on, a pair of thrashed old jeans hanging low on his hips. Without his sunglasses, his eyes were a deep, dark green, like the color was a secret you only got to see if you looked closely enough. She pulled in a steadying breath and smiled.
“Hello, neighbor. Figured if we were going to watch the same show every night, we might as well save electricity and do it on one TV. Can I come in?”
11
A Fixer-Upper
When Mari showed up at his door, Jack’s first thought was, Thank God I wear headphones when I watch porn.
He hadn’t been sure until just now if she could hear his TV as well as he could hear hers.
His second thought was more incoherent. Mostly four-letter words jumbled up in his head while he stared at the woman in his doorway. Her hair was back in a loose, messy bun, her breasts soft and round under an old T-shirt, and yoga pants smoothed lovingly over her strong legs.
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