Magdalene (30 page)

Suddenly Trevor pulled her to him in the
same kind of bear hug Mitch had given me. “You have
got
to
tell my dad what you told me, or else let me tell him.”

The girl looked hunted, and I knew why. I’d
seen that look on Gordon’s face too many times during our marriage
not to know what it was. I’d seen a flash of it on her mother’s
face not twenty minutes before. “Oh, I don’t— I don’t know.”

“Well, if you won’t talk to my dad,” Trevor
whispered earnestly, “talk to Josh, and see what he says. You’re
almost eighteen. At least make plans to get out of the house.”

Her mouth tightened.

“Okay, look. I’ll try to come up with
something. But at least be honest with Josh about your feelings.
Just that? Will you do that?”

She nodded, and the relief on her face was
almost heartbreaking. The elephant was on its way out of the
room.

At the sound of Sitkaris’s cheerful booming
voice coming from an adjacent hall, Hayleigh scrambled out of the
alcove and into the gym—the opposite direction.

Neither Trevor nor I spoke as he escorted me
out of the building, then to my car. He handed me in and said
simply, “I’ll see you tonight.” Then he bounded up the stairs and
disappeared into the building.

I began to smile in spite of myself, warmth
sort of stealing over me in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. I
checked my watch.

Eleven o’clock was a lifetime away.

* * * * *

Iron Coke, Chromium
Steel

I bought jeans, a sweatshirt, hiking boots,
socks, and a cheap coat to go to the mill that night, as I hadn’t
planned for anything like a tour through the bowels of a foundry.
Floodlights held back the night as I drove onto the property, the
foundry itself separated from the offices by an enormous
underground parking lot. Mitch’s office directly overlooked the
parking lot and straight into the major building of the mill. I
parked and followed the last stragglers through the checkpoint.

I gave my name to the guard who nodded, put
his fingers in his mouth, and released an ear-piercing whistle.
Soon enough, Trevor jogged around a corner. In sharp contrast to
his church garb, he now sported an oil-filthy coverall and a hard
hat. His face displayed a healthy portion of the same grease as his
coverall and he held a pair of heavy leather gloves in his hand.
Without speaking to me, he grabbed the coverall and hard hat the
security guard handed him, then signaled to me to follow him.

“You won’t need this, trust me,” he said,
divesting me of my coat and handing it back to the guard. The noise
from out here was loud, but not so loud that I couldn’t hear Trevor
if he spoke loudly.

“Let me help you with these,” he said,
practically in my ear. So I did, and it was an odd feeling to be
dressed by someone. “I’m going to take you to see the furnaces.
Dad’s casting ingots right now and his dinner break is in an hour.
He packed an extra lunch for you if you wanted to eat with
him.”

I stared at Trevor in shock. “He’s doing
what?”

“Didn’t he tell you?” Trevor plopped a hard
hat on my head. “He works the night shift on Sundays. He rotates
out with each worker in the mill to give them a paid Sunday night
off.”

Of all the implications of that that swept
through me, I could only articulate the simplest one. “Isn’t that
breaking the Sabbath?”

Trevor flashed me a grin. “He says service
is the higher law.”

I tried to catch a breath and said the only
thing I could come up with. “Please call me Cassie.”

“Okay.”

In other circumstances, I would have asked
why the CEO of a several-billion-dollar business such as this
worked at such blue-collar tasks, but here I didn’t have to. Any
man who’d spend so much time serving his parishioners for free
would serve the lowest of his employees in the same way. No wonder
Jack respected him so much, treated him with a deference he didn’t
show Sebastian—or any other of his clients, for that fact. Why
Mitch didn’t return that respect, I didn’t know.

We didn’t speak as we trudged along into the
bowels of a building twice the size of a hangar. I couldn’t tell
whether the floor was concrete or hard-packed dirt, but it didn’t
make any difference. I looked up, up, up at the mammoth beasts
radiating heat that was oppressive even in the depth of winter; I
couldn’t imagine what this place was like in the summer.

“What do you do here?” I asked Trevor
suddenly.

“I’m on second shift, almost full time. I
can do every job in the mill, so I usually end up filling in for
whoever called in sick.” I could detect the note of pride in his
voice.

“You don’t normally work on Sunday, do
you?”

“No. My dad asked me to come in tonight to
show you around at a reasonable hour.” Trevor flashed me a grin.
“He didn’t expect you to show up and he can’t leave his station.
Decker would kill him.” Confusion must have shown on my face. “The
foreman. Dad gets bossed around like the rest of us when he’s out
here.”

“Are you getting paid to be here
tonight?”

“Of course. I don’t work for free.”

I laughed out loud at that. “So your
dad—”

“Keeps his hand in the pot. It’s hard to
strike on a guy who works with you doing the shittiest jobs, gets
bossed around by the foreman, brown-bags his dinner and eats with
you. Out here, he’s no different from anyone else. Watch out.”
Trevor grabbed me then and jerked me aside as a bucket as big as a
house—a raging inferno—slid past us, suspended on massive cables
from a double track attached to the ceiling, fifty feet up in the
air. The heat was suffocating. One tap from that bucket and I’d
have been toast.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. You get used to the
ladles.”

I had no words to describe the size of the
blast furnaces and buckets—ladles, like something one would use to
dip gravy or punch—that poured liquid flames into chutes where they
ran like a fire river toward the other end of the building. “Orange
is your father’s favorite color,” I mused, though more to myself
than Trevor.

He looked at me sharply. “Yeah. Did he tell
you that?”

“No.” I pointed to the steel. “He sent me
roses that color.”

So. Those roses hadn’t signified any passion
he had for me whatsoever; the thought might have deflated me,
except here I was, eight weeks into a relationship with a chaste
Mormon bishop. I’d surprised him at church, thought I’d completely
blown it, only to end up touring his steel mill with his son.

Mitch was showing me his life, sharing his
most deeply held accomplishments with me, even if it was through
the conduit of offspring and steel and church.

“Where around here is your father, by the
way?”

Trevor pointed toward the opposite end of
the building, in the same direction the steel creek ran. “Forming
ingots. The steel flows through here to a bed where it gets molded
into blocks. Come on, I’ll show you.”

We walked slowly so I could take in the
sights. Occasionally, someone would take a second glance at me, but
it seemed everyone here knew who I was or, at the very least, knew
who I belonged to.

I stumbled.

“Careful,” Trevor said as he caught me. We
walked for a while in silence. Then, in a forced casual tone, he
said, “My dad really likes you.” He was too young to have learned
how to finesse his voice to betray nothing. Trevor wouldn’t give
his okay until he’d had time to probe me for ulterior motives.

“I really like him, too,” I said in a moment
of utter candor spawned by the shock of having run up against a
seventeen-year-old man. “Does that bother you?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I worry about him. He
needs someone to take care of him.” He glanced down at me, his eyes
narrowed. “I’d really,
really
hate it if he met somebody,
you know, and he cared about them, but they didn’t care about him
that much, if they were just playing some kind
of...
game
...and ditched him when they were done with him.
That would really suck. Especially after my mom just died,
yanno?”

I swallowed. Hard.

He stopped glaring at me, and we continued
our stroll past the blast furnaces. “I can’t remember a time when
someone took care of him, when he wasn’t taking care of everyone
around him. I try, but you know, I can only do so much and I’ll be
leaving for college soon.” He paused. “I mean, the Taights and
Kenards try to take care of him as much as they can, but they live
so far away...”

The rules of the game—the game itself—had
just become irrelevant.

I took a deep breath. I wanted to close my
eyes so I could come to terms with that, but I didn’t dare, what
with all these buckets flying around like Dorothy’s house about to
land on the Wicked Witch of the West.

“Don’t you have sisters?”

“Yeah, but they have their own lives and Dad
would be upset if they left them to tend to him. He raised us to be
out and on our own by the time we were eighteen. Or twenty-three,
depending on if we went on missions.”

“Did your sisters?”

“Yes. And then went to the Y—Brigham Young,
I mean. Got married like good Mormon girls, in the temple. Lisette
hasn’t even been married a year and she’s already got one kid on
the way.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Oh, it’s not that I don’t approve. It’s
just so...
Mormon
. I thought they’d do something more
exciting. Geneviève speaks Russian and Lisette speaks Mandarin. I
mean, come on. They could have gone to the State Department or
something. The CIA cruises BYU like it’s a singles bar. They were
both recruited, but...”

Damn. That was depressing, considering I’d
had to fight tooth and nail to get to go to college, and even then,
it had been on the sly. Sneaking my tuition, squeaking it out of
what little Gordon had left me that month. Cheating on my husband
with NYU. “So you’re disappointed in them.”

“Yeah. I am.”

“Are they happy?”

“They seem so, but I don’t see them that
often. One lives in Colorado and the other lives in New
Orleans.”

“What did your dad think?”

“Don’t know. He said he was happy with
whatever they chose to do, but I don’t know if that was the truth.
He’ll lie to you if he doesn’t think the truth matters and you keep
pressing him for an opinion. He could lie to Satan and Satan would
believe him.”

Oh. Hmm. “Are you going on a mission?” I
asked, as if I didn’t know the answer to that already.

“I don’t know yet. I don’t believe in what
my church teaches.”

I feigned shock. “But you go every Sunday
anyway.”

“Sure. It’s one way I can take care of my
dad.”

“I’m confused. If you don’t believe, why
would you even consider going on a mission?”

“Well, I might go ahead and put in my
paperwork after my dad’s released.
If
I go on a mission,
it’ll only be if I get called somewhere foreign. Take the path my
sisters didn’t. I’m not looking for some spiritual experience, and
selling something I don’t believe? In a foreign language? Priceless
training.”

“That’s rather mercenary, don’t you
think?”

He laughed. “I’m all about taking advantage
where I can get it. I don’t want to spend my life being four
hundred people’s slave. I figure, as long as I follow the mission
rules and do a good job, the Lord has no right to complain about
why I’m there.”

“Does your father know about this plan of
yours?”

“Not yet, but he knows I don’t believe. No
point in lying to
him
. He’s had years of people lying to
him; he knows when someone’s going to lie to him before they say a
word.”

“Would he step in to block it some way?”

“He might. He’d definitely blow his top and
refuse to pay for it, but I have the money. And Sebastian would if
I asked him to. On the other hand, my dad knows I’d do the job
right. Guys go on missions all the time to get straightened out, or
because their parents make them. They don’t care. Probably don’t
believe. But they go anyway and make it hard for the other
missionaries who are really there to do the work. He hates that
more than anything, I think. I’m just a lot more honest than they
are about my goals and I wouldn’t fuck around while I’m there.”

“So what
do
you believe?”

“About all I can swallow is that there’s a
God and he or she—they—made us. Somehow. Maybe with his hands.
Maybe through evolution. Maybe some combination. I don’t know and I
don’t care, but look around. I can’t believe that minds that can
create this had no creator. This didn’t just form out of the soup
on its own. The soup had to have had a finger stirring it, adding
ingredients here and there.”

Any man who had bred and raised a kid like
this was worth a helluva lot more than a casual lover and I didn’t
know what to make of this strange longing curling through me. I
didn’t have a chance to examine it more closely, though, because we
had arrived at our destination.

I saw Mitch high up in what looked like the
cab of a bulldozer, pulling levers systematically. Trevor pointed
over to a flat bed where the steel pooled. Two sides of the bed
moved inward so that the steel was extruded as it cooled. The
mechanisms that extruded it moved in sync with the levers Mitch
pulled. He hadn’t seen us yet and I wanted to watch him rather than
the steel, fascinating as it was.

From what I could tell through the dirty
glass of the cab, he was as filthy as his son, in a coverall and
hardhat and thick gloves. He had sweat running down his face, which
was a study in concentration.

I had never seen a more beautiful man in my
life.

“It’s called slab casting,” Trevor said. The
ingot Mitch had just pressed and cut was about six feet long, two
feet wide, and four inches thick. “They’ll get hot and cold rolled
in different buildings,” Trevor said, interrupting my musings, but
then he lapsed into silence. I watched Mitch while Trevor watched
the next ingot take shape. “Some of this will go toward the Jep
products. That’ll get loaded up on a semi and taken over to
Allentown and machined there.”