Last Shift at the Rebuild

Teresa Smithson walked into the bunker at dusk the way she had walked into it for fourteen years, which was to say without thinking much about it. Her boots hit the steel grating of the entry stairs and the sound carried down into the concrete like it always did, a flat little clap that the walls swallowed. Below that, under her feet, the pipes hummed. They had hummed the whole time she had worked here, low and steady, the heartbeat of Stony Gorge come up from the deep rock through the old city's veins, and if a person sat quiet enough in the control room they could feel it in the chair frame, in the desk edge, in the backs of their teeth.

She was sixty-two years old and she had run this regulator since before some of the younger greenhouse crew were old enough to vote. Fourteen years, counted from the winter they re-rigged the main loop, and she counted most things now. The council had voted in the fall to automate the station by spring. A new unit was coming up the supply road in pieces, some engineer from two valleys over was going to bolt it together in this very room, and Teresa's job, the whole shape of her days, would go the way of so much else after the collapse. She had voted for it herself, which was the funny part. It was the sensible thing. Heat stayed even, nobody had to trudge down the canyon neck at three in the morning when a valve stuttered, and she could finally sleep through a night without one ear cocked for the phone.

The trouble was that she had built her whole life around being the one who listened for the phone.

The control room smelled the way it always did, machine oil and warm concrete and a faint sweetness off the pressure gauges that nobody had ever identified. She hung her coat on the peg by the console, a peg she had driven into the wall herself with a hand drill in her first month, and she sat down in the operator's chair and pulled the night log toward her without opening it. Outside the one small window the sky over the canyon rim was going the color of a bruise, purple edging into dark, and the first greenhouse lights were coming on down the slope, little orange squares, forty-one of them if she still counted right and she did.

She flipped the log open anyway, because that was the routine, and wrote the date at the top in her square handwriting, and then she sat there looking at the gauges. Everything was in the green. Everything was always in the green. Being good at a job had this one problem, she thought. You got so good at it that it stopped needing you, and then somebody came along with a clipboard and a budget and said so out loud, and you couldn't even argue, because you'd spent fourteen years making the argument for them.

It was going to be a long, empty shift. She knew the shape of those. She had worked hundreds of them, reading, dozing in the chair with the alarm keyed to her hip, waking at odd hours to walk the pipe gallery with a flashlight and find nothing wrong. Tonight the thought of it sat on her chest like a cat, heavy and dull, and after twenty minutes of staring at a pressure chart she had read a hundred times she reached for the handset on the wall, the old wired one they kept because the radio repeater up on the ridge had died twice in one winter and nobody trusted it since.

Monty picked up on the third ring. She could hear wind behind him, so he was out at the scrap yard, probably stacking salvaged pipe insulation in his lean-to the way he did when he couldn't sleep.

"It's me," she said. "I'm at the bunker. Night shift."

"I know what night shift means, Teresa. That's the thing you do at night, in the bunker." His voice was dry as the creek bed in August, and even through eight years of listening to it, it still did something for her that she didn't say out loud. "Everything all right down there?"

"Everything's green. Everything's always green." She turned the log page with her thumb. "Monty, I'm bored. I'm sitting here bored out of my skull, and I've got ten more hours of it, and I thought, well. I thought maybe you'd rather be bored with me than bored out there stacking that insulation wrong."

"I don't stack it wrong."

"You absolutely do, and it drives me crazy, and I'd still rather look at it than this pressure chart."

There was a pause, and she could picture him standing in the lean-to with the handset wedged against his shoulder, fifty-eight years old, gray coming in at his temples like frost on a fence post, doing the arithmetic of his evening. Feed the dog, bank the stove, ride the scooter down the canyon road in the dark. She had met him eight years back at a community meeting about water rationing, of all things, where he had stood up and said the rationing schedule was unfair to the greenhouse tiers in a voice that made half the room laugh and the other half think, and she had thought, well, there's a man who pays attention. They'd started dating a few months after that, once she worked up the nerve, and he had courted her in the slow old way, fixing her gutters, bringing her batteries, walking her home along the rim road. At her age she had figured romance was a thing that happened to other people, younger people, and then it happened to her anyway, plain and late and good.

"Bored, huh," he said now. "That's a serious condition. There's treatments for that."

"Don't be cute."

"I've got a bottle of that pear cider Celeste's kid fermented. The batch he swore wouldn't be any good. It's actually pretty decent, which proves he shouldn't be trusted with predictions." She heard him set something down on a workbench. "You want company down there, or you want me to just say goodnight and let you suffer?"

"Company," she said, quicker than she meant to. "If it's not too much trouble."

"It's no trouble. It's a scooter ride and a bottle of cider." He paused, and when he spoke again the dryness had gone soft at the edges, the way it did sometimes when he wasn't thinking about how he sounded. "I've been meaning to come down anyway. Feels like we haven't sat still together in a week."

They hung up and Teresa put the handset back in its cradle and stood a minute in the middle of the control room with her hands on her hips, feeling a little foolish and a lot lighter. Ten more hours. A man, a bottle, a warm bunker full of the hum of the deep earth. It was more than she had any right to expect from a Tuesday night, and she was going to take it.

* * *

Monty came clattering down the entry stairs forty minutes later with the bottle wrapped in a rag under one arm and a fat candle in his coat pocket, because the bunker's overhead lights had two settings, harsh and harsher, and he had learned early on that Teresa hated them after dark. He was wearing the wool cap she had knitted him three winters ago, the one with the dropped stitch he refused to let her fix on principle.

"You weren't kidding about the bored," he said, looking around at her sitting in the chair with the log open to a blank page. "You look like a woman waiting for a bus that already came and went."

"Charming. Come in and shut the door, the heat's leaking."

He shut the door and came over and stood behind her chair, and he read the log upside down for a moment, which was a habit of his, checking her night entries out of pure curiosity. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of her head through her hair, slow, and she reached up and put her hand over his where it rested on her shoulder.

"A few more months," she said, to the gauges more than to him. "That's all that's left of this. They flip the switch in March and this room is a closet full of somebody else's equipment."

"You've been chewing on that all week."

"Course I have." She turned the chair around to face him. "Fourteen years, Monty. I kept two hundred people warm. Now the charts say a box can do it better and the charts aren't even wrong, that's the part that gets me."

He set the cider bottle on the desk and worked the cork out with his pocketknife, taking his time, letting her talk or not talk, which was one of the better things about him. "Charts don't hear the pipes," he said finally, handing her the first cup. "You do. Worth something, even if the council can't put it on a form."

Teresa took the cup and looked at the candle flame and the green gauges behind it, and under her boots the hum went on, steady as it had ever been, and she thought that steady was a fine thing and also that she'd had about enough of it for one lifetime.

They drank the cider sitting on the floor, because the bunker had two chairs and both of them belonged to the desk, and sitting on warm concrete felt like being young in a way neither of them had actually been. Monty told a story about a water pump he'd pulled out of a ruin up the north fork, how it had turned out to be full of dead wasps, and Teresa laughed until her ribs hurt, which surprised her. It had been a while since anything got a real laugh out of her. The candle burned down a thumb's width. The gauges stayed green. Under everything the deep hum went on, the sound of the earth doing its work, and she had stopped hearing it years ago the way you stop hearing your own pulse, but tonight she heard it again, and it sounded like the last shift it would ever keep.

Later she showed him the alcove. It was a leftover from the original design, a recess in the back wall where somebody in the before times had put a cot for overnight operators, and the township had kept the cot and even a blanket, scratchy and gray and clean. The alcove was barely wider than the cot itself. You stood in it and the walls were at your shoulders. When they'd both been younger, or at least when she'd been fifty-four and new to being loved, they had joked about it, the world's smallest bedroom, and never used it. Tonight she pulled the blanket down and looked at it and thought, why not, the night is long and the floor is cold.

"That cot's held heavier men than you," she said, and he snorted and set the candle on the shelf above it, and they got in, which took some arranging, knees and boots and elbows, and then they were lying side by side in the narrow space with the pipes ticking behind the wall, looking at the underside of the shelf.

"Cozy," Monty said.

"It's a closet."

"It's a closet with you in it, so I'll take it."

She lay there and listened to him breathe, and after a while she heard herself talking, which was the thing she'd been afraid of all evening, that once she started she wouldn't have the sense to stop.

"You know what it feels like," she said, to the shelf, "being told they're replacing you? It doesn't feel like losing. It feels like being a machine that got switched off mid-cycle. Nothing's wrong with me. All my gauges are green. I'm just done, is the official word. Pointless. The same pipes, the same heat, and somebody else's hands on the valves by spring."

Monty didn't say anything right away. He was good at that too, the not filling the silence with comfort, though she knew he was working up to something.

"Mid-cycle," he said at last. "You've still got half a load of laundry in you, is what you're saying."

"Don't make it stupid."

"I'm not making it stupid. I'm agreeing with you in my own language." He rolled over onto his side, which in that space put him half against her, his chest warm through his flannel. "Teresa. You're not a machine. You're the only person in this township who knows what that hum means when it changes pitch. That's not pointless, that's just rare."

"Rare doesn't keep the valve seats from rusting."

"No. But it keeps you interesting!" He touched her wrist, just laid his fingers over it where it lay on the blanket between them, over the pulse point, casual as anything, like he did it every night, and maybe he had, in eight years, more times than she could count. Then his fingers moved up her forearm slow, and then to her throat, resting there lightly, thumb along her jaw, and she turned her head and found his mouth.

The kiss was slow. That was the way they did it, after all these years, no hurry left in either of them, or so she'd believed until tonight. His thumb moved on her jaw and she opened her mouth and he made a low sound into her, and the hum of the bunker and the hum of her own body got mixed up together, and she thought, here is something that isn't pointless, here is something the charts can't do better.

She pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were open too, candlelight on the gray in his beard.

"Monty," she said. "I want you to not be careful with me tonight."

He went still for a second, the way he did when he was reading something twice to make sure.

"Not careful."

"Not gentle the way you're gentle. Not slow the way you're slow. I've been careful for fourteen years, up here, keeping everything level, watching every gauge, and I'm so tired of it I could scream. I want something tonight that I don't have to be responsible for." She heard her own voice go rough at the end, and she didn't care. "Do you understand what I'm asking?"

"I think so." His thumb was still on her jaw. "You want me to ask, though, before I take anything. That part I'm keeping."

"Fine. Yes. Ask, then take!"

"All right." He kissed her again then, and it was different, there was weight behind it now, his hand sliding into her hair, and she made a sound against his mouth that embarrassed her and then didn't, because he answered it with one of his own, hungrier. Her hands went to his belt. The buckle was cold and stiff, the way belts are, and she worked it with more want than skill, and he laughed low in his chest and reached