The Incorrect Beep

I'm forty-four years old, and let me state right off that I took this job for the money and nothing else, so when I say what happened later surprised me, you'll know I wasn't looking for it.

Hugo, the site foreman, had called the temp agency in Butler on a Thursday, and by Saturday morning I was standing on a dock beside a proglacial lake with a folding table, a laptop, a box of laminated badges, and a handheld scanner that had already decided it hated me. The old resort behind me was half wrapped in scaffolding, all bones and blue tarps, and the water in front of me was so flat it looked poured.

"Kasey, you get the table set up okay?" Hugo asked, jogging past in his hard hat with a clipboard under his arm. He's fifty-two, married, and treats everybody on site like a new hire he's personally responsible for, which I appreciated since I knew nobody.

"Table's fine, Hugo. Scanner's not."

He stopped and came back, squinting at the little handheld unit in my hand. "What's it doing?"

"It beeps when it shouldn't and doesn't beep when it should. I scanned my own wrist four times and got three rejects and one green light, and I haven't moved."

"Huh. Tap it on the table a few times, they're always like that when they've been sitting in a truck. We've got about two hundred wrists coming through today and tomorrow, so holler if it gets worse."

And then he was gone again, because foremen never actually stand still, and I was left alone with the lake, the laptop, and a machine that kept making incorrect beeps at me like a smoke detector with a low battery. I'd done temp work before, mostly data entry at the furniture factory where I normally answer phones, and the whole appeal of this weekend gig was that it was supposed to be boring. Sit at a table, scan a wristband, wave a man through, sip my coffee. That was the brochure. Instead the scanner was staging a mutiny before eight in the morning, and I'd already taken my wristband off and put it back on twice trying to get the thing to read me straight.

I'll admit I talked to it. Not loudly, just little mutters, the way you do when you're alone with technology that's gaslighting you.

"Nope, that one didn't count either," I told it, scanning my own wrist again and getting the flat little error tone. "Thanks, buddy. Really earning your keep."

The morning crew trickled in past me, a string of guys in hi-vis vests and muddy boots, and every time the scanner worked it gave a cheerful chirp and every time it didn't I got to say "hold still, let me try that again" like a nurse with a bad thermometer. By eight thirty I had a rhythm going, hold the wrist, angle the scanner, half expect the lie, and the men didn't mind because construction guys will wait for anything if you let them put their coffee down first.

That's when the black pickup pulled into the gravel lot above the dock, and a man got out, and I'm just going to describe what happened to me honestly because there's no point pretending otherwise.

He was tall, maybe six two, forty-something, built the way a man is when he lifts heavy things for money, which he was. He came down the gravel path with a duffel over one shoulder and a toolbox in one hand, and he was wearing worn leather work gloves, the kind that have molded themselves to a person's hands over a couple of years, cracked at the knuckles and dark at the palms. Something about those gloves did it for me. I'm not proud, well, actually I am a little, but there it was. He moved easy, unhurried, like the ground had agreed in advance to stay where it was, and his sleeves were pushed up over forearms that had actual business being forearms.

I'm single by choice, happily so. My last relationship ended three years ago, amicably, we just ran out of road, and since then I've been fine, genuinely fine, coffee and my apartment and my sister's kids and no drama. But fine is not the same as feeling something, and standing there behind my folding table I felt a jolt of pure, uncomplicated physical interest, the kind I hadn't had in a while, and it went through me like a flame catching.

He reached the table and looked at the laptop, the badges, then me.

"Morning," he said. "Stewart. I'm supposed to be on the list somewhere."

"Stewart," I repeated, and I made myself look at the screen instead of at his hands. "What's your trade?"

"Foundation underpinner. I'm here to stabilize the old dock footings before somebody drops a lake house into the lake." He set the toolbox down with a clunk and rested one gloved hand on the edge of my table, and I noticed the leather was scarred and soft-looking and I made a firm internal decision to be a professional adult about all of it.

"Well, Stewart, I have good news and bad news. Good news is you're on the list. Bad news is this scanner has been lying to me all morning, so let's see what it thinks of you."

He held out his wrist. He had a temp band already, the paper kind, from the parking lot check-in, and I aimed the scanner at it with the confidence of a woman who had been fooled too many times already. The scanner stayed silent. I tried again. Silence.

"Course," I said.

"Course what?"

"It doesn't beep. Or it beeps wrong. It's got two modes and neither one is helpful." I tapped the scanner on the table twice, the way Hugo suggested, and tried a third time, and this time it gave one short, wrong, tinny beep, not the green chirp and not the error buzz, just this odd off-key beep that didn't mean anything at all.

Stewart tilted his head. "Was that a yes?"

"That was a lie. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't a yes."

"So am I checked in or not?"

"You are," I said, squinting at the laptop, "because the laptop, which is the only thing out here behaving itself, shows you checked in at seven fifty-one this morning. Which is interesting, because you just showed up at eight forty."

He laughed, and it was a real laugh, surprised out of him. "Maybe I checked myself in from the road."

"Maybe the scanner's been checking people in on its own. Maybe it's running the whole site. Maybe I'm superfluous."

"Nobody out here is superfluous, they've got us on a schedule," he said, and then he squatted down next to the table to look at the scanner himself, and I got a nice clean view of him at eye level for a second, which I did not need and did not decline. "My last site had one of these. It used to clear its cache every time it rained. You just have to talk to them like they're a horse."

"Is that right."

"Works on horses, works on scanners." He took the scanner from me, gently, and held it flat in his gloved palm, and did some small thing with his thumb over the reset, and then scanned his own wrist, and it chirped green like a choir of angels. "There."

"Okay, I hate that you could do that," I said, taking it back.

"It's a gift. It's also probably a loose battery connector, but the gift story sounds better." He stood, and he didn't leave. He shifted his weight, looked out at the water, then back at me. "You're going to be out here all weekend?"

"Today and tomorrow, eight to four. Scanning wrists and being lied to by machinery."

"Huh," he said, and that was all he said, but the way he said it had a little door in it. "I'll probably be coming through this table a couple times a day. Dock work, everything comes past the dock."

"Then I'll be here," I said. "Failing to beep at you."

He picked up his toolbox and went down the dock toward the old resort footings, and I watched him go for exactly as long as was dignified, which was slightly longer than that. Then I looked down at the scanner in my hand, which chose that exact moment to emit one random incorrect beep at absolutely nothing.

"Sure," I told it. "Now you're just showing off."

Christine's cafe sits up the hill from the dock, a small squat building with a hand-painted sign and the best coffee within twenty miles of this lake, and Hugo had arranged for the site crew to get a lunch account there, which is how I'd already met Christine, fifty, divorced, runs the place alone and likes it that way. She'd come down at seven with a thermos for me and a look at my table setup.

"Honey, that scanner's been bad news since Hugo bought it off a truck at a discount," she'd told me. "Everything on this site came at a discount. That's the whole charm of the place."

So there I was at eight forty-five on a Saturday morning, coffee from Christine, lake flat as glass, scanner misbehaving, two hundred wrists to go, and one very specific pair of worn leather gloves walking away down a dock, and I caught myself already doing the arithmetic of how many times a dock underpinner might legitimately need to pass a check-in table in one weekend.

The answer, if you're wondering, is more than zero, and that was enough for me.

Hugo came down the dock around nine, clipboard under his arm, and he had the walk of a man who has already put out three fires before breakfast and is scouting for a fourth. He's the foreman, fifty-two, married, and he treats every single person on that site like a new hire he's personally responsible for, which means when he stopped at my table and frowned at my laptop I braced for a foreman's lecture.

"So what's the story with the scanner, Kasey?"

"It beeps wrong. It beeped wrong at Stewart, it beeped wrong at nothing, and then Stewart fixed it and now it beeps wrong at nothing again."

"Stewart fixed it?"

"He did some thumb thing. I think it's a horse thing."

Hugo took the scanner, turned it over, held it up to the light like that was going to tell him something, and then he keyed his radio and asked somebody named Dale a question I didn't fully follow, something about bands and the server and whether the weekend roster had synced. Then he looked at Stewart's wristband, which was still sitting in the system as checked in at 7:51 when the man himself had strolled in at 8:40 like the lake wasn't going anywhere.

"Yeah, that band's flagging weird. Temp bands do that when the roster syncs late. I'll run up to the trailer and grab Stewart a replacement, clean data, no arguments. You sit tight." He pointed at me with the scanner. "You, don't scan anybody with this thing till I'm back, because I don't trust it and I trust it less when it agrees with me."

And off he went, up the gravel path toward the trailer, and that left me and Stewart standing at a folding table with nothing legally required of either of us, which is a dangerous kind of free time.

He set his duffel down and leaned a hip against the table edge, and that's when I actually looked at the other thing he'd carried, this big rigid chest, silver-skinned, heavy-looking, with latches that had real hardware on them, the kind of box that costs more than my laptop. It had ridden in the bed of his black pickup and he'd hauled it down the dock one-handed like it was a picnic basket.

"Okay, I have to ask," I said. "What is in the mystery box. Because it's not a toolbox, you already have a toolbox, and nobody brings two toolboxes to a dock."

"This one's not tools." He popped a latch so I could see inside, and there was this pale vapor fog and rows of slim cylinders packed in foam, each one labeled in handwriting neater than mine. "Zinc-lined. Core samples. I pull cores out of the old footings, wood and sediment, and they have to stay cold from the lake to the lab or the readings drift and I get to do the whole week over again."

"So you're carrying a freezer around a construction site."

"Basically, yeah. It holds temperature for thirty-six hours even in this sun. Costs a stupid amount of money and it's the second most valuable thing I own."

"What's the first?"

He looked at me over the top of the chest, and he didn't rush it, which I appreciated, because a man who rushes a line is a man who's used it on everybody. "The auger rig," he said. "But the chest is a close third."

"What's second, then?"

"I said the chest was third. I'm not giving you the whole list before ten a.m." And I laughed, because it was a good line and because he delivered it flat and dry with those cracked gloves hanging out of his back pocket, forty-six years old, six foot two, built like somebody who lifts heavy things for a living, which as far as I could tell was exactly what he did.

I'm forty-four, single by choice, happily so, three years out of a relationship that ended so amicably we still send each other Christmas cards, and I do data entry at a furniture factory and answer phones, and I took this weekend gig for the money, plain and simple. I was not on the market. But I'm also not blind, and there is a specific category of man, forearms, competence, doesn't fill silence with noise, that my body files under look into this later, and Stewart had walked straight out of that category onto a dock.