Tigress in Transit

Jeanette Swanson was thirty-four years old and had been welding for fourteen of those years, and she still could not get over how much she hated airports.

Not flying. Flying was fine. She liked the takeoff, liked watching the ground fall away, liked the little pretzels. It was the waiting she hated, the way an airport took a perfectly capable adult and turned her into somebody who stood in line holding a boarding folder like a hall pass. McAllister Regional in northern Montana was small enough that it should have been painless, but the board over the charter desk had been flipping the same bad news for two hours.

FLIGHT 4471, CANCELLED, WEATHER.

"Not even weather," she muttered to the man behind the desk, who was doing his best. "Weather advisory. There's a difference. I've driven through worse skies than this."

"I believe you," he said, and he did look like he believed her, which somehow made it worse.

So that was that. Her charter home was cancelled, the next one out was tomorrow morning if the advisory lifted, and the airline had vouchers for a hotel she was not going to use because the hotel was eleven miles down a road the county had already started sanding, badly. She grabbed her carry-on, the one with the worn handle and the sticker from the trade show in Denver, and went to go be bored somewhere with better lighting.

The private charter terminal at McAllister was all glass and steel, the kind of building somebody had designed to look sleek in a brochure and then the budget had run out before the comfortable chairs arrived. It did look nice at night, she had to admit. The blizzard warning had emptied the place out, and the snow came down in slow fat flakes past the tall windows, lit up orange by the ramp lights. It would have been romantic if she hadn't been so irritated.

There were maybe eight stranded passengers left in the whole building, all of them collected around the one working coffee machine like it was a campfire. A bartender named Shelby, twenty-nine and chatty in the way bar people get at the end of a dead shift, had set up shop at the lounge counter even though the flight was dead and nobody was going to tip her tonight. Jeanette bought a beer she did not especially want, just to have something to do with her hands, and took a lap of the terminal.

That was when she saw the gate.

She had been walking the long glass wall, the way you do when you are bored, hands in the pockets of her canvas jacket, and she noticed that one of the ground-level access gates to the ramp was hanging wrong. Not broken, exactly. Sagging. The kind of sag that a hinge takes on when the lower knuckle wears out and nobody has gotten around to it, so the whole thing droops two inches and drags a scar in the concrete every time somebody opens it. She had fixed forty gates exactly like it. She had fixed gates like that in rain, in mud, once in a hailstorm in Wyoming that had taught her to respect hail.

And past the gate, through the glass, there was a maintenance bay. It was after hours, lights half on, and sitting out in the open like an invitation was a welding cart. Honest to God welding cart, with a machine on it, a helmet hung off the side, and a little pile of scrap stock next to it that somebody had left out like the world's most considerate goodbye gift.

Now, here is a thing about welders that people who are not welders do not always get. You can leave a welder alone with a problem for only so long before the problem stops being theirs and starts being hers. Jeanette stood at that glass for a good four minutes, beer in hand, doing the math. The hinge was a simple repair. There was a machine right there. There was stock right there. There was, if she was honest with herself, nothing else on this earth for her to do until sunrise.

She turned back to the desk guy, Ethan, who was thirty-two and clearly counting the minutes until his shift ended without an incident report in it.

"You want to fix it," he said. "With the airport's welder."

"With the airport's welder, on the airport's gate, for free, while I wait for a plane that isn't coming." She tipped her head. "Or I stand around for nine more hours watching snow. Your call, Ethan."

He looked at the gate. He looked at her. He looked at the gate again, and you could watch the arithmetic happen behind his eyes, the one where a sagging gate fixed for free beat a sagging gate he would have to put in the work order for Monday.

"There's leather in the bay," he said finally. "And if you burn yourself, that's on you, and I never saw any of this."

"Honey, I haven't burned myself since before you had this job."

That was maybe ninety percent true and they both knew it, but he waved her through anyway, and that was how Jeanette Swanson came to be sitting on a milk crate in a maintenance bay at half past ten at night, in her jacket and her work boots, with a carry-on bag parked against the wall and a Mig torch warming up in her hand.

The sparks were the part she would never get tired of, and she knew it, and she had stopped apologizing for it somewhere around her thirtieth birthday. The wire touched the steel and the arc lit up the bay, blue-white, and the little orange sparks went spraying off across the concrete like somebody had shaken a jar of fireflies. She ground the old hinge knuckle clean, tacked it, checked it for square with the little level on the side of her phone, and welded it proper. Four passes. Clean beads, nice and even, the kind of beads that get photographed for the shop wall.

She was about halfway through the second hinge, helmet up, squinting at her work in the shop light, when she felt it.

Not heard. Felt. That prickling on the back of the neck that every person who has ever worked in a shop knows, the one that says somebody is standing behind you watching. She lifted the helmet the rest of the way and turned, ready to tell Ethan that yes, she knew about the leather, she had put it on before she struck an arc like a big girl.

It was not Ethan.

It was a man she had not seen in fourteen years, and she would have known him anyway, because some people you just know. Will Brandt. Thirty-five now, broad in the shoulders, wearing a wool coat that cost more than her truck, standing in the doorway of the maintenance bay like he had every right to be there. He was from the lounge, judging by the little paper cup in his hand, and he had clearly been standing there a while.

She knew why he had stopped, and it was not the sparks. It was the way she moved, the way she handled the torch, the way she sat on the crate like she owned the crate. She could feel all of that from across a room, and it made her want to be even better at it, just to watch him watch.

"Jeanette Swanson," he said.

"Well, I'll be," she said, and pushed the helmet up onto her head like a crown. "Will Brandt. You got old."

"You got sparks in your hair."

"That's just how I look now!" She grinned and held up the torch. "Pull up a crate or keep walking, but if you stand in my light I'm charging rent."

He laughed and pulled a crate over from the corner, set it down about six feet off, and sat. He kept his distance and kept his paper cup and watched her strike the arc again like it was a show he had paid for.

"You're the guy from that pizza date," she said over her shoulder, before she could stop herself. "It was one date. Fourteen years ago. We split a pizza and you spilled a soda on your own shoe."

"Thirteen dollars and forty cents on a pizza, and you made me split it evenly even though you ate three slices and I ate one."

"The math was the math. That's welding brain. Everything gets measured."

"I remember the math," he said. "I remember you made me drive you home at nine because you had a six a.m. shift at the fab shop. I remember thinking, well, there's a woman who knows what she wants, and it's not me."

She laughed out loud at that, a real one, and it surprised her. She lifted the helmet, checked her bead, and grinned at him. "You want to know a secret? I remembered the pizza. I barely remembered you. You were a name on a class roster until about ninety seconds ago."

"Ouch."

"Truth hurts, Brandt." She dropped the helmet and finished the second hinge with two quick passes, then flipped her shield down for a third on the corner where the steel was tired. The arc sang. The sparks poured off. Two minutes and change from first strike to final tack, and she knew it was good before she even looked. She stood, pulled the helmet off, and waved him over. "Look at that. That's a hinge that'll outlive the airplane."

He leaned in and studied the bead as a man reads a contract. "That is genuinely beautiful work. You do that for a living?"

"Fourteen years. Structural and custom. I was in Denver for a trade show, which is why I'm here instead of home." She yanked her glove off and offered a hand. "You? Last I heard you were in school for something boring."

"Cargo logistics. I run a firm now. Fifty planes, four hundred trucks, a lot of problems exactly like that gate."