She sputtered a laugh, but wasn’t sure what to say. They’d worked together a lot on the last job, and even though the Japanese woodworker and botanist was half her age, he didn’t seem to mind her. Mostly because she would listen to him talk about plant speciation for hours without interrupting, since she didn’t want to upset him by mentioning it wasn’t quite as interesting as he thought.
When he saw her chopping vegetables on a flattened cereal box, he’d made her a beautiful hand-sanded cutting board, sized to fit perfectly in her box of cooking utensils. Though Mari still always put a cereal box on top of it when she cut things so that she wouldn’t mar its surface.
“Sorry, Hotaka. I need you on the east end of the project, finishing the rare-cactus survey.” Marcus fussed with his clipboard a little more. “Maybe . . . but no, then . . .”
Shit. But then, if she didn’t take Wyatt, someone else would have to, and he’d made most of the female bios—and Jorge—cry.
Mari put on a placid smile. “Of course, Marcus. Don’t worry, I can handle him.”
That was not, as it turned out, strictly true.
On Monday, it was about his crew checking under their tires.
On Tuesday, they got into it because he was driving too fast. He claimed his eyes weren’t so damn slow that he couldn’t see a tortoise when it was right in front of his face, no matter how fast he was going.
On Wednesday, the drip pan under the forklift cracked, he refused to pause work to get a new one because his boss was “all up his ass to get this tower done,” and she had to write him up for a secondary containment violation.
On Thursday, his crew read the plans wrong and put part of the tower together backward. And, of course, they hadn’t yet gotten that fixed when Jack’s boss showed up.
Mari hated the big boss on sight. He parked in the middle of the road and left his truck running for an hour and a half. He had shiny boots that kept scuffing Jack’s already-scuffed ones when he got up into his space, forcing Jack to back away time and again. Calling him “son,” repeatedly reminding Jack to call him “sir.”
She overheard the words “lazy” and “slow” and “half-assed,” and it made her cringe.
It was cruel, and it didn’t even make any sense because the only other tower assembly crew on this section was still working on the same tower while Jack’s crew had finished several. Lisa was the other crew’s monitor, and she always joked that it took them until eleven thirty to get warmed up enough to pick up a wrench and then they needed a two-hour lunch to recover from the trauma of doing actual work. Mari didn’t understand why they weren’t getting this chastising from the big boss. Or at least she didn’t until she got a close look at the boss’s face.
He had a slab of a jaw and heavy brows, like an older version of the foreman in charge of the slower crew. Ah. Well, now she got why Junior was getting special dispensation and Jack was being lectured despite picking up Junior’s slack and then some. They’d been getting the tallest tower assignments, the ones that started in low-dipped washes and had to be built higher and with more-complicated shapes so they could get up high enough to draw even with the towers built on high spots. They still built three of those for every one of the other crew’s shorter ones. And yet this jerk seemed determined to make Jack apologize for it.
The next time the word “lazy” drifted over to her, Mari had had it. Her mother had always warned her that if she didn’t learn when to hold her tongue, it’d cause her a world of trouble. Mom sure hadn’t been wrong, but right now, Mari didn’t care.
She marched right up onto the pad, the crew stopping to stare because she was always so careful to stay out of their way. She went up to the boss and inserted herself into the conversation, even though he didn’t even turn to acknowledge her when she approached. His shirt buttons nearly brushed her breasts before he finally, grudgingly, gave way and stepped back—from both her and Jack.
“Can I help you?”
“Your truck is parked in the road, and if it’s going to be stored on-site, it needs to have secondary containment underneath to catch any engine leaks,” she said crisply.
“Uh, sorry about that, little lady,” he said, sounding anything but. “I don’t happen to have a pan with me to put under the truck. Wasn’t expecting this crew to need so much supervision.”
She wasn’t looking at Jack, but she could feel his chagrin at this latest passive-aggressive swipe. It was probably taking a lot for the normally explosive man to keep from defending himself. She’d already heard the supervisor suggest to Jack that he use a particular method that Jack had discarded last Monday as being too slow.
“In that case,” she told his boss, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go. We don’t have extra containment pans on-site.”
Jack shifted beside her, and she hoped he wouldn’t blow her cover. He knew all too well she had three shiny new pans in her truck, because she’d shown them to him this morning. She brought them from the yard after the forklift argument, explaining that now they wouldn’t have to lose work time to get a new pan if one of theirs broke, because she’d keep extras on hand for them.
“Listen, darlin’, if you could just look the other way just this once, that’d be real nice. I need to stay and talk to my crew a little more.”
She didn’t smile. “I’m sorry. State and federal regulations don’t have leeway for that. You’re welcome to come back after you get a pan from the construction yard.”
“Well, somebody’s got a stick up their lady parts,” he muttered, and Jack took a sharp step forward. The boss’s eyes widened and Jack reluctantly backed off, his jaw clenching. Something in her stomach curdled at him being forced to back down, like she’d seen something private and too vulnerable.
Mari turned and walked away, not dignifying the boss’s comment with a response. Men like him wanted you to laugh off their poor behavior, and she’d be damned if she would. Behind her back, she heard the supervisor growling something to Jack that sounded like “keep your bio bitch on a leash.”
She walked out toward the road, stooping to check under his tires for animals. Which turned out to be a good thing because the boss didn’t check at all when he jumped in and screeched away a second later, leaving them all to choke on his dust.
She tucked her hands in her pockets and forced herself to keep casually strolling along, even though she wanted to crawl into her truck and gobble the last of her brownies just to wash the taste of that encounter out of her mouth. Why didn’t she call him on that “lady parts” comment? She ought to report him to HR. Darlin’ indeed. What a jerk. Telling Jack to “control” her like she was his property instead of an educated professional.