Lara Jordan
Hana Kovach woke before the bell. Peter lay beside her, taking up most of the narrow bed, mouth open, one arm flung across where she’d been. On the sill, a matchbook with a painted girl watched over his cigarettes.
“Hanuška,” he murmured.
She slid out and pulled on her dungarees. “I got to go.”
“You just got up.”
“Bell’s coming.”
“Let it ring.” He caught her wrist. “Five minutes.”
For a moment she pictured slipping back under the blanket, the room close and dark.
Then the factory whistle cut through the morning.
She pulled free. “Somebody’s got to punch in.”
She tugged on her boots. Her purse lay flat on the chair. Peter had taken two dollars—she could tell. Four dollars left and some change. She folded the bills and tucked them into her left boot. The coins could stay.
“You’re mean when you worry,” he said, wide awake now.
“What am I worried about?”
“Beats me. You been counting your money different.” She felt him watching her. “And you keep touching here.” He laid a hand on his stomach.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure I do.” Softer now. “We’re gonna have to marry.”
She stopped, one boot unlaced. “We are?”
“Unless you got a better plan.”
“I got plenty. None with you.”
He laughed. “Then why you still here?”
Outside, men walked toward the Vulcan Iron Works, lunch pails swinging, boots ringing on the cobbles. Hana fell in step.
She walked six blocks, fog sinking into her hair. Across the Susquehanna, breakers stood against the mountain like bad teeth.
At the factory she hung her coat and took her place at the line. Machine oil and hot metal thickened the air. Hana bolted plates onto bucket frames bound for the mines.
“Morning,” said Elmer.
“Morning.”
The whistle blew and the line started. Hana picked up her socket wrench and felt her body fall into rhythm. Bolt, turn, tighten. Move. The noise drowned out thinking.
An hour in, Elmer misaligned a plate. Hana straightened it, showed him the corner trick.
“Thanks,” he said, flushing.
“Watch the edges.”
Wozniak smirked from across the line. “Mother Hana.”
She didn’t look up.
At the ten o’clock break, she went to the washroom and looked at herself in the cracked mirror. Broad face, thick shoulders, the kind of build Babka used to call dobré na prácu. Here, covered in dust and sweat, she felt like herself.
In Pittsburgh she’d worn a clean apron and kept her eyes lowered while a woman corrected the way she folded napkins. Silver polished until Hana could see her face in it, warped and dim.
Near the end of break, two women from the smaller press line came in, talking low.
“—moved Lena off the floor,” one said as Hana stepped in. “She ain’t coming back.”
Hana kept her eyes on the mirror.
At noon, Peter showed up outside the fence. He worked at Benedetti’s barbershop when Mr. Benedetti felt like paying him. In his jacket he kept matchbooks with painted girls—dancers and actresses in beaded dresses and pearls.
“You mad at me?” he said.
“Should I be?”
“’Bout this morning. I said we got to marry.”
“You said it like you were ordering lunch.”
Behind her, workers ate from their pails, voices carrying across the yard.
“You want flowers with it next time?”
“I want you to stop taking my money.”
“I needed cigarettes.”
“Cigarettes and a round at Mancini’s. And whatever you put on the Pirates.”
“They were playing the Cubs. I’ll pay you back.”
“When?”
“When I get paid.” He held up a matchbook through the chain-link—a girl in a beaded dress leaning against a piano. “Look at this one,” he said. “Pretty, ain’t she?”
“She’s a picture, Peter.”
“I know that. But she looks happy, don’t she? Like she don’t got to worry about nothing.”
“Must be nice.”
“Netráp sa. We’ll figure it out.”
Hana looked past him toward the factory windows. “That’s easy to say.”
He reached through the fence and touched her hand. “I ain’t going nowhere.”
She looked at his fingers against hers, then pulled away.
“That’s what worries me.”
His grin faltered. He turned the matchbook over once, twice, then pushed it through the fence toward her and walked away.
The afternoon shift was long and hot. Around three, the pneumatic hammer that riveted bucket handles started acting up—losing pressure, making weak hits that didn’t seat the rivets. The line slowed while they waited for maintenance.
“Goddamn thing,” muttered Dabrowski.
“Might be the fitting’s loose,” Hana said.
“You think so?”
She climbed onto the platform and checked the connection where the air line met the hammer. Hand-tight, not wrench-tight. She borrowed a pipe wrench from Elmer and gave it a quarter turn.
“Try it now.”
Dabrowski hit the trigger and the hammer drove a rivet home with a clean thunk. The line lurched forward.
After her shift, she walked back to Mrs. Kowalski’s boarding house, past coal smoke and fried onions.
She counted her money. Maybe twelve dollars a month saved, if careful.
She took out the matchbook Peter had given her and struck a match.
The girl’s face curled and blackened. Hana watched the flame eat through the cardboard, the beaded dress, the piano. The fire crept toward her fingers. She held it until the heat bit her skin, then dropped it in the sink and let it burn out.
She ran cold water over her hand. Downstairs, Mrs. Kowalski was calling the girls to supper.
She pressed her palm flat against her stomach. She knew it was there the way she knew a bolt was about to strip.
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LARA JORDAN is a writer based in Arlington, Virginia. Her fiction has appeared in Superlative Literary Journal and is forthcoming in After Dinner Conversations. She is currently at work on The Arithmetic of Mercy, a linked short story collection set in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region. She lives with her husband and four children.
