Stacy had been working at the shop for three years, but sometimes it seemed she'd always been there. It was career number three, but she liked machining. Even more, she liked being one of the guys. It was the best of therapy to cut up and carry on, call each other every name in the book, and have it all be in good fun.
Even so, the moment she left the parking lot at the end of the day, she was a woman—not a dainty or flowery one, but a woman. She came home, took a shower and styled her hair and put earrings on, made herself look her best. For no one. Donny was gone, irretrievably gone, the gone you didn't come back from. In four years she had picked herself up and learned to go on, but she still didn't feel like she was really living again. Something was waiting, something was hanging in the balance, something wasn't full. She was waiting, wondering whether that something—that someone—would come her way.
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Machinists need cardboard. They need it all the time, to put between layers of finished parts to be shipped out. Stacy knew all the oddball corners of the shop where people left cardboard, and she knew where to squirrel it away so it would be there when her department needed it. But even so, there never seemed to be enough.
Which was why she cast a jealous eye across the alley, at the dock of the propellor shop, where they would toss big sheets of cardboard into the dumpster and she would wish she worked third shift just so she could filch it under cover of darkness. She was really almost covetous of their cardboard, and finally one day when she couldn't find any in the shop, she asked her boss if she could go over and score some from the propellor guys.
That was how she came to know Darren. He was a cute, skinny kid with a pleasant smile, and he was their dumpster guardian. The next time she saw him tossing some boxes into the dumpster, she hustled over and explained the situation. Darren was more than happy to have her take the cardboard off his hands, so soon she was a regular visitor.
Darren was the only one there she knew by name, but she recognized the other guys and always exchanged a hello with them. Except for the big guy. She only saw him occasionally, and half the time he seemed to almost run off when she came to the dock. He was tall and huge, with a bunch of auburn hair and a big moustache, and she couldn't tell if he didn't like her, if he was a biker and thought she was a dork, or what. That made her curious, but somehow she couldn't get up the nerve to ask Darren what the deal was. Her guys would've never let her hear the end of it had they known, so no one knew. Only at odd moments, after she'd cleaned up her dinner and was sitting watching TV, did she wonder who the big guy was and what was up with him.
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Finally she just had to know, so she had to make a plan. When she went to the dock, she asked for a lot more cardboard than usual, then told Darren she'd make two trips to get it over to the shop. Then, in a totally non-casual way, she asked who was the big dude with the moustache.
"Oh," Darren said, "that's Thor."
"That's his real name?"
"Dunno. That's what everyone calls him."
"Is he a biker?"
Darren laughed. "No way," he said. "He drives that red clunker."
She'd seen it. The clunker that had once been red, that now was a mass of peeling clearcoat and cancer of the left front fender.
"Is he nice?"
Even a young kid like Darren got what was going on. "Hey, Thor!" he shouted into the shop.
"Yeah," answered the deepest, grainiest voice she'd ever heard.
"Hey, can you help Stacy get this cardboard across the street?"
A pause, then, "Yeah."
She waited and he came slowly onto the dock, wiping his hands on his pants. "Scott okay with me going over there?" he said to Darren.
"Yeah. Just don't take all day," Darren said kiddingly.
"Hi," Stacy said. "Hi," Thor muttered back, looking at the ground. Then he hefted the cardboard up, carrying about three times what she ever could. He didn't say a thing as they walked across to the machine shop, until they were up the ramp and at the dock. Then all he asked was, "Where do you want it?"
"Uh," she said, quickly problem-solving. If she had him take it inside, she would get teased mercilessly for the rest of her life. And he would probably arrange it so he never, ever had to help her again.
"Why don't you leave it here," she said, "and I'll just make a couple of trips and bring it inside."
"Okay," he said, and kept his blue eyes from meeting hers. They were a beautiful blue, a color between sky and robin's egg, almost a shock in his broad-featured face. It did nothing to slake her curiosity.
Darren was up to the task, and somehow managed to put Thor in charge of cardboard transportation. Even when Stacy could have easily carried it herself, Darren made sure she needed the help.
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Thor wished Darren had never even seen a sheet of cardboard. He didn't know what to do around girls, and girls never seemed to know what to do around him. If they thought anything, he basically knew what it was: Why are you so tall, and is your cock as big as the rest of you.
Stacy was funny, always joking around, but he felt dumb if he laughed, because his laugh was weird. He couldn't burst into laughter like most people did. His voice was too deep, so all that came out was a single grunt that usually stopped everyone cold. The guys at the shop knew him so they weren't bothered by it, but the most he usually let himself do was smile. Having a moustache helped. It hid his mouth and made people think he was tough and that was why he didn't laugh.
One day she got to him, though. She told him how the machine shop guys were joking during lunch, and someone had said someone else was hung like a light switch, and she had said, "Well, even a light switch can get turned on." And Thor had laughed, and Stacy had smiled, and he kind of smiled back although she probably couldn't tell. He went home that night and looked at himself in the mirror, then turned away, thinking there was no way in the world a pretty, funny girl like her was going to go for a big hulking dude like him.
Still, there was the cardboard. The cardboard made her talk to him and smile at him and be nice to him. But sometimes he even hated that, because it made it all the more dead when he went home. A lot of nights he'd stay up as late as he could, some nights he'd sleep on the couch even though it killed his back, some nights he'd go out on the porch of his apartment and stare up at the sky and chain-smoke, just so he didn't have to be in bed. He was a big guy, so he had a big bed, and a big bed with no one in it was the emptiest thing in the world. Sometimes he would lie diagonally across the bed and spread his arms out, trying to fill it. It never worked, and sometimes his skin actually ached just to feel someone near him.
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Darren finally talked it over with his boss. That settled, he started working on Thor about it.
