“Just be safe,” Deacon said.
“Will do,” I said. “Bye, Eloise.”
I headed out, driving straight from the hospital to the office. Deacon was going to be out of work for a little bit while he spent time with his new baby—as he should. I just needed to pick up the slack a little. If nothing else, this was why I’d hired Wendy. I knew the slack was coming.
As soon as I got in the doublewide, I opened the fridge and grabbed the carton of eggs and bacon I kept in there for mornings like this one. Sometimes, I would roll out of bed just in time to get to work, and while we were going over the day’s jobs and what I needed to do, I would make breakfast. Rebecca had even taken to coming into the office with Deacon and eating with me on the regular since she started showing, and now it was part of my regular routines.
I fried up the bacon, then scrambled the eggs in the fat with some peppers and cheese and onions. When the door opened and Wendy came in, the pot of coffee was also done, and I greeted her with a smile. She waved and cocked her head to the side.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Where is everybody?”
“Well, Deacon and Rebecca had their baby last night,” I said. “Lauren had asked for today off anyway to take care of some stuff, and Carter is heading straight to one of the job sites that’s just getting off the ground today. So, you and I are going to have a hell of a day catching up with things around here and at the local site. Did you get breakfast?”
“Actually, I didn’t. I was running late this morning and thought I might just take a big lunch and go to Dina’s.”
“You like eggs scrambled in bacon fat?” I asked.
“I don’t frankly know if there are prettier words in the English language than that,” she said and laughed.
“Then dig in,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”
I put away a pot of coffee all on my own. I was drinking it like it was the only thing keeping my heart beating, and it damn well might have been. It had been years since I had been in uniform and doing thirty-six or forty-eights, and I had gotten quite well used to getting eight hours of shut eye on the regular.
Thankfully, Wendy was a damn fine trooper. She stepped right up to the plate and kept up with me at the office, learning on the fly how to handle administrative stuff, and also when we went down to the local job site. It was a mountainous area that we owned, but we tried not to mill too often from it. It was essentially our reserves, our backup against downtimes when we couldn’t lease or contract land from someone else.
An experienced crew was down there, but they were down two men. Those two were supposed to be replaced by Wendy and me, but we had been trapped in the office all morning, handling the things Deacon would normally have been doing. Now, we were out in the field, and I was hoping the coffee would sustain me as I tried to power through the day.
It did a pretty good job of keeping me moving, and Wendy was right there to make sure I got water in me too. On more than one occasion, she saw me slowing down and shoved a cold bottle in my face and told me to drink. There was something to the commanding tone of a mother, no matter how new, that got right down into your spine. When she told me to drink, I drank, and damn if she wasn’t right.
Wendy might have been small, but she was capable, and whatever doubts the boys on the crew had about her were gone by the time we were finishing up for the afternoon. Between the eight of us on site, we caught up on what was supposed to have been done for the day, which was a miracle considering how late we got there that morning.
Carter called twice, once early on, right as we got to the site, and then again as I was hopping in my truck to drive back to the office. I could have walked down there, but it was a mile of uneven surface, and frankly, I enjoyed the off-roading adventure of it. Wendy and two of the other fellas on crew had hopped in the bed of the truck to catch a ride back with me.
“I tell you, Carter, she was fantastic,” I said. “You can talk to Dwayne or Pedro. They will tell you. We got down there late, and with Wendy busting her ass, we caught up.”
“Well, I have to say I’m impressed,” Carter said, and I relished what was as close to admitting he was wrong as I would get out of him. “Good job, bud.”