Belonging to the Shop

Maya held the TIG torch three inches above a steel joint, but her right hand would not stay still. The blue arc flickered wild against the tubing. She lifted her boot off the foot pedal, flipped her welding mask up, and set the torch down on the brick table.

A girl named Chloe stood on the other side of the rig, her safety glasses pushed up into her dark hair, a pair of leather gloves sticking out of her rear jeans pocket.

“Your turn,” Maya said. She pulled off her work gloves. Her knuckles were swollen, crooked from decades on concrete floors and stuck ratchets.

“You’re not finishing the frame?” Chloe asked.

“A builder knows when her hands aren’t part of the tool anymore,” Maya said. “Take the torch. Keep the tungsten tip clean.”

Maya walked across the shop floor to the rolling red chest. She pulled her old nine-millimeter wrench out of her back pocket. The chrome was worn down to dull steel where her thumb had rested for sixty years. She dropped it into the open top drawer beside forty other hand tools.

“Leave it there,” Maya told a teenager who reached for it. “That one belongs to the shop now.”