Page 57 of Puck You Both

"I don't grin."

"You're doing it right now."

I locate my face.

He's right.

Chapter 11

PATRICK

THE HAMMER I'M holding has never hit a nail.

I know this because I've been holding it for forty minutes, and every time I move toward an actual task, a woman in a headset repositions me in front of a different semi torn-down wall.

"Great," she says, walking backward with her hands framed like a director. "Now hand it to Wallace. Slower. Like it means something."

Across the stud wall, Wall accepts my hammer like it means something. We have now exchanged the same hammer eleven times, and neither of us has been permitted to use it.

"Is anyone going to actually build anything?" I ask a few minutes later.

The PR lead lowers her hands and glances around, then lowers her voice and gives me honesty. "The contractors start on Thursday. They're licensed and insured and none of them are famous. You lot swinging hammers raises more money than the hammers will ever earn back in labor." She taps her clipboard. "Half construction site, half a television studio. You're mostly in the studio half."

I can respect that. I adjust my grip on the prop hammer and once again hand it to Wall like it means something.

His fingers brush mine on the handle, his face giving the camera nothing while he does it.

The Milwaukee shelter is a gutted warehouse two blocks off the river, currently containing both full rosters, a content crew, a forest of kennel parts and two grandmothers. The Wolves arrived this morning like they were annexing the building. Within an hour they'd colonized the far wall, demolished another, established a paint operation, and built a snack table that Snooze is asleep under. Nobody seems alarmed. I'm coming to understand that on that team, chaos is an extra player.

My team is quieter about its misconduct. The rookies are painting a mural of a dog that's developing some anatomical problems, and Dziedzic brought his label maker. To a construction site. Slash studio. He's already labeled three bins, a ladder, and the audio technician's coffee.

The grandmothers concern me most.

Mama Paws arrived with the Chicago caravan, wearing a hard hat with paw print stickers on it. The Milwaukee shelter's matriarch, a short-haired woman named Wanda who everyone under sixty is required to call Nana, met her at the door. They looked at each other for five full seconds, the way captains do at center ice.

Then they merged.

By ten a.m. they share one clipboard and finish each other's sentences. By eleven they've reorganized the campaign's shot list by deploying players according to a cuteness algorithm only they understand. I personally watched Wanda evaluate Lindqvist, say "too calm, people will think the dogs are boring," and reassign him to lifting things in the background. Groover got promoted to puppy duty on the grounds that he, and I quote, photographs sad.

Somewhere behind me, a familiar voice announces itself to the room. "Today my word is liability."

Petrov stands beside the ladder wearing a purple hard hat, holding his phone up like a proclamation. "A person or thing that causes you problem. Example sentence." He looks around, selects Becker. "You."

"Correct usage," Wall says from the top of a ladder, without turning around.

Petrov pockets the phone and picks up a coil of roofing felt. "Now I go up."

Three Wolves materialize around him like a special-teams unit. Groover takes the roofing felt. Ace takes the staple gun Petrov had somehow acquired. Hammer just stands in front of the ladder with his arms crossed.

"It happened before," Jinx says to me, and walks away.

I decide not to probe, for my own sanity.

Twenty minutes later, Dziedzic drifts past Petrov and applies a label to his hard hat without breaking stride. The label says LIABILITY. Petrov wears it for the rest of the day with visible pride.

***

THE AUDIO TECH flags me down before lunch, holding up his tablet. "Your pack died an hour ago. Battery. I'll swap it when we break."