A Mile High Over the Tarmac

The accordion case banged against my knee the whole walk from the car park. It was Tricia's accordion, not mine, and she had made me promise twice not to drop it. I had promised. I was forty-four years old and I had promised a woman with purple hair that I would not drop her instrument, and here I was tripping over a guy-wire on the edge of a launch field with all the grace of a newborn deer.

The pavilion sat at the far end of the grass, all glass and timber, with strings of fat bulbs strung along the eaves. It was the third Saturday of the month, which I had learned from the flyer taped to the window of my half-finished taproom meant talent night. I had signed my name on a clipboard five weeks ago, right after I moved, when the town was still a word I mispronounced. I had signed it back when signing up for things felt like something I used to do.

Dom was in the third row.

I want to be careful how I say that, because I did not know it was Dom at first. I knew it was a broad-shouldered man in a green shirt, laughing at something the woman beside him said, and then he turned his head and thirteen years folded up like a map. Dom Erickson. We had been together for one year when I was thirty-one and he was thirty-three. He moved to Leeds for a job and I stayed, and we had parted the way you part from a good meal, grateful and a little sad.

He had no reason to know me on sight anymore. But he raised one hand anyway, that slow half-wave of his, and my stomach did something unhelpful.

"Right," I told the accordion case. "Don't drop her."

The host, a wiry man with a kazoo on a lanyard, called my name with the wrong emphasis. Isla, I had learned, got said Is-la here, and I had stopped correcting people around week two. I walked up with Tricia's accordion and a reel I had played at my husband's wake, because that seemed like the kind of thing a fresh start should carry with it. You do not get to choose which ghosts ride along.

I will not pretend the set was good. It was honest, which is a lower bar, and sometimes a better one. I played a reel my mother taught me and then a slow air I wrote the winter after Bret died, and about forty people in folding chairs let me have both of them without a single phone coming out. When I finished, the applause was warm and slightly longer than politeness requires, and I looked up from the bellows and Dom was standing. Just him, just for a moment, clapping with his whole chest. Then he sat down like someone who had not meant to make a scene.

Afterward I hid by the tea urn like a professional. I got a cup of tea I did not want. I rearranged the same biscuit on the same plate three times. It did not work. He found me anyway, the way he always did, drifting over with his hands in his pockets and that look of his that gave you room to run.

"Isla Dempsey," he said.

"Dom Erickson." I set down the tea. "You look, well. Older. Sorry. That came out wrong."

"Forty-six comes out however it likes." He smiled, and the smile had a little more silver in it than I remembered, and I had to look at the urn for a second. "God, that was lovely. The slow one. Was that yours?"

"Mine, yes!" I did not say written for my dead husband. Some things you ration. "Thirteen years, Dom. You could have written."

"I could have. I moved for a job and told myself I'd stay in touch, and then I moved again, and then I was just a person who used to know you." He shrugged, and it was an honest shrug, not a charming one. "I'm sorry for it."

"You were thirty-something and stupid. So was I. It balances." I punched his arm, which was still firm, which annoyed me. "How did you even know it was me? I've lived here five weeks."

"The accordion. You had that same way of hunching over it like it was a campfire." He said it plainly, no weight on it, and it still went straight through me. "Are you here long? I'm here with friends, they've got a food truck, they feed everyone after. You should come."

I said I would think about it, which is what I said, and then I stood there as a woman whose knees had voted independently.

The food truck was parked behind the pavilion, chrome and cheerful, with a hand-painted sign reading DRISCOLL AND ARNOLD, FEEDING HAPPY PEOPLE. A woman with sun-stained cheeks and a pilot's jacket was coiling cable by the wheel, and a tall man with flour to the elbows was handing out plates of something that smelled like honey and rosemary.

"Bridget, Lawrence, this is Isla," Dom said. "She's the reason I stopped talking mid-sentence during the kazoo act, which I expect an apology for later."

"I heard nothing, I saw nothing," said the woman, wiping her hand before offering it. "Bridget. I fly the balloons. Dom's from my coding group, which is how I ended up responsible for him socially."

"Lawrence," said the tall man, "and you're staying for supper whether you like it or not, because there's a leek tart going spare and I'll be offended otherwise."

I laughed before I could stop myself. There was something easy about them, a married-couple rhythm, her finishing his sentences by simply knowing them. Bridget had been flying since she was twenty-six, I learned, and she and Lawrence had been hosting small private gatherings after talent night for about two years now. I learned this while eating the tart, which deserved every compliment I gave it.

"What kind of gatherings?" I asked, because I am from Yorkshire and we ask.

"The kind where everyone's kind and nobody's pushed," Bridget said, easy as that. "Grown people, all of us over thirty-eight and counting, who like a slow evening and clear yeses. You'd be welcome. So would Dom. Or not. The tart works either way."

I looked at Dom. Dom looked at me. Thirteen years of nothing, and still we could hold a whole conversation with our eyebrows.

"I should say," I began, and my voice did something wobbly, "I haven't. Since Bret. Two years, and before that a long marriage, and I'm rusty at everything past small talk."

"Then come for the tart and the company," Lawrence said, "and let the rest of the evening mind its own business."

So I stayed. I helped stack chairs, which is my love language, and the crowd thinned until it was our little circle and a couple of balloon crew arguing about wind forecasts. The field went gold and then purple, and the balloons on their trailers looked like sleeping animals.

It was Dom, later, by the fence, who said the thing that changed the shape of my night.

"Here's a thought, and you can refuse it." He turned his cup slowly. "What if, for tonight, we weren't us? What if you were a woman I met at a talent show, and I was a man who thought she played beautifully, and we got to know each other the way strangers do. No history. No debt owed to the people we were."

"Strangers," I repeated.

"Strangers. It's only a game. It lets us start somewhere with no ghosts in it." He looked almost shy about it, which at forty-six is a rare sight. "If it feels silly, we drop it."

It did not feel silly. It felt like a door I had not known was there. A woman named Isla could flirt without an apology to a memory in her pocket. A man named Dom could ask questions he would never dare ask the woman who once knew how he took his coffee.

"I'm Isla," I said, holding out my hand. "I play the accordion badly and I'm new in town."

He took my hand and shook it, formally, eyes bright. "Dom. I do something with data nobody understands. I noticed you hunch over your instrument like it's a campfire."

"You've said that before," I said, and we both broke, laughing into the dark over the field, and behind us Bridget called out that the pavilion lights were on and nobody had to drive anywhere, and I felt something in my chest turn over and start, cautiously, to run.

The pavilion at the far end of the grass was all glass and timber, and with the lanterns lit it glowed like a paper lamp dropped on a dark field. Bridget went behind a timber counter and started pouring from bottles she called local, and Lawrence walked the room lighting lanterns with a long match, and I stood in the doorway feeling like I'd been let into somewhere I wasn't finished earning.

"Sit," Bridget said, pushing a glass into my hand. "This one's from a brewery two villages over.