A New Chord

Sonny Clarkson spent most of his first week at Hartwell's Hardware learning where things lived. The store had been in the same family for forty years and nothing was where a sane person would put it. Bolts were in aisle six. So were the shower curtains. He got lost twice going to the bathroom and once ended up in the paint aisle with a clipboard he'd picked up from somewhere and forgotten he was holding.

He was thirty-five and this was his second career, sort of. The first one had been selling equipment leases to small businesses, which sounded better at parties than it felt at two in the afternoon. That job had ended the same year his marriage did, two years back now, and he'd spent a while after that living in his brother's spare room and applying to things online at one in the morning.

The hardware store was quieter than he expected. The owner, a man named Gil Hartwell who was somewhere north of seventy and refused to admit it, mostly wanted people to show up on time and not scare the regulars. Sonny could do both.

The other thing about the store was Doreen Snow. She ran the office in the back, which meant she ran the money, which meant she was the person Gil actually listened to. She was thirty-three, had been there eight years, and she had a way of talking to customers that Sonny kept noticing. An old farmer came in Wednesday with a broken part wrapped in a grocery bag and no idea what it was called, and Doreen just asked him questions until the part told on itself. No hurry, no showing off.

On Thursday they closed together for the first time. She counted the register while he swept, and around eight she said, "There's coffee still in the pot if you want it. Fair warning, it's been sitting since four."

"I've had worse coffee," Sonny said, which was true. His ex-wife had gone through a phase where she bought beans from a place in the city that cost more than his first car payment.

"It'll be bad, though," she said, pouring two cups anyway. "This isn't a trick."

They stood by the back counter and drank it. It was bad. It was also the first cup of coffee he'd had with a coworker in months that didn't feel like a meeting.

"You get the aisles sorted out yet?" she asked.

"Kind of. I know where the bolts are now."

"And the shower curtains."

"And the shower curtains," he agreed. "Whoever decided that one must have had a reason."

"There was a flood in the old stockroom in 2009," she said. "Everything got moved around and never fully put back. Gil says someday. He's been saying someday for eight years."

He laughed, and she smiled into her cup, and it was a good conversation, and neither of them needed it to be anything else.

The second week, on Tuesday, she caught him at five with a proposition.

"I'm staying late to redo the back stockroom," she said. "It's a two-person job and nobody else wants to do it. You'd be doing actual work, I'm not trying to get free labor out of you, but I'll order pizza."

"I can't argue with pizza."

"It's from Deena's. It's not great pizza."

"It's the best offer I've had all week," Sonny said, and it was mostly a joke and mostly wasn't.

They worked until nine. The stockroom was a mess of mislabeled boxes and a shelf unit that had been leaning against the wall since before the flood, and Doreen turned out to be organized in a way that was almost violent. She had him pull everything off the top shelves and sort it into piles while she built a new system on a legal pad. Around seven she called the pizza in herself and they ate on overturned buckets in the loading area with the door open to the August air.

"So how'd you end up here?" she asked him, folding a slice in half the way people do when they're not messing around. "You don't strike me as hardware."

"Leasing company folded. I was in sales there for nine years." He took a bite. "I figured I'd sell something I could actually hold."

"That's a pretty good reason."

"What about you? Eight years in a hardware office, that's a choice."

"My mom needed somebody to watch my dad's books when his eyes went bad, and it turned into a real job, and then I stopped leaving." She shrugged. "Small towns, you know. You don't move so much as you settle."

He knew. He'd grown up forty minutes east of here and never managed to get further than college, and even that was only two years.

By the time they finished, the stockroom looked like a store again, and Gil was going to be confused and pleased in equal amounts.

The next Thursday they closed together again, and this time the price gun was the thing. Sonny had been re-tagging a shipment of paint rollers and the gun jammed, and he carried it back to the office and she leaned over the counter to look at it.

"Here, you have to hold the trigger down while you pull it back," she said, and reached to show him, and her hand landed on his over the grip. She didn't pull away right away and neither did he. It was maybe four seconds, which is nothing, and both of them were aware of all four seconds.

"Sorry," she said, stepping back.

"No, that's, I mean you were showing me the thing." He was aware he sounded like he was describing a car accident.

"Right. The trigger." She tapped the counter twice, a small nervous habit he'd noticed before. "Okay. Well. It works now?"

"It works now!"

He went back to the rollers and she went back to the invoices, and for the next twenty minutes the only sounds in the store were the price gun and the receipt printer, and Sonny thought about that hand contact more than he thought about paint rollers.

The third Thursday was the one where things got said out loud. They'd fallen into a pattern by then, closing together once or twice a week, coffee afterward, sometimes pizza if the stockroom had won or lost in a way worth discussing. That night they were sitting on the loading dock with the door propped, and it was cooler out, almost fall, and Doreen had her shoes off and was eating gas station peanuts out of the little bag.

"I like this," she said, after a while. "The closing shifts. I know I assigned myself to them, which is cheating, but I like them."

"I like them too."

"No, I mean!" She looked out at the parking lot. "I like that it's you. I signed up for Thursdays on purpose. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying it badly, but I'm saying it."

Sonny set his coffee cup down on the concrete. There was a way this conversation could go badly and he wanted to be careful with it, because he liked her, had liked her for a while now, and because there was a whole thing he hadn't told her yet.

"I should tell you something," he said. "I was married for ten years. Divorced two years ago."

"Okay."

"It's not a secret or anything, it's just, I haven't done this in a long time. This. Whatever this is. Sitting on a dock with somebody." He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the cup. "I'm kind of out of practice at the whole thing. And I don't want to rush into anything and mess it up, because I did that before. Not with her, exactly, but I know what it looks like when you grab at something because it's there."

Doreen was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Can I tell you what I hear?"

"Sure."

"I hear you like being here and you're scared of it. Which, same, by the way. I dated some in my twenties and it was all sort of exhausting, and then I stopped, and now there's a guy who sweeps the floor and knows where the bolts are and I signed up for Thursdays on purpose." She folded the empty peanut bag into a neat square. "So maybe we don't rush. Maybe we just keep doing this and see where it goes. I'm not going anywhere. I've worked here eight years, I'm famously not going anywhere."

That got a laugh out of him, which was probably part of her plan.

"For the record," she added, "I didn't ask you to tell me about the divorce so I could check a box. I asked because you looked like you were carrying something around and I figured you might want to set it down."

"It's set down," he said, and it mostly was.

They sat there a while longer. A truck went by on the county road and its headlights swept across the loading area and were gone. She put her shoes back on around ten and he walked her to her car, an old Buick with a CD still in the player, and she drove off and he stood in the parking lot a minute longer than he needed to.

The next Thursday, when they closed, Doreen locked the front doors and then turned around and looked at him like she was deciding something.

"So my place is ten minutes from here," she said. "I have actual good coffee. The kind you pay too much for. And I have a couch that doesn't come from a loading dock." She said it evenly, no hurry in it. "No pressure. I just figured I'd say it out loud instead of doing the thing where we both pretend the coffee at work is the point."

Sonny thought about the last month, about the stockroom and the price gun and the dock, and about how careful they'd both been, and how the carefulness had started to feel less like caution and more like stalling.

"Yeah," he said. "I'd like that."

"Okay," she said, and smiled, and it was the same smile from the first bad coffee, except now it was aimed at him with nothing in the way.

The kiss happened before the couch did, which neither of them planned. They were still in the store that night, Doreen doing a last walk-through, and Sonny was restocking paint cans in aisle two when she came around the corner and just stopped there in front of him.

"So I've been thinking about the drive," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Ten minutes is a long time to sit in a car with somebody and not have said anything yet." She had her keys in her hand, turning them over. "So maybe we say something here, where the lighting is bad and it doesn't count as much."

"That's not how it works," Sonny said. "It counts more here. This is where the bolts are."

"Are you arguing with me or kissing me?"

"I'm getting there." He set the can he was holding back on the shelf. "Can I kiss you?"

"Yeah," she said, and her voice did something on the second syllable, went a little rough, "yeah, I'd like that."

It was slow, mostly because he was out of practice and partly because the shelf of paint cans was right there at his back and he didn't want to knock a gallon of eggshell onto the floor in the middle of it. Her mouth was warm and she tasted like the coffee from the office, the bad kind, and one of her hands came up and held the front of his shirt, not pulling, just holding. They stayed like that for a while. The fluorescent hum of the store filled the room up around them.

"Okay," she said when they broke apart. Her hand was still on his shirt. "That was worth waiting for."

"It really was."