A Razor's Edge

I found the peletine at the bottom of the second storage container, under a folded spinnaker that smelled like the inside of somebody's attic, and I swear my hands started shaking before I even got the tissue paper all the way off it. Black chantilly lace, the real stuff, the kind we used to run on the old Leavers frames back at the plant, and I sat down on an upturned dinghy hull right there on the gravel slipway and held it up to the light coming off the Shigar River and thought, well, here it is after twenty-five years, still perfect, still finer than anything either of us ever managed to say out loud.

So I did what any sensible sixty-two-year-old woman would do. I got my phone out and texted Colby.

*Found it. Black chantilly, whole peletine of it, been sitting in this container since before either of us had grey hair. Contest's the day after tomorrow and you'll choke without practice, so come down to the slipway and see it before the tie-breaker round. Dare you.*

I knew the dare would work, because dares always worked on Colby, back when he was thirty and I was thirty-seven and we ran the packing line together at the textile plant, and now that he's fifty-five and still scared of his own shadow I figured the odds were even better. I shoved the phone in my coat pocket and went back to stacking the winter gear, sail bags and coiled halyards and the cardboard boxes the supply boat left Tuesday, and I gave it about six minutes before the thing buzzed against my hip.

*How is there chantilly lace in a boat storage shed. Also I'm nervous about the contest. I keep typing the sample text and my accuracy drops every pass. 97, then 95, then 93. I'm going backwards.*

I laughed out loud, right there on the slipway, loud enough that a heron went up off the shallows, because that man had been nervous about every single thing I'd ever watched him do, and he still placed second in the regional qualifying round anyway. I typed back with my gloves off and my fingers going numb.

*You're distracted, that's your whole problem. Stop thinking about the score and think about the text. And bring your honing stone when you come, the little one, not the big bench stone. Trust me.*

*Why do I need a honing stone to look at lace?*

*Because I said so. Tomorrow morning, early, before the light gets flat. If you're late I'll enter the tie-breaker myself and beat you at your own game.*

He sent back a thumbs up, which is the coward's reply, and then a minute later he sent, *ok. Early. I'll be there,* and I put the phone away and finished the gear stack and thought about how some things never change no matter how much hair goes grey.

* * *

That night I sat in my room at the staff quarters with the peletine spread across my knees and the kerosene lamp turned low, and I wrote in the diary I keep the way some people keep dogs, badly but faithfully. This is what I wrote, more or less word for word, because I remember it plain.

*Unpacked the lace tonight. Twenty-five years I've kept this thing and I could never tell you why, except that it was the last good run we did together before the plant shut the Leavers line down. Colby packed it himself, I remember that, wrapped every sheet in tissue like it was a baby. He was thirty that year and I was thirty-seven and he used to watch me across the floor the whole shift, never said much, never touched, just watched, and I'd catch him at it and he'd go red to the ears and turn back to his machine like a man caught stealing. I liked it more than I ever admitted. I liked that he looked and never once presumed. Twenty-five years is a long time to keep a piece of lace and a longer time to keep a maybe, and tomorrow I mean to stop keeping the maybe.*

I put the diary away and held the lace up against the lamplight one more time. Every thread in it was a decision somebody made slow and exact, and that was always the thing I liked about Colby too, that he was slow and exact, in a world full of men who did everything fast and wrong.

* * *

The next morning I got an email instead of a text, which told me everything, because Colby only sends emails when he's been thinking about a thing all night and wants to say it in full sentences. My phone chirped at half past six and there it was, four paragraphs long, from a man sitting three hundred meters away in his bunk.

*Jodie, I've been turning this over since your text and I might as well say it plain, I've never actually set a razor on lace before. I hone straight razors, you know that, it's my trade and my hobby and I've put an edge on glass and paper and hanging hair, but chantilly is different, it's levers and points and a whole grammar I don't know. You were on the Leavers floor, I was in finishing, we were in the same building for six years and I never asked you a single question about it because I was a coward at thirty and apparently I'm still one at fifty-five. So I'm asking now. If you know how it's done, would you demonstrate? I'll bring the honing stone. And the text, I mean the tie-breaker text, if you want me to bring that too, tell me and I'll bring it.*

I read it twice, standing in the cold with my tea going lukewarm in my hand, and I thought, oh you dear foolish man, you have no idea what you just asked me for, and I typed my answer slow so I wouldn't rush it.

*Yes I'll demonstrate. But not the way you're thinking, so stop rehearsing whatever speech you've got planned. Put the typing practice down, you've ground enough passes out of that sample to sink a boat, and come to the slipway this morning. Bring the exact text from the tie-breaker, the whole printed sheet, not from memory and not a copy, because half the lesson is reading the thing in your own hands. And the honing stone. If you do everything I say I'll show you how a razor sits on chantilly, and maybe a few other things you were too shy to ask about back at the plant, though one thing at a time, Colby, you're fifty-five now, we take these things slow.*

I hit send before I could edit it down to something safer, because I have spent sixty-two years editing