A Two-by-Four and a Prayer

I work at a lumber yard off Route 9. I drive a forklift. I'm twenty-two, and before last month the most interesting thing that happened to me was a guy from shipping who hooked up with me once at his cousin's wedding and then acted like we'd never met. His name was Mario. I don't think about him much.

So when the church order came in, I didn't think anything of it. St. Anne's, over the highway bridge, ten minutes east. Renovation on the parish hall. Two-by-fours, plywood, a stack of cedar planks for some wainscoting project. My boss loaded me up and I drove it over on a Thursday afternoon.

That's how I ended up there at seven that night, because the cedar was wrong. Wrong grade, wrong width, whatever. I had to come back and swap it out, and the only slot I had was after my shift, and the only person still at the church was the secretary.

His name was Philippe. He told me that twice, like he expected me to get it wrong. "Philippe. Two L's if you spell it, actually no, one L. It doesn't matter." He was thirty, maybe older looking, glasses, cardigan in June like a weirdo. He smelled like burned coffee. The office behind him smelled like old carpet and burned coffee too. I noticed that because it was so different from my truck, which smells like sawdust and diesel and me.

The problem was the choir was rehearsing in the hall where my cedar planks were supposed to go. Thirty people singing. So we waited. He made me coffee that tasted like it had been burned on purpose and then burned again. We sat in his office and didn't talk much, and then the singing stopped and I went to move the planks, and that should have been the end of it.

Except I didn't want it to be the end of it. I don't know how to explain that without sounding pathetic. My life is flat. It's safe and flat and I drive the same route every day and go home and microwave things. Standing in that hallway with the hymns still hanging in the air, I felt something I hadn't felt in a while, which was basically anything.

So I did something dumb. There was a stack of hymn books on a cart by the door. I tore the corner off a page of my delivery slip, wrote my number on it, folded it around a scrap of two-by-four I had in my pocket because of course I had a scrap of two-by-four in my pocket, and I slid it into one of the hymn books. Not a random one. One near the front, where somebody organized would find it.

Then I drove home and felt stupid about it for four hours.

***

He texted the next morning at 8:04. I was loading my first run.

you left this on purpose.

Just that. No name. I stood in the yard with my phone in my glove and grinned like an idiot.

yes, I texted back.

Then nothing. For six hours nothing. I checked my phone at lunch like a lunatic. Then at 2:30, a voicemail. I'd never gotten a voicemail that mattered before. Usually it's my dentist.

"Lynda. It's Philippe. From the church. Obviously. You know that." A pause. "I found your note in hymnal forty-three, which is the one the soprano section uses, so I assume you have some kind of system. I'm not going to ask why a hymnal and not, say, my desk, because I think I understand. It felt less like asking. Anyway. I'm at work. I shouldn't be leaving this. Goodbye." Then, three seconds later, "Also, thank you."

I listened to it twice in the bathroom.

I left him one that night after my shift. I don't know what came over me. I sat in my truck in the yard lot with the windows down and just talked.

"You want to know why a hymnal? Because I'm a coward, basically. Also I had a two-by-four scrap in my pocket and it seemed like a sign. My whole life is two-by-fours. I've been driving the same route for three years. You want to know what my day smells like? Cut cedar and chain grease. It gets in my hair. I wash it twice and it's still there. I kind of like it. That's probably gross. Tell me what your basement sounds like. You mentioned the parish hall. I bet it's weird at night, all that empty space. Call me back. Or don't. But call me back."

He called back at 12:40 in the morning. I was in bed.

"The basement sounds like a swimming pool with no water in it," he said. "That's the best I can describe it. Everything echoes wrong. I stay late doing the books and I can hear the furnace ticking and my own footsteps and nothing else. Two years I lived with someone and now silence has a texture. That's probably more than you wanted."

"It's not," I said.

We talked for an hour. He told me he'd been alone for two years, on purpose, sort of, and that he was restless in a way he didn't have a word for. I told him about Mario and the wedding and he laughed, a real laugh, and then said "he didn't deserve the cousin's potato salad" and I laughed too.

***

Two weeks of this. Voicemails mostly, because we both worked weird hours. Then Thursday I came back to the church to deliver the corrected cedar, and when I got down from the forklift there was an envelope tucked under the wiper of my truck. Handwritten, four pages.

I read it in the cab.

It was not a nice letter. I mean, it was nice, it was polite, but the middle of it was him telling me exactly what he'd do if I came to his office after the cleaning crew left. He wrote it like he'd been rehearsing in his head for two years and finally had somewhere to put it. He'd lock the door. He'd push everything off his desk, the files, the pen cup, all of it, and he'd sit me on the edge of it. He wrote about my work shirt, the one with the