Air in the Bones

I'm sitting on Timmy's porch with a glass of iced tea going warm beside me, and I want the record to show that when he asked me to water his plants for three weeks, I did not sign up for any of this. I'm Shari, I'm twenty-three, I train people at the gym over on Delano, and I have been dating Timmy for about fourteen months now, ever since he tried to order a coffee in three accents at the trailside café and I laughed so hard I dropped my keys in the storm drain. So really, watering his stupid tomato plants is the least I owe him, and yet here I am, day three of my little holiday from my own apartment, writing him a letter like it's 1954.

That's his fault, by the way. The letter thing. I found a box of nice paper in his desk drawer and it felt wrong to text him from twelve feet from where he sleeps, so here we are.

Dear Timmy, I wrote. Your plants are alive. Your zucchini is trying to take over the garden and I have decided to let it. Also, I found a hole in your floor.

* * *

Here's how that happened. The HVAC in this converted ranger station of his is temperamental, which is a polite word for it, and on Wednesday evening it started making a noise like a raccoon learning the trumpet. I got down on my knees in front of the vent panel with a screwdriver and a phone flashlight, because I am competent, and when I pulled the panel off there was no raccoon and no ductwork either, just a dark square opening with a wooden hatch set into the subfloor, old and warped, with a little brass hook latch gone green.

Now, a normal person would have put the panel back and called him. I am a personal trainer and I have a flashlight and a crowbar of a screwdriver, so I popped the hatch instead, and the crawlspace under there smelled like dry dirt and old paper, and wedged against a joist was a rusted coffee can with a rubber band around it that snapped when I touched it, which made me yelp and bang my head on a beam, and that is the only injury I have ever gotten from a plant-watering favor.

Inside the can were letters. Dozens of them, thin paper, soft from being handled, tied in bundles with kitchen twine. I took them up to the kitchen table, washed my hands like I was handling museum pieces, and read the top one, which was dated the year before I was born.

I texted him in Portugal, or wherever his dialect road trip has him this week.

Me: small update. Found crawlspace behind hvac panel. Found coffee can. Found LETTERS. Explain yourself

Timmy: ha. Those are my grandmother's. I've been meaning to go through them

Timmy: mostly recipe swaps and church gossip, I think. She and her sister wrote back and forth for forty years

Timmy: please don't read the gossip ones

Me: too late for some of them. A woman named Bunny is in TROUBLE

Timmy: oh no. Bunny

Timmy: keep them somewhere dry, I'll sort them when I'm back. Don't throw anything out

So of course I read more of them. He told me not to throw them out, and he said nothing about reading, and I decided on the porch that night that a boyfriend who leaves that loophole open deserves what he gets.

* * *

Most of them were what he said, recipes for things with canned soup in them, complaints about a neighbor's dog, complaints about the other neighbor's husband. But Thursday morning, over my second cup of coffee, I hit one different. It was older, thinner paper, and the handwriting was fancier, and I sat up straight on the porch step because it wasn't a recipe at all.

It was about a button jar.

The way I read it, your grandmother, or great-grandmother, Timmy, the handwriting was hard, had a jar of buttons she'd been collecting since girlhood, mother-of-pearl and carved bone and a few that were real amber, and a woman down the road wanted that jar badly for her daughter's hope chest. The way the letter told it, they sat at a kitchen table and hashed it out plain as day, what the jar was worth, what the favor was worth, and the favor won, and the jar changed hands, and everyone was satisfied and stayed satisfied, which honestly is more than I can say for my last apartment lease.

And there was a line in it I keep going back to. She wrote, a fair trade talked out to the end is worth more than the thing itself, and I don't know why that hit me the way it did, but I read it four times and then I sat there looking at his tomato plants like they'd understand.

Anyway, I did what any normal girlfriend does, which is leave him a voicemail and then transcribe the voicemail into the letter I'm writing him, because apparently I have a system now.

Voicemail transcript, Thursday, 9:40 in the morning. Ahem.

"Timmy, it's me. So your grandmother ran a black market button operation out of her kitchen and I have the receipts. Also I think I know what I'm getting you for your birthday, and no, I'm not telling, and also the zucchini has achieved a size I would describe as threatening, and also call me back because I have questions about a woman named Bunny and I need answers before tonight or I'll make some up. Okay. Love you. Bye."

I hung up feeling pretty good about myself.

He answered the voicemail the way he answers everything, and he overdid it. That night an email showed up in my inbox with an audio file attached and a subject line that just said FOR THE ARCHIVE, and I put my earbuds in on the porch while the bugs got loud, and there he was, reading one of the letters aloud, the whole thing, in that voice he uses when he's working.

Timmy records dialects, that's his actual job, he drives around with a microphone and gets old folks to talk about weather and funerals and what the lake was like when they were young, and he's got a festival coming up this summer that he's been building his accent archive toward for a year. So when he reads, he can't help it. The letters were written in an upper peninsula voice, all the vowels slid a little sideways, and you can hear him slide right into it, this soft flat northern sound, and halfway through the button jar letter he stops being my boyfriend reading a dead woman's mail and starts being somebody's grandson doing her the honor of saying it right.

He got to the fair trade line, the one I liked, and he read it slow, and then there was a pause on the recording, maybe four seconds of porch silence on his end or kitchen silence on mine, I couldn't tell, and then he said, off script, still in that accent, "She would've liked you, Shari. Stubborn and fair. That's a dangerous combination in a kitchen."

And then the recording just ended, no goodbye, like he got embarrassed, which he absolutely did, and I sat there grinning at my warm iced tea like an idiot.

So now I've got a stack of letters on his kitchen table, a zucchini with ambitions, a button jar I haven't found yet but am absolutely going to look for, and a boyfriend somewhere downstate who reads to me in a dead woman's voice.

I'm writing at the bottom of the page now, Dear Timmy, continued, and here is what I've decided, which is that when you get home we are going through the rest of these together, every gossip letter and every Bunny incident, and I don't care how much of the archive you have left to record.

Some trades you talk out to the end.

Your plant girl, Shari.

The button jar hunt took me two days, which is embarrassing, because it was under my feet the whole time. Saturday morning I went back into the crawlspace with a headlamp and a dust mask, because I have some standards, and I started moving the insulation batts along the far wall where the light didn't reach, and there it was, tucked behind