Bottle Job

The last box in the truck was the heavy one, of course. It always is. I had it halfway up the ramp when the courier van pulled into the drive with that particular squeal of brakes that says the driver has given up on his vehicle and on life generally.

"Navarro?" the guy said, holding out one of those plastic sleeves with a slip inside.

"That's me."

"Sign here. And hey, you order perfume?"

"No!"

"Well, somebody at this address did, because this thing is leaking a little and it smells like a department store threw up."

I signed and took the box. He drove off. I set the box on the porch rail and read the label. A. Winslow, and then an address that was ours in every way except the last digit. Someone down at the depot had read a 7 as a 4, and now I had a stranger's perfume leaking gently onto my porch.

Lois came out with a mug of coffee, squinting at it. "That's not ours."

"Wrong address. Some A. Winslow."

"Wrong address how?"

"One digit. Somebody's 7 looks like our 4, apparently."

"Huh." She turned the box over in her hands, read the return label, and something crossed her face that I didn't have a word for yet. "French return address. Somebody from Lyon."

"Translation work, probably. This town's full of translators now, you told me that yourself."

"Three months you've been telling me that," she said, and smiled, and went back inside.

I put the box in the hallway by the coats and forgot about it for about four hours, which is a normal amount of time to forget about a stranger's perfume. Then came a knock at the door, mid-afternoon, and when Lois answered it I heard a woman's voice say, "Hi, I'm so sorry, I think my package came here? The post office gave me your address and I felt ridiculous just showing up, so if this is a bad time..."

"Not a bad time at all. You're Adrianna?"

"Yes! And you're..."

"Lois. This is my husband, Kurt."

I came around the corner wiping sawdust on my jeans and got my first look at her. Thirty-four, she'd have been. Dark hair going gray early and not fighting it, which I've always thought takes a kind of nerve. She was holding a tote bag like a shield and apologizing again.

"I'm the one who should apologize," I said. "The box has been sitting in my hallway leaking perfume onto my floor like a small animal that died of Chanel."

"Oh no. Is it ruined?"

"Only the box. We wrapped it in a grocery bag out of basic decency."

"That's very kind." She laughed, and I could say the laugh did something to the room, but the truth is simpler: she laughed like someone who hadn't laughed at anyone in a while and was out of practice and enjoying it anyway. Lois laughed too, and they looked at each other a beat longer than two people look at each other over a misdelivered package.

"I'm in the yellow house past the point," Adrianna said. "I just moved from Lyon. Three months ago. Everything still arrives at the wrong address."

"Give it time," Lois said. "We've been here six years and the paper boy still can't find our driveway."

"Six years and he delivers to the boathouse next door out of spite," I said.

"Well. Thank you both. Really." She took the box, hesitated, and said, "I'd offer you a drink as a thank you, but I don't know where anything is in my own kitchen yet, so it would be a humiliating experience for all involved."

"Next time, then," Lois said. Just like that. Next time, like they'd already agreed there would be one.

Adrianna walked off down the drive with her leaking box, and Lois stood in the doorway watching her go. I went back to the boxes in the truck. When I came up the path with the last load, maybe ten minutes later, Lois was still at the front window, looking out at the lake, which happens to be the direction Adrianna's yellow house sits in.

"You get lost?" I asked.

"Hmm? No. I was thinking!"

"About what?"

"The scheme. The payroll thing. If the auditor comes in December, we need the December numbers to look like September numbers, and I haven't finished the French half of the fake invoices."

It was a true thing to be thinking about. We'd been running it for six years, since I was thirty-two and found out the company was skimming the drivers and decided two could play. The money sat quiet in an account in Trieste and neither of us had touched it. That was the deal. Slow and boring and clean.

"Then finish the invoices," I said.

"I will." But she stayed at the window a while longer, and I carried the last box inside and told myself it was nothing, which is what I told myself, and what I believed, roughly sixty percent.

***

The coffee invitation came three days later. Lois mentioned it at breakfast like she was mentioning the weather.

"Adrianna's coming by at ten. She does French and I do French, and there's a firm in Brescia that needs a second set of hands on a contract. She asked if I knew anyone."

"She asked, or you asked?"

"What's the difference?"

"The difference is nothing, I'm just asking." I buttered my toast. "It's good for you. Company. You've been saying you miss actual colleagues."

"I have been saying that." She looked at me over her mug. "Is this you being suspicious?"

"This is me eating toast."

"Uh huh."

At ten Adrianna's little car came down the drive, and Lois went out to meet it before it had fully stopped. I stayed in the workshop with a fake repair to justify myself, but the truth is the boathouse carries sound, and I heard them on the dock for the better part of an hour.

They were talking about work at first. I could hear Lois saying, "No, the genitive does half the work there, you don't need the clause at all," and Adrianna saying, "Wait, say that again, slowly, I want to feel stupid in an organized way." Then the work talk fell away and something else came in. I heard Adrianna say, "My ex texts me every Sunday. Every single Sunday, like a subscription I can't cancel," and Lois say, "What does he say?" and Adrianna say, "Nothing that means anything. How are you. The dog misses you. We never had a dog, Lois. We never had a dog." and Lois laughing so hard I could hear it in the workshop with the door half shut.

And here's the part I've had trouble explaining to myself since. I stood there with a wrench in my hand, listening to my wife laugh with a stranger, and what I felt was relief. Not jealousy. Relief. I had been carrying a piano downstairs alone for six years and heard someone on the porch offer to take the other end.

Six years of invoices and false numbers and a marriage that had become, mostly, two people coordinating a crime with very good manners. And now here was Lois on her own dock, laughing about a dog that never existed, and I felt light. I should have examined that. A smarter man would have examined that.

They came in around eleven-thirty. Adrianna had her coat half on and was saying, "I should go, I have a deadline and a kitchen full of boxes in that order," and Lois was saying, "Same time next week? I'll ask about the Brescia hours."

"Please ask. I would work for anyone who lets me sit on that dock."

"Come Thursday," Lois said. "Thursdays the husband plays darts at the Legion, so we'll have the place."

"Is that true?" Adrianna asked me, half smiling. "Is Thursday your darts night?"

"It is now," I said, and Lois elbowed me, and Adrianna laughed her out-of-practice laugh again on her way out the door.

After her car pulled away, Lois stood at the window again. I watched her from the kitchen. She had her coffee cup and that same look, and this time I did the arithmetic out loud, because I'm not built for subtlety and never have been.

"You like her."

"She's a colleague, Kurt."

"I didn't say anything bad. I said you like her. Those are different sentences."

"She's..." Lois turned around, and whatever was on her face made her look twenty-nine again, the year we cooked this whole thing up over cheap wine and a legal pad. "She's easy to be around. That's all. I haven't had easy in a while. We haven't had easy."

I knew what she meant. The scheme was easy. The marriage had gotten hard in ways that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with December auditors and the Trieste account and never, ever saying anything true in the kitchen after nine at night.

"So Thursdays it is," I said. "I'll go throw darts at the Legion. Say hi to Big Ray for me."

"You don't have to go."

"Lois. You just told the woman Thursdays are free. I'm not gonna un-free them."

"Thank you," she said, and it came out too fast, and she turned back to the window, and I went to get my darts, and that was the week everything stopped being boring.

I just didn't know yet whether that was a good thing.

* * *

The burner phone went off at eleven that night. It lives in a coffee tin in the workshop, behind the sandpaper, and it has gone off maybe nine times in six years, so when it rang I knew before I answered that the news wasn't good.

"Mm," said the voice, which is how Joseph says hello. Joseph works in payroll at the company and has the phone manner of a hostage. "The auditor got moved up."

"To when?"

"December. I told you December."

"You told me December. That's what I'm asking about."

"December is now firm. He booked the flights. And Navarro, he's bringing a second set of eyes. Somebody from the regional office."

I sat down on the workshop stool and looked at the sandpaper for a while. "Okay. Anything else?"

"Lois needs to finish the French half. The Brescia invoices are sitting in the queue looking like garbage. Somebody with actual French is gonna notice."

"Thanks, Joseph."

"Be careful with that phone," he said, and hung up, which is Joseph for goodbye.

I stood in the workshop holding the phone and doing math. Then I took the phone inside, because Lois and I had an agreement about bad news, which was that we didn't carry it alone past the property line.

She was in bed reading with her glasses down her nose. She took one look at my face and put her book on her chest.

"Joseph called."

"December's firm?"

"December's firm. And he's bringing a second set of eyes."

She didn't say anything for a bit. Then she said, "The French half isn't done."

"I know."

"There are thirty-one invoices, Kurt. I've done nine. The Brescia ones have clauses in them that I have to make look like a real translator wrote them, and real translators leave fingerprints, and I'm out of practice at faking fingerprints."

"Adrianna's a translator."

She sat up so fast her glasses slid off. "No."

"I didn't finish the sentence."

"You were going to. I saw your face do the thing."

"My face did nothing."

"Kurt. We are not bringing the neighbor woman into a payroll skim because she knows the subjunctive."

"I said she's a translator. I didn't say hire her."

"You had the follow-up loaded. I've been married to you twelve years. I know what your follow-ups look like."

I sat on the edge of the bed. "Okay, I'll drop it. But somebody has to finish those invoices, and it's either you, faster, or nobody, and nobody means Joseph and I go to a minimum-security facility with terrible coffee."

"I'll do them faster." She picked her book back up. Then she put it down again. "That's not even the thing that's bothering me tonight."

"What's the thing?"

She looked at the ceiling. "I don't want to say."

"You don't want to say, or you don't want to say it to me?"

"That's a nasty question."

"It's an honest one."

She was quiet for a long time. "I'm confused about something," she finally said. "And I haven't sorted it out yet, and I'm not going to name it, because if I name it it becomes real and then it has to be dealt with, and we're in December-auditor mode, Kurt. We don't have room for anything that has to be dealt with."

"Is it about the scheme?"

"No."

"Is it about me?"

"No." She pulled the blanket up. "Go to sleep. You have darts tomorrow."

"It's not Thursday yet."

"It will be."

* * *

Thursday I threw darts badly at the Legion while Big Ray drank two of my beers and explained his theories about the county road commission. I got home around nine-thirty and the boathouse was lit up warm, and Lois was in the kitchen, and she had the look on her face that used to mean the legal pad was out.

"Good darts?" she asked.

"Terrible darts. Ray won eleven dollars off me."

"Ray always wins eleven dollars off you. It's basically a subscription." She wiped the counter that was already clean. "Kurt. Adrianna brought something."

"A thing or a person?"

"A thing. Come see."

On the couch table, next to the ship-in-a-bottle display, was a second ship in a bottle. Older. The glass had gone slightly amber and the rigging was real thread and the little flag was hand-painted, badly, by somebody who loved boats but could not paint flags.

"She said it was a housewarming gift," Lois said. "But we're not the new ones. She is."

"Maybe she's regifting."

"Kurt."

"Sorry. Why did it bother you?"

"It's her grandfather's. She said he built it in Lyon after the war, and it sat on his desk her whole childhood, and she carried it here in her carry-on because she didn't trust