Broom Closet Letters

I found out something about myself last March: I can write a dirty letter with a mop in one hand. Not on purpose. It just happened.

My name is Carlotta Ramsey, I'm twenty-three, and I clean the community center at Fort Baines. Not the base itself, mind you. The little community center off to the side, the one with the shuffleboard room nobody uses and four restrooms that see real action on bingo nights. I've worked there two years, ever since I moved to Edgefield. I met Randall at the Dusty Boot out on the highway when I was twenty-one, out with the girls from the laundry annex, and he was twenty-three and in uniform and bought me a Shiner because they were out of limes for anything better.

He's been deployed nine months now. Letters and calls. Mostly letters, because the wifi on his end is a rumor.

Anyway. The broom closet. The supply room, if you want to be formal about it. It's eight feet by six, smells like bleach and lemon, and has a mop sink, three shelves, and a folding chair with one cracked leg. It's where I take my fifteen-minute break at ten, because the break room shares a wall with the shuffleboard room and the old boys argue about the scoreboard like it's the stock market.

That Tuesday I sat on the folding chair eating a gas station egg salad sandwich and I just started writing on the back of a work order form. Nobody reads those. I'm serious, I've written grocery lists on them for a year.

Dear Randall, I wrote. You would not believe this floor. The tile in the men's room by the vending machines has some kind of gum fossil situation going on that predates my employment. I scraped for forty minutes. My whole day is scrape, mop, restock, repeat. I'm bored clean through, babe. Bored like a hole in a fence post.

Then my hand kept going. I don't know why the thought showed up right then. Maybe because I scrubbed that same floor while thinking about your hands on my hips, standing behind me in the kitchen last time you were home, both hands flat, pulling me back into you while the spaghetti boiled over and neither of us cared. I wrote about that. I wrote a lot about that. I described your hands in more detail than the work order form deserved. I described what I'd do if you walked into the supply room after my shift, still in your civvies, and turned me around by the hips and sat me up on the shelf between the paper towels and the toilet bowl cleaner.

I folded it into an envelope and dropped it at the post office on my lunch. Then I panicked a little. Then I went back and scrubbed the urinals and felt weirdly cheerful about it.

* * *

His letter took eleven days. That's normal for where he is.

Carlotta,

Got your letter. Read it twice, once in the tent and once behind the latrine where a man can have some privacy. I didn't read it with a straight face, because Corporal Dean saw me grinning at a piece of paper and asked if my mom sent cookies, and I said sure, something like that.

Sorry about the floor. Gum fossils are a crime. I'm sorry about the boredom too. That one I can maybe fix.

Here's my counterproposal. My leave starts in about ten weeks, give or take a day of army math. The day I land, I'm coming straight to you. Your shift ends at four thirty. That leaves us that supply room with the door locked and a man who has thought about your hips every night for nine months.

I'm not saying we do all of it in a broom closet on a folding chair with a busted leg. I'm saying we start there and see where the evening goes. I'll book the motel on Route 9 for afterward. The one with the ice machine that growls.

Tell me if I'm out of line. If you'd rather I just take you to dinner like a gentleman, I can do that too. But you wrote what you wrote, and I read it twice.

Randall

P.S. Dean still thinks my mom sent cookies.

I read that standing in the supply room with the door propped open with a mop bucket, and I laughed out loud, and Marge from the front desk asked what was so funny and I said a coupon.

* * *

Dear Randall,

You are not out of line. You are exactly in line. Stay in line.

Okay, since you're serious about the closet, I got serious about the closet. I did some measuring on my break. It's eleven steps from the door to the mop sink, heel to toe, and I know because I counted them twice like a weirdo. Step seven has the shelf with the paper goods, and that shelf is sturdy, I tested it. Don't ask how. The folding chair stays in the corner because that leg is not trustworthy for anything but sitting.

Here's how it goes. You come in straight from the airport, I lock the door behind you. Step one, I push your jacket off your shoulders. It goes on the hook, the hook is real, it's held a mop bag for two years. Step two, your shirt, and I take my time with the buttons because I've earned that. Step three through five, boots and belt, and I will let you handle the boots because I've watched you unlace them before and it's a whole procedure.

Steps six through eleven, that's yours to walk me backward. I counted them out so you don't bonk my head on the detergent shelf. I did the math for both of us, that's just the kind of woman I am.

I'll be wearing the blue dress. The one from last Christmas. It comes off in about two seconds and it doesn't wrinkle, which matters because I refuse to walk out of this building after our shift looking like I slept in a hedge.

I put the bucket where it needs to go and I set two folded towels on the shelf at step seven, the thick ones from the good box, not the scratchy ones. Cushioning. I think of everything.

Bring the lube sorted in your bag, and yes, condoms, I know we'll talk about the testing paperwork when you're actually home but closet rules are closet rules.

Your loving girlfriend, who scrubbed a toilet an hour ago and is somehow still thinking about your hands,

Carlotta

* * *

Carlotta,

Eleven steps. You counted eleven steps in a mop closet and drew me a diagram. I taped it up inside my footlocker. Dean thinks it's a map to the PX.

Noted on the dress, the hook, the towels, the condoms. All sorted. I'll bring a bag like a normal civilian coming home, nobody will look twice.

Now, since you made a plan, I'll make one part of mine. The first thing I do when I see you isn't the closet. The first thing is in the parking lot, by my rental car, before either of us says anything smart. I put my hands on your hips, both hands, the way you described, and I walk you back two steps until you're up against the car door, and I kiss you there until you forget what bleach smells like. That's not a figure of speech. I plan to kiss you long enough that the smell of that supply room gets knocked clean out of your head. Then, and only then, eleven steps to the mop sink.

I've got forty-some days left. I've read your letter enough times that the paper's gone soft at the folds.

Six weeks and change, babe. Keep the good towels folded.

Randall

* * *

He got home on a Thursday. I'll get to that. But first, one more letter went in the mail before he did, and this one had a drawing in the margin.

Dear Randall,

Enclosed, a map. Yes, I drew you a map of the supply room, yes, in pen, no, I am not ashamed. The door is the rectangle at the bottom. The mop sink is the little