Busk and Thistle

My ex-husband Edward used to say I planned things to death. He said it the day he left, actually, standing in the doorway with his duffel bag over his shoulder, like planning was the crime and the affair with his coworker was just a detail. I was twenty-five then. I'm twenty-eight now, and I still plan things to death, so maybe he had a point.

Here is my plan for today, made three days ago and memorized like scripture. Take the dolmus up the coast road at eleven. Reach the rose garden above the village by half past one. Wait inside the greenhouse, because it is the winter solstice and the wind off the glacier will strip your face off. Meet Lars Masterson, thirty-four, furniture restorer, three weeks of chatting on an app, first time face to face. Have one conversation. Assess spark. Go home.

The dry spell, if anyone is keeping count, is going on three years. Not that I haven't wanted something. It's more that after Edward I stopped trusting my own read on people, and reading people is most of dating. So I sat on the app for two years before I answered anything, and then Lars's message was just a question about a chair. He'd photographed a broken rocking chair at a flea market and asked if I thought the tattoo on the seller's forearm was machine work or hand poked. I said hand poked, badly done, probably in a kitchen. He wrote back that he'd guessed the same. That was it. Three weeks of that.

So I was standing among the rose beds at half past one, and the greenhouse smelled like wet dirt and old wood, and the glass overhead was fogged except for a few clear patches where the winter light came through in pale bars. Outside, up the slope, I could see a handful of people climbing toward the glacier with stones in their pockets, the way everybody here does on solstice day. Three stones stacked on the ice, one for what you're leaving, one for what you're keeping, one for what you're asking. I had put two small stones in my coat pocket that morning and I still hadn't decided what the third one was for.

And I was nervous. That's the dumb part. I've spent the last three years elbow-deep in strangers' skin, holding a needle against people while they cry or laugh or tell me about their divorces, and none of that makes my palms sweat. One app date does it. I checked my phone twice, decided against checking it a third time, and studied a rosebush that had been cut back to ugly knuckles for the winter.

He came through the greenhouse door at quarter to two, and I knew him from his pictures, which was a relief, because there is always a bad moment where you're scanning a cafe full of strangers wondering which one lied. Lars was tall and narrow, wearing a wool coat too warm for inside, and he was carrying a canvas bag that looked heavier than a first date should require.

"Penny," he said, and stopped a step short of me like he'd run out of road. "I'm late. The minibus dropped me at the wrong gate and I had to walk the whole wall."

"Fifteen minutes late," I said. "I counted."

"I'd have counted too." He held out his arms a little, an awkward question of a gesture, and I stepped in and we did a hug that was mostly shoulders and mutual apology. He smelled like sawdust and cold air.

Then he lifted the canvas bag and set it on the potting bench between the rose beds like we had agreed on this, which we had not. "Before you decide I'm a lunatic," he said, "I brought something. It's for work. I was restoring it this morning and I couldn't leave it at the guesthouse, and I couldn't leave it in the car I don't have, so."

"So it lives in your bag now!"

"It lives in my bag now!" He unbuckled the flap and lifted out something long and pale wrapped in a cloth, and unwound the cloth on the bench as a man would lay out a surgical instrument.

It was a corset busk. I know a little about antique textiles because of a client, a woman who had me ink a pair of Victorian scissors on her shoulder blade and talked for three hours while I did it. This was two long strips of whalebone, one fitted with studs and one with eyes, meant to lace together down the front of a corset and hold a whole torso in. It was stained. Down one strip ran a brown mark, water-darkened, like tea poured over bone a hundred years ago and never cleaned.

"I found it in a chest I bought at an estate sale in Izmir in October," Lars said. "The chest was worthless. Rotted on one side. But there was a false bottom, and under it was this and a dress and a bundle of letters, and the letters are mostly in French, so I'm having a friend translate them. Somebody wore this, Penny. Somebody laced it every morning for years, and I've spent two weeks getting the stain out of the bone and it won't come, and I've decided it isn't coming out because it's part of the story now."

He was talking with his hands the whole time, and I liked that, and I noticed I liked it, which is a thing I do now that I didn't do when I was married. I reached out and touched the bone before I thought about asking. It was cool and dense and slightly greasy, the way old ivory feels, and the stain was rough under my fingertip, and I got a little shiver up my forearm that I am not going to pretend was the cold, because the greenhouse was humid as a bathroom.

"Sorry," I said, pulling back. "I should have asked."

"You can touch it. That's the whole reason it's here." He turned it over for me. "See the wear on the stud edges? Whoever did the lacing had a pattern. Same hand every day. I think about that too much."

"Most people don't think about corset busks at all."

"Most people are missing out." He smiled, and then he went a little careful, the way people do when they're about to ask