Button Jar

My name is Janelle Hall, I am sixty-two years old, and I have been married to Kenneth for thirty-eight years. Two years ago I finished treatment for breast cancer, and Kenneth never once left my side through the whole rotten business. He drove me to every appointment, held my hair back during the worst of it, and slept in a chair beside my bed for eleven nights when the hospital was short on rooms. I have been trying to work out how to thank him for a long time, and a card did not seem like enough.

Kenneth retired from the hop farm last year, though you would never know it to look at him. His family had grown hops on that land for four generations, and he still turned up every September for the harvest, because the man does not know how to sit still. Our house sits right beside the old drying barn, and during the last week of September the whole place smells green and strange and like my whole married life.

On the Tuesday of that week, we were in the barn together, sorting dried cones into the pressing frames. Kenneth was on the far side doing the heavy lifting, and I was picking out the leaves and stems that always sneak through the harvester. My back ached in the familiar way, and my hands smelled like hops, and I was as happy as I have ever been, honestly.

That was when I saw the jar.

It was on the second shelf, behind a coil of twine and an old seed catalogue, and I had to pull it out with both hands. It was dusty as anything, a big Kilner jar with a rusted lid, and inside it were buttons. Dozens of buttons, all sorts, bone and brass and mother of pearl, jumbled together like treasure.

"Kenneth," I said. "Come look at this."

He came around the pressing frame with his sleeves rolled up, wiping his hands on his trousers the way he always does. He is sixty-three now, grey at the temples and still broad through the shoulders from decades of farm work. He looked at the jar and laughed.

"Well, I'll be. I wondered where that got to. That's my mother's button jar. She kept it in here for donkeys' years, said the damp in the house was bad for the bone ones." He took it from me and turned it in the light. "Haven't seen it since she died. Must have been shoved back there better than fifteen years."

"She never threw a button away in her life," I said. "I remember her sewing one back on your good coat at Christmas, that brass one with the anchor on it."

"That's in there somewhere, I expect." He shook it gently and the buttons rattled. "Silly thing to keep, really. But I couldn't bin it either. So it lived up here."

I held out my hands for it and he gave it back. I am not sure what came over me, exactly. Maybe it was the light coming through the barn boards, or the smell of the hops, or maybe it was two years of wanting to thank the man properly and never finding the moment. But I stood there with a jar of buttons in my hands and an idea landed on me all at once, the way ideas do when you are past sixty and no longer embarrassed by your own notions.

"Kenneth," I said. "I dare you to kiss me."

He blinked at me. "Come again?"

"Right here. In the barn. Away from the house, where nobody does anything but sort hops and complain about their back." I set the jar down on the frame and put my hands on my hips. "I dare you. That is a formal dare, Kenneth Hall, and I expect you to rise to it."

He looked at me the way he used to look at me in nursing school, when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three and he kept finding excuses to walk past the library window. Then he grinned, this big crooked grin that still does things to me.

"Well," he said. "I've been dared worse. Mostly by your mother, as it happens."

"My mother never dared you to anything half so nice."

"No, she dared me to eat a pickled egg in one bite, and I still regret it." He crossed the space between us and took my face in both hands, careful as anything, thumbs on my cheeks. "Is this really what you want, then? Because I'll not say no."

"It's what I want," I said. "Kiss me before I lose my nerve."

So he did. And I will tell you, a kiss in a hop barn with dust in the air and your husband of thirty-eight years cupping your face like you are something breakable is not a small thing. It was soft at first, and then it was not soft, and my hands went up under the front of his shirt to the warm skin of his chest, and he made a low sound against my mouth that I had not heard from him in a good while. When we came up for air he kept his forehead against mine.

"Blimey," he said. "What's got into you, Jan?"

"I'll explain. Sit down." I pointed at the old crate by the wall and he sat, still looking puzzled and pleased about it. I picked the jar back up and held it between us. "Here's my idea. This jar held your mother's buttons for years, and I am not going to take her buttons out, they stay. But we're going to start adding to it. Every dare I set you this week, one of us drops a new button in. Something we find, or buy, or already own. By Sunday the jar will be full again, and every new button will mean something we did."

"Dares," he said slowly. "You're going to dare me. All week."

"Something like that. You beat cancer with me, Kenneth. You carried me, and I never got to say thank you in a way that felt like enough. So this is my thank you. A week of dares. Some of them will be silly. Some of them," and here I felt my cheeks go hot, which at my age is a rare treat, "will not be silly at all."

He was quiet for a moment, turning his wedding ring with his thumb like he does when he is thinking.

"And what do I get out of it, besides the obvious pleasure of your company?" he asked, but he was smiling when he said it, and his eyes held a quality I had not seen in a long time. Want, maybe. Or hope.

"You get me," I said. "And you get to say no to any dare you don't like, that's the rule. We're not twenty-two anymore, either of us. No dare that doesn't suit us both."

"That seems fair." He reached over and picked a dried hop leaf off my shoulder, brushing it away with two fingers. "And the buttons mark them."

"The buttons mark them. One per dare. And at the end we put the jar back on the shelf, and in ten years some poor soul finds it and wonders what on earth went on in this barn."

He laughed at that, a proper laugh, head back. "My mother would be tickled pink, actually. She always said that jar wanted filling again."

"There's a good spot of room at the top," I agreed.

"Right then." He stood up off the crate, and there was a lightness in him I had not seen since before my diagnosis, since before the whole grey stretch of hospitals and waiting rooms. "What's the first one, then? You've had your kiss, but you said dares, plural."

I had not planned past the kiss, if I am honest. But I looked around the barn, at the pressing frames and the dust motes turning in the light from the high window, and something else came to me.

"Dare two," I said. "Tonight, after the last load is pressed, you dance with me in here. Properly. Music or no music. Nobody watching but the hops."

"In the barn," he said. "Dancing."

"In the barn."

"Well, I haven't danced since Dooley's wedding, and that went badly because Dorian stood on my foot." He held out his hand anyway. "But I dare say I can manage it. For you."

"Good," I said, and took his hand. "Because there's seven buttons in this jar by Sunday, Kenneth, and I've only just started."

We danced that night, after the last load was pressed. Kenneth put the wireless on low, just for something to keep time to, and we swayed between the pressing frames like a couple at a village disco who have known each other too long to be embarrassed. He stepped on my foot once and blamed the cider. I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the crate. When we went in, I dropped two buttons into the jar, a plain brass one for the kiss and one from his old coat for the dance, and he watched me do it with an expression I want to remember on my dying day.

So that was Tuesday. Wednesday dawned grey and damp, the sort of late September morning where the fields steam a bit and the dog won't get out of bed. I was in the kitchen around four, peeling potatoes and getting a shepherd's pie going, when the dare came to me. I had been thinking about it all morning, actually, in a sneaky sideways fashion while pretending to plan supper.

Kenneth came in from the yard at half five, boots muddy, looking every one of his sixty-three years and also looking, to my eye, exactly like the man I met in nursing school when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three and had sideburns he thought were magnificent.

"Smells good," he said, kissing my cheek. "What's the occasion?"

"No occasion. Dare three, though!"

He stopped halfway to the sink. "It's not even dark yet."

"The rule was one a day, not one a night. And this one's easy." I set the peeler down and wiped my hands on the tea towel, which took longer than it needed to because my nerves were doing something silly. "You let me undress you. Right here. In the kitchen. While the pie simmers."

Kenneth looked at the oven. He looked at the window, which faces the yard. He looked at me.

"In the kitchen," he said. "Janelle. I am sixty-three and you are sixty-two years old and you want to undress me in front of the Aga."

"There's nobody for three fields in any direction. And the curtain's drawn, I checked this afternoon while you were at the co-op."

"You checked the curtains this afternoon."

"I planned a dare, love. Of course I checked the curtains."

He did the ring-turning thing again, standing there with his sleeves rolled up and his forearms brown from the harvest, and I could see him weighing it, the same way he weighs everything, as a man reads a seed label twice before he plants. Then something shifted in his face and he set his tea mug down on the counter with a click.

"Right," he said. "Well. It would be rude to refuse a lady."

"It would," I agreed. "Terribly rude."

I had undressed this man thousands of times, in a manner of speaking. Hospital gowns, bandages, that dreadful jumper his sister knitted him in the nineties. But I had never undressed him slowly, on purpose, in a lit kitchen with the pie bubbling behind us, and I will tell you it is a different thing entirely. I started with his shirt, working the buttons one at a time, and he stood still as a post and let me, his breath going a bit shallow by the third one.

"You're enjoying this," he said.

"Immensely."

"It shows."

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and ran my hands over his chest, which is broader than it was and softer than it was and still his, still the chest I pressed my ear against during all those frightened nights before the diagnosis, listening to him breathe. He caught my hands and held them flat against him.

"Jan." His voice had gone rough. "The pie."

"The pie has twenty minutes."

"And you've got me standing in me socks in the middle of the kitchen like a trussed chicken."

"Not trussed yet." I reached for his belt, and he sucked in a breath, and I looked up at him and stopped, because that is the rule, the rule we made in the barn. "Still all right?"

"Yes," he said, quicker than I expected. "God, yes. Carry on!"

So I carried on. I will spare you the full inventory, as my mother would say, except to report that by the time the timer went off on the oven we were both in a state, and the shepherd's pie was very nearly ruined, and we ate it late and laughing at the table with him wearing only his boxers and a grin, which he refused to put clothes on for, saying the dare had not technically ended. I dropped a mother-of-pearl button I had been saving into the jar after supper. He held the jar up to the lamp and counted.

"Three," he said. "Four to go, and the last two had better watch out."

"Oh, they will," I said, and I am afraid I smiled in a way he could not quite read. Because the truth was I had been thinking about dare six for two days now, and it was a big one, and I had not yet worked up the courage to say it out loud even to myself.

* * *

Thursday was the last day of the harvest, and Christopher came.

He has worked for Kenneth's family since he was twenty-one, which means he has been turning up at this farm for forty-five years, longer than I have known either of them. He is sixty-six now, a widower three years