Buttons and Beer

My name is Rudy Novak, I'm twenty-three, and I play guitar in a band that mostly plays bars around the city, which is how I know half the people at this wedding. The bride, Anita, is an old friend from college, and the rehearsal dinner was held at a craft brewery upstate, a big barn of a building with exposed beams and copper kettles behind glass, and long tables set up between the tanks. That's where I first really noticed Jocelyn Olson, who was twenty-four and sat three seats down from me, and who wore a denim jacket with big silver buttons that caught the light every time she moved her arm.

She was telling some story about a pallet of beer that got mislabeled, and she had this way of laughing that was loud at the start and then quiet, like she gave up on the laugh halfway through and just smiled instead, and everybody at the table leaned in a little when she talked. She worked at the brewery, it turned out, in some kind of product recall job, which sounded horrible and she made it sound funny. I was Anita's friend from the wrong half of college, so I was seated with a bunch of strangers, and I mostly spent the dinner watching her and pretending I was listening to the best man describe the bachelor party in detail.

At one point she caught me looking and raised an eyebrow at me.

"Something on my face?" she asked, wiping at her cheek with a napkin.

"No, sorry," I said. "I was looking at your jacket. The buttons. Did you do that yourself?"

She looked down at her sleeve and then back up at me, and she smiled the quiet half of her laugh. "Yeah. I collect buttons. I sew them on stuff when I'm bored at work. These are from a thrift store in Poughkeepsie, I think. Or Tanaka. One of those."

"They look good," I said, and she said thanks, and that was pretty much the whole conversation at dinner, but it was enough that when I walked out to the platform at nine forty and saw the last train pulling away, the first person I texted was her, because she was the only number I had in this town besides Anita, and Anita was busy.

The station was one of those small upstate ones with no staff and one flickering light, and I stood there as an idiot, watching the taillights go while my phone buzzed. She wrote back inside of a minute.

"lol. I'm still at the brewery doing inventory. Come back, I'll drive you to my place after. I have a couch and no pets."

I walked the mile and a half back with my duffel over my shoulder, feeling like a character in a movie I hadn't seen before, and the brewery parking lot was empty except for her little blue hatchback with a bike rack on top. The front door was unlocked and the dining room was dark, chairs up on the tables, and I followed a light down a hallway and found her in a room full of kegs.

"This is cold storage," she said, waving at the walls of kegs and stacked crates, all lit by one bare bulb hanging from a wire. "It's where I do inventory because nobody bothers me in here. You want a beer? We have, and I'm not exaggerating, four hundred kegs."

"I watched you do inventory at dinner and you made it sound fun," I said. "I want to see the real thing."

She handed me a clipboard and pulled a tap on a keg near the door, filling two plastic cups from a line she clearly knew by heart. The room smelled like hops and malt, faint and kind of sweet, and it was cold enough that I was glad I'd brought my jacket.

"Okay, so the system says there are twelve of the pilsner on this row," she said, counting with her finger and writing something down. "There are eleven. Somebody drank one and didn't log it. This is my whole life, Rudy. This is what I do."

"Somebody should go to prison," I said, and she laughed the loud part of her laugh, the one that cut off halfway, and pointed at me with her pen.

The whole time, I kept noticing her, and I want to describe her right, because she wasn't what I expected when Anita had mentioned her friend from the brewery. She was maybe five foot six, with dark hair cut to her chin, and a nose ring, and she wore her denim jacket over a flannel with the sleeves rolled up, and her forearms were strong-looking, like she hauled kegs around for fun, which maybe she did. There was a tattoo of a swallow on one wrist. She moved around the cold room like she owned it, which in a small way she did, and every so often she'd say something dry and sideways and then look at me real quick to see if I got it, and I always got it.

We finished the pilsner row and moved to the ale crates in the back, and that's when it happened. She was carrying a tin, one of those round cookie tins, and she had it balanced on top of a stack of crates, and when she reached for the clipboard the tin slid, hit the concrete, and exploded buttons all over the floor. Not a few buttons. Hundreds. It sounded like hail on a tin roof, and we both just stood there for a second.

"Oh no," she said. "Oh, no no no. Okay. Okay, it's fine, these are sorted. These are SORTED, Rudy. By color and size. I spent, no joke, six weekends on this."

"We'll get them," I said. "We'll get them all."

So we knelt down on the cold concrete floor, under the one bare bulb, in a room full of kegs, picking up buttons. She had a system by the end, her sorting them back into little piles by color while I swept my pile over to her, and the whole thing was kind of ridiculous and kind of nice at the same time. My knees hurt and my fingers were cold and I didn't want to be anywhere else.

"Why buttons?" I asked her. "Out of everything in the world."

She held one up, a little brass one, and turned it in the light. "There was a jar of them in a box of my mom's stuff when I was a kid, my grandma's, and I used to dump it out on the carpet and just look at them for hours. I got to keep the jar. Then I started adding to it. Every thrift store between here and the city, I stop. I have maybe three thousand now. This tin is the wedding ones, the silver ones, for the table decorations tomorrow."

"They're pretty," I said, and I meant the buttons but I was probably not talking about the buttons, and she studied my face for a second and then went back to sorting, but she was smiling.

"Careful," she said. "I've heard about you. Anita says you're charming."

"Anita says a lot of things. Anita once told me the earth was flat to see if I'd argue."

"Did you?"

"For like twenty minutes. She won."

"See, that's the kind of info I collect," she said, dropping a handful of silver buttons into the tin with a clatter. "I keep a little mental file on everybody. Yours is getting thick tonight."

"Good things, I hope."

"Mostly," she said, and looked at me sideways, and the bare bulb made the silver buttons in her hand shine like little coins. "Mostly good things."

We got the last of them up around midnight, her pouring the sorted piles back into the tin with the care of somebody handling eggs, and she held the door for me and killed the light and we walked out through the dark dining room to her car. I remember thinking that I had missed a train and gained an hour on my knees with someone I liked, and that seemed like a fair trade, and I remember thinking I hoped the weekend was long.

* * *

Her car was a little blue hatchback with a bike rack on top, and she drove me the mile and a half back to the brewery while the radio played something old and we both sang the wrong words to it. She pulled up under the awning by the taproom door and said, here, take my number, and I did, and then I stood in the parking lot for a minute after she pulled away because I didn't know what to do with the rest of the night. There was a couch in the little back room that the staff used, apparently, because Anita had texted me a key code and told me to stop texting her about it. So I slept on a couch that smelled faintly like grain and woke up at nine the next morning with my back complaining and my phone showing one message from Jocelyn that just said, hope the couch was kind to you, and I lay there grinning at the ceiling like an idiot.

That was Friday night. The wedding was Sunday. Saturday was the big setup day, and everybody descended on the brewery around noon, and I got drafted into carrying chairs because I have guitar-player arms and nobody respects them. Somewhere around ten that night, after the welcome BBQ, Jocelyn cornered me by the bar and said she had to do a final count in cold storage before the weekend rush and did I want to help, and I said yes before she finished the sentence, which probably told her everything she needed to know.

* * *

The cold storage room again, the one bare bulb, the rows of kegs and the crates stacked along the walls, and that faint smell of hops and malt that I was starting to associate with her, for reasons I'll get to. She grabbed two bottles of the good stuff off a shelf, the stuff they don't sell, the pilot batch, and she popped both caps on the edge of a keg with a practiced little whack and handed me one.

"Perk of the job," she said. "We're not supposed to, so don't tell Anita, she'll make it a whole thing."

"Your secret's safe. I forget things constantly. It's one of my features."

We leaned against a keg side by side, and the cold came up through our jackets and the beer was actually good, malty and a little sweet, and for a while we just drank and didn't talk, which was its own kind of nice. Then she turned her bottle around in her hands a few times and said, "So I should probably tell you something before this goes any further," and my stomach did a thing, because that's never a sentence with a happy ending, in my experience.

"Okay," I said.

"I'm trans," she said, flat out, no windup, the way you'd tell somebody you were left-handed. "Came out when I was twenty-two. Two years on hormones. I don't usually do this in a fridge, but you're going to be around all weekend, and I'd rather say it myself than have it be a surprise later, because surprises in that direction have gone badly for me before." She was watching my face the whole time, careful, the way you watch a pot you're afraid might boil over, and I could see her ready to be done with me, already halfway to the door in her head.

And here's the honest part, which is that my first feeling wasn't shock or anything dramatic, it was just glad she told me, glad she trusted me with it, standing there in the cold with a beer in her hand and a swallow tattooed on her wrist. What I said out loud was, "Okay. Thanks for telling me. Doesn't change anything for me."

She didn't relax right away. "You sure? Because people say that and then it turns out it does change something, and it's always in the middle of something nice when they remember."

"I'm sure. I like you. That part's settled. The rest is just facts about you, and I like facts about you, I've been collecting them all night." I took a drink because my mouth was dry, cold air does that. "Can I ask you stuff, or is that rude?"

"Depends on the stuff."

"Not tonight. Tonight I just want to stand here and drink this beer with you. But sometime, if you feel like it, I'd listen."

She held my gaze for a long beat, and then some of the careful went out of her shoulders, and she said, "Yeah. Sometime. Most people don't ask first, they just ask." She knocked her bottle gently against mine. "You're doing good, Rudy Novak."

"Tell my file," I said, and she laughed that laugh again, the loud part cutting off halfway, and she leaned her head back against the keg and looked up at the bulb.

The cold was getting to me, honestly, my ears were burning in that cold-room way, and I don't know how to describe what happened next except that I kept looking at her and she kept not looking away, and there was this long moment where neither of us said anything and the compressor in the corner hummed like it was holding the note for us. My heart was going pretty good by then, I'll admit that.

"Rudy," she said.

"Yeah."

"If you're thinking about something, think faster, my hands are freezing."

"Can I kiss you?" I asked, plain, because that seemed like the only