Caprock Lantern

Laurie had told Hilary she would come, and that was the entire problem with telling Hilary things. You made them on a warm afternoon in a garden, feeling generous, and then the third Saturday of October rolled around and you were pulling on boots in the dark, twenty-eight years old and grumbling as a woman twice that age would.

She parked the truck at the base of the mesa and joined the line of lantern-carrying neighbors shuffling up the switchback path into the rock. The caprock hall had been carved out of the mesa decades ago, and the town loved it the way small towns love anything mildly unusual. Rough-hewn stone walls. A little stage. Rows of chairs that always wobbled. Lanterns hung on wires from ceiling hooks, hundreds of them, throwing soft orange light in circles across the floor.

It was beautiful. She was still annoyed.

Inside, the place smelled like woodsmoke and cider, and half of Ross River was already there. She grabbed a paper cup of the cider because it seemed rude not to, and she took a seat near the back because that also seemed rude not to, and she settled in for an evening of watching people she mostly liked perform gratitude at each other.

Three years. It had been three years since anything, since a brief, friendly, entirely consensual fling with a co-worker down in Whitehorse that had ended the way those things end, with a shrug and a phone call that got shorter each week. She was fine with it. She had told everyone she was fine with it, including herself, several dozen times. Happily single by choice. It was practically her business card.

The dry spell was another matter. The dry spell was not up for discussion, but it sat in the back of her skull most nights like a hen on a nest, and no amount of telling it to scram did any good.

She scanned the room out of habit and stopped scanning very suddenly.

Johnny was over by the stage.

Johnny, her boss. Thirty-two years old, quietly competent, the man who spent his days being a neutron scattering length density fitter, which Laurie could say out loud but had never once been able to explain to her mother. He had moved up from the south two years ago and settled into Ross River like a coin into soft dirt, present but unobtrusive. At work he said about nine words a day, and four of them were in emails.

At work he was a closed notebook. Here, right now, he was laughing. Actually laughing, head tipped back, at something one of the Fournier brothers had said, and the Fournier brothers were laughing too, and there was a whole little knot of locals around him like he was somebody they knew.

Laurie took a sip of cider and tried to reconcile the two men. It did not work. The man by the stage had one hand wrapped around a mug and the other gesturing as he told some story, and his face did things she had never seen it do. His face, under fluorescent lab lighting, mostly did nothing.

Then she noticed the collar.

He was wearing a dickey. An actual dickey, that fake shirt-front thing your grandfather might have worn under a sweater, except this one was made of some rough brown woven stuff, haircloth maybe, and it closed at the throat with a little brass hook-and-eye. It should have looked ridiculous on a grown man. It looked, instead, like something a person wore because he genuinely liked it, and Laurie found that oddly charming and immediately resented finding it charming.

"You're staring," said Hilary, materializing beside her with the timing of a woman who had been waiting all week.

"I'm observing."

"You're staring at Johnny."

"I am observing a colleague in his natural habitat."

Hilary grinned and patted her arm. "Go say hi. He's actually fun, you know. He fixed my fence in September and stayed for supper."

"I've met him. He signs my flight logs."

"He signs your flight logs and then he builds raised garden beds for old ladies. Go say hi."

Before Laurie could decide, he saw her. And here was the strange part: instead of the small nod he gave her in the lab hallway, he lit up. He said something to the brothers, excused himself, and came across the room with his mug held as a man crossing a ship's deck in a swell would.

"Laurie. You made it."

"I made it. Under protest, but I made it."

"What's the protest?" He was smiling. At work his face did nothing. Here it was apparently a whole instrument panel.

"The climb. And the chairs. And being social on a Saturday."

"Those are good protests. Well founded." He gestured with the mug. "The cider helps."

"The cider is helping right now, yes!"

They stood there a second in the lantern light, and he seemed about to say something, then glanced toward the door instead. "It's getting warm in here. Do you want to walk out to the edge? There's a ledge past the entrance where you can see the whole valley. Best view in the territory and nobody uses it because they're all inside being grateful at each other."

Laurie weighed it. It was her boss. It was cold. It was also the most anyone had said to her all evening.

"Sure," she said. "Lead the way."

The ledge was maybe twenty steps past the door, a flat shelf of pale caprock with a low natural rim, and it did indeed look out over the whole valley. The lantern light from the doorway spilled a few feet onto the stone and then gave up, and beyond that it was moonlight and stars and the dark mass of the valley falling away below. The cold hit her face like a reset button.

"Oh," she said. "Okay. This was worth it."

"Told you." He set his mug on the rim and shoved his hands in his pockets. "I come out here every year during the walk. Ten minutes of quiet and then I go back in."

"You? You need quiet from that?" She nodded back toward the noise of the hall. "You're the quiet one, Johnny. You're the quietest person I know. You say four words a day and two of them are 'regards' and 'attached.'"

He laughed, a short surprised sound that made a little cloud in the cold air. "That's fair. That's very fair."

"So what's this then?" She waved a hand at him. "This person telling stories to the Fournier brothers?"

"Ah." He looked down at his boots for a second, then back out at the valley. "Work me and off-work me are different guys. At the lab I'm thinking about the fitting, and talking costs effort, so I don't. Out here I'm not thinking about the fitting."

"So you're not antisocial. You're just on a budget."

"Exactly. I've got a talk budget and work eats all of it." He turned his head toward her, and the lantern light from the doorway caught the edge of that rough collar and the little brass hook at his throat. "You noticed the dickey."

"I noticed the dickey."

"Hilary's mother made it for me. First winter here I looked half frozen and she decided it was her business." He touched the hook-and-eye with one finger. "Haircloth. She wove it herself. I wear it every lantern walk. It's tradition now."

"It's a good tradition." Laurie wrapped her hands around her paper cup, mostly for the warmth. "I would not have guessed you for a traditions guy."

"I'm full of things you wouldn't guess. That's the trouble with a talk budget. People fill in the blanks themselves and they always fill them in wrong."

"What did I fill in?"

"You thought I was stiff," he said, not accusing, just stating it, the way he stated data. "You thought I was reserved and a little dull and that my entire personality was flight logs."

Laurie felt her ears go hot, which the cold did nothing to hide. "That's..."

"It's fine. It's the accurate first draft. I'm just telling you the second draft is different."

The wind came up the valley and moved the lantern light on the stone between them. Somewhere behind them inside, someone started a song and got half a verse out before losing the tune.

"Johnny," she said. "Can I ask you something that's not about work?"

"Please. I have budget tonight!"

"What do you actually do for fun? Real fun. Not fence-fixing fun."

He smiled, slower this time, and looked back out at the dark valley, and took his time, and Laurie realized she was holding her breath a little, waiting, the way you wait for a story to go somewhere.

"Come to the walk next year," he said, "and find out."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the best draft I've got right now."

She laughed, and the sound of it surprised her, because she had come up this mesa under protest, and here she was out in the freezing dark, ears going red for more reasons than the cold, not wanting to go back inside just yet.

"Next year," she said. "Okay. I'll hold you to that."

"Good," said Johnny, and picked his mug back up, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, which was fine, because the valley was doing plenty of talking, and the lanterns behind them made a small warm doorway in all that dark.

Laurie looked out at the valley and decided, for no good reason, to say the true thing.

"I haven't been on a date in three years," she said. "Since Whitehorse. There was a co-worker, it was friendly, it was nice, and then I just... stopped. Flew planes, fixed the truck, went to bed. That's been the whole shape of my life."

"Three years?" Johnny didn't say it like it was pathetic. He said it like it was a number worth knowing.

"Three years. People keep trying to fix it for me. Hilary keeps trying to fix it for me. And I keep saying I'm happy, and I mostly am, I just." She shrugged. "I stopped wanting things. It was easier. Flying takes all the want I've got, most days."

"That sounds less happy than you keep saying it is."

"Oh, well, look at you," she said, laughing. "Two sentences and you've got me all figured out."

"I'm a fitter. I fit things to models. You're not fitting your model."

She stared at him. "Did you just use work talk to call me out?"

"I did. I've been saving it up all night. It cost me half my budget."

The laugh came out of her big and loud, too loud for the quiet ledge, and a raven somewhere down the cliff said something rude back at her. She hugged her cup to