Clock Tower Afternoon

Lindy showed up at the fairgrounds at ten in the morning, still in her patrol jacket even though she was off duty. I was standing at the base of the clock tower with a dolly and a bad attitude, and she looked at the two of us and laughed.

"You called me for this," she said. "Moving furniture."

"It's one sewing machine. Heavy, old, awkward. Basically you." I was twenty-four and she was twenty-three and we'd been giving each other grief like this since the ski trip two years back, the college one where she beat me down the beginner slope twice and never let it go. She was a cop now, which meant she got to be smug with a badge behind it.

The clock tower sits in the middle of the county fairgrounds, dead center, and nobody uses it for anything anymore. The county turned the bottom floor into a storage nook for odd items years ago, junk that didn't fit anywhere else. My aunt had rented a corner of it since before I was born. She stored her antique sewing machine in there, the one with the treadle base and the black enamel, and she left it to me when she died in March. The house inspection was in two hours. The machine had to be out of that tower and into my truck before the inspector showed up, or at least that's what I'd decided, because the inspector was coming to the house and the machine was here and I don't always think things through.

So we climbed the narrow stairs together and I showed her the door at the bottom of the storage nook, a heavy wooden thing with an iron latch, and I told her the whole history. Aunt Jo rented the space in nineteen ninety-two. She kept the machine here because the tower stays dry and the clock mechanism above keeps mice away, or so she claimed. I don't know if that part is true but it sounded good.

"It's a nice machine," Lindy said, looking around at the dark nook. Grimy windows up near the ceiling let in little columns of light. The clock ticked overhead, a big slow chunk-chunk every few seconds.

"It's the only thing I have of hers that's worth anything. And I need the money before I can fix the roof the inspector is going to yell at me about."

"Solid plan."

I grabbed the door handle and pulled. It didn't open. I pulled again, harder, and the whole door shuddered but the latch stayed where it was.

"That's new," I said.

I got down on my knees and looked through the gap at the bottom. The latch was caught on something. Not the strike plate. Something small and metal, wedged right under the latch tongue so it couldn't retract.

And then Lindy went very quiet behind me, and I heard her pat her jacket pocket, and she said a word that would have gotten her written up at work.

"What," I said.

"My keys. They fell out when I shrugged my jacket off on the stairs. One of them dropped under the door and it must have slid under the latch."

I looked through the gap again. Sure enough, a brass key, hers by the little blue fob, sitting in exactly the wrong spot in the whole world.

"So we're locked in," I said.

"Temporarily. Give me your keys."

I handed them over and she went to work, sliding one of mine under the door, trying to lever the latch up off her key. It's a weird angle and the gap at the bottom is thin and after five minutes we were both sweating and the latch had not moved a hair. The clock ticked above us like it was timing us for a sport.

"Okay," she said, sitting back on her heels. "Different approach. We jiggle the door while I push the key sideways. On three."

We got into position. She had her arm flat against the floor and I had both hands on the handle, and I counted three, and right then the county fair, which does not open until eleven, decided to test one of its rides.

The bang came from somewhere behind the midway, a huge metallic crack like a dumpster falling off a roof, and it went through that tower and echoed off every stone wall. I jumped about a foot. I will not pretend otherwise. My hand came off the handle and clipped the shelf next to the door, and something on the shelf went over, and I heard it hit the floor and slosh.

We both looked down. There was a bottle on its side, a squeeze bottle of chain lube, the stuff I keep for my bike, because Aunt Jo's nook apparently also served as my unofficial bike maintenance station and I'd forgotten a bottle in there months ago. It had landed cap-down on the floor and the cap had popped and now there was a spreading puddle of silicone lube on the boards, and some of it had gotten on the side of my sneaker, and some of it had gotten on Lindy's knee, because she was the one kneeling closest.

Neither of us said anything for a second. Then she looked at the puddle, and at her knee, and at me, and she started laughing. Not a polite laugh. A real one, the kind where she folded forward and put her hand on the door to stay up.

"You," she gasped, "keep a bottle of personal lubricant in a clock tower."

"It's for the bike chain!"

"Sure it is, Tommy."

"It is! Look at the label!"

She looked at the label, which did say chain lubricant in very small print, and laughed harder, and I gave up and laughed too, and the two of us stood there in a ticking stone room covered in lube, laughing like idiots. That's the honest version. I've told this story to guys at the shop and they never believe how dumb the start of it was.

We found a rag on the shelf, an old shop rag that had survived Aunt Jo, and we started wiping each other off. Her knee first, because she was closest. I knelt and dabbed at her pants leg and the lube made the fabric slick and my hand kept sliding instead of wiping, so I was basically petting her knee over and over, and she snorted and took the rag from me and did it herself. Then she went after the side of my sneaker, and then my jeans where the stuff had splashed my thigh, and the rag was useless against silicone, all it did was spread it around, so her hand was sliding on my leg the same way mine had slid on hers, and neither of us pulled back.

I should explain something here, because it matters to how the rest of this went. Lindy has had a thing for me since the ski trip. I know this now. I did not know it then, which is embarrassing, because I'd had a thing for her the whole two years and had convinced myself she saw me as a buddy, the guy she helped move furniture. So her hand kept slowing down on my thigh, and I kept not moving away, and the clock ticked, and the light through the grimy windows made stripes on the floor, and at