Comet Light Over Us

My name is Jared, I'm sixty-two years old, and last August I did something completely out of character. I went to a festival alone.

Let me back up a little. Two years ago I sold my fish shop in Dryden and retired. Forty years of hauling cod and herring out of ice chests was enough for anybody's back. I picked a little lake town three hours north because the real estate listing had a photo of a dock at sunset and I was in the kind of mood where a photo of a dock can decide your whole life.

It worked out, mostly. The neighbors wave. The diner knows my order. But I hadn't made a single friend I could call on a Tuesday, and by last summer I had to admit the quiet was starting to feel less like peace and more like a long pause in a conversation nobody was coming back to finish.

So when the bulletin board at the hardware store advertised the Perseid festival down at the lake, with booths and a helicopter outfit doing short tours and a night of meteor watching, I stuck a note on my fridge. Jared, it said, go to the thing. I still have the note.

I'm sixty-two, I told you, the math of my own life trips me up sometimes. Sixty-two, single, never married. There was a fellow in college I liked, way back when I was twenty-one, but nothing ever came of it and I filed it away with the rest of the things I didn't do. I'll get to him. He's the reason I'm writing this.

The festival was set up on the flats near the north shore. String lights everywhere, fried dough, a guy selling carved wooden ducks to people who did not need carved wooden ducks. The helicopter pad sat off to one side behind a chain-link fence, with a windsock drooping off its pole and a folding table where a man in aviator sunglasses was selling fifteen-minute tours over the lake.

I was looking at the price sign when I recognized the voice before I recognized the face.

"And if you look to your left on the way out, that's the old tannery, which is now condos, because everything is condos now."

That laugh. I would have known that laugh at a hundred yards. I turned around and there he was, sixty-three years old and grayer than me but still built like the letter P, talking to a couple who had clearly already paid.

Preston Belling. Spelling bee champion of our whole county, two years running. Helicopter pilot, apparently. The man I kissed once, forty years ago, at a party neither of us has ever mentioned since.

My stomach did the thing it used to do in the lecture hall when he sat two rows over. Sixty-two years old and my stomach is still taking orders from a forty-year-old crush. Embarrassing. I almost walked away. I actually took a step.

Then he saw me.

He stopped mid-sentence. The couple he was fleecing drifted off toward the fried dough and he just stood there with his sunglasses sliding down his nose, staring.

"Jared Hollis," he said.

"You remember."

"Of course I remember." He pushed the glasses up onto his head. His eyes were the same, brown with a crooked fold in one eyelid. "You sat third row, left side, and you underlined everything. I used to watch you underline."

"I did not underline everything."

"Jared, I sat behind you for a semester. You underlined the word 'the.'"

I laughed, and it came out too loud, and I didn't care. We stood there grinning at each other like a pair of fools on a festival ground full of actual fools, and I felt twenty-one again for about four seconds, which was nice and also completely unfair.

"So," he said, wiping his palms on his flight jacket. "Fish shop. I heard. Somebody from the old crowd said you went and sold fish for forty years."

"Forty on the nose. And now I live here, as of two years ago. That's my dock in my kitchen window, figuratively speaking."

"Small lake," he said. "I've been flying tours out of here for eighteen years. I could have run into you any summer."

"You could have. You didn't."

"You didn't either," he said, and I had no answer for that, because it was true.

He waved me around the folding table and we leaned on it while the light went orange over the water. He talked with his hands the way he always did. He'd been flying since he was forty-five, after a first career in insurance that he described as "sitting down for money, which turned out not to suit me." Twice divorced, no kids, a hangar, a dog named Tulip who was at home because she hated crowds.

"And before you ask," he said, reaching under the table, "yes, I still have it!"

He set it down between us as a man would present evidence. The county spelling bee trophy, 1970-something, a little gold-plated figure of a boy holding a book. The plating had gone dull and one arm was bent.

"You've kept this for fifty years?"

"I kept this in three apartments and a hangar. It's my good luck object. I tap it before every flight."

"It's a boy holding a book, Preston. It's not a saint."

"It's a saint of spelling," he said, and put it back under the table with real tenderness, and I remembered all over again why I'd liked him, before I'd let myself like him.

Here is the thing I never told anybody, including him, including myself out loud. At a party the summer after we graduated, back when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three, we ended up alone on a porch with two beers and a lot of nerve, and we kissed. Once. It lasted maybe as long as it takes to read this sentence. Then somebody came out the screen door, and he said "well," and I said "well," and we went back inside and never spoke of it and mostly never spoke again. I have turned that porch over in my mind more times than I'd admit to anyone at a diner.

I was working up to some version of mentioning it when the loudspeaker crackled.

"Attention festival guests, the main gates will be closing in ten minutes. All visitors off the grounds by nine. The night viewing area reopens to permit holders at ten."

"Ten minutes," I said. "I haven't eaten. I haven't seen the booths. I haven't bought a wooden duck."

"You don't need a wooden duck." He glanced at the sky, then at the pad, then at me, and something shifted in his face, some old calculation coming back online. "Look, the tour crowd clears out at nine. I've got a permit to stay overnight for the shower, we do a dawn flight. The best view of the meteors in this whole county is off the pad, out past the fence line, no trees, no lights. Better than the public hill, and I say that as a disinterested salesman."

"You're saying sneak me onto a helicopter pad."

"I'm saying I have two lawn chairs and a thermos and ten minutes for you to decide." He shrugged, too casually. "Or you run for the gate and buy a duck, and that's also a fine evening."

I looked at the lights strung over the booths. I looked at the windsock. I looked at him, standing there with his hands in his pockets like it didn't matter one way or the other, and it obviously mattered.

"Two lawn chairs," I said, "and you owe me the story of how a spelling champion ends up flying rich people over a tannery."

"That's a long story."

"I've got all night."

He grinned, and it was the porch grin, the one from forty years ago, and I felt that stomach thing again and let it happen.

"Chair's on the left," he said, already moving. "Fair warning, Tulip's blanket is in it. You'll smell like dog."

Honestly, that was the best offer I'd had in two years.

* * *

The tour crowd left in twos and threes, a little wobbly in the knees, everyone saying wow. Preston walked each of them to the gate and came back locking the chain-link behind himself with a padlock the size of my fist. The announcer's voice called the ten-minute warning again, then a five, and then the loudspeaker just gave up and played folk music at nobody.

He dragged two canvas chairs out of a shed by the hangar and set them facing northeast, away from the last of the booth lights. There was a thermos and, I noticed, two clean enamel mugs, which meant the lawn chair story had been prepared in advance.

"Two mugs," I said.

"I'm an optimist with a storage shed," he said.

The gates clanged shut somewhere behind the trees. We were the only two people on a quarter acre of cracked asphalt under a darkening sky, and the first star came out right on schedule, like it had been booked.

"Locked," he said, giving the gate a rattle, and then he laughed. "Well. Nobody gets in until ten. And for the record, you can walk out whenever you like. This padlock opens for me in two seconds. Say the word and I'll walk you to your truck."

"Noted," I said. "I'll tell you if I want out."

"Good." He rattled it once more, purely for show, then gave up. "I'll let in the permit folks around ten. Until then we're voluntary prisoners of the north shore flats. You'll have to settle for lawn chairs and coffee."

"Life is hard," I said.

We went back out to the chairs. The sky had gone from dark blue to proper black while we weren't looking, and the stars had come out in that way they do over water, like somebody spilled a bag of them. He poured coffee into the two mugs, handed me one, and sat down with the sigh of a man who sits down for a living, which I suppose he does, in a way.

"So," he said. "The tannery story."

"That's the one I asked for."

"Right." He blew on his coffee. "So I did insurance for twenty-some years. Started right out of college. Dad's business, you remember that?"

"I remember you hating it."

"I could claim I hated it from day one