Concrete Heat

The slam happens every first Friday of the month, down in the parking garage under the Arts Center. I'd lived in this town for eleven years and never gone, until two months ago, when I turned thirty-four and watched a six-year relationship go in the dumpster behind my apartment. That was the week I signed up.

My name is Tamara Heller, and I drive a forklift at the distribution center out by the rail yard. It's not a job that leaves a lot of room for feelings, which is probably why I started writing poems on my lunch breaks, sitting on an overturned milk crate with a clipboard on my knees. The poem I signed up to read was about my ex, Maxwell, and it was not a nice poem. It was a funny poem, mean in the way that makes an audience laugh before they realize they should feel bad for you.

I read it on the far end of the garage, because that's where the mic was set up, under the overhead door with the November wind coming through the gap at the bottom. I was three lines from the end when I spotted him, way in the back by the concrete pillar. A guy, maybe twenty-eight, with burn-scarred forearms and a wool cap, rolling his eyes so hard I could see it from forty feet. Not at my jokes. At me. He had his arms crossed and this little smirk, like he was grading me and I'd failed.

So I finished strong, out of spite. I gave the last couplet everything I had and the crowd gave it up, whistles and stomping on the concrete, and I got off the stage feeling like I'd won something. Which lasted about ten minutes, until the open mic wound down and the crowd started drifting toward their cars, and I found myself walking toward the garage entrance and there he was, leaning on the wall next to the pedestrian door, still wearing that smirk.

"You the forklift girl?" he said. "The poem was cute. Heavy-handed, but cute."

"Excuse me?"

"Heavy-handed. The metaphor with the pallets. You used it twice. Once would have been enough for anybody paying attention."

I don't know what I expected him to say. Something normal, like good poem or hey, nice set. Not a critique delivered like a forklift inspection report.

"You didn't pay attention," I told him. "You spent the whole set rolling your eyes at me. I saw you."

"That was at the host. He said the word vibe seven times." He shrugged. "I heard your whole poem. Twice, in my head, since."

"Then you know it landed."

"It landed on people who laugh at anything. Look, don't take this wrong, but you've got a good ear and you're hiding behind jokes. The middle stanza, where you actually say what you feel? That's the poem. The rest is armor."

I stood there with my coat half on, holding my notebook, and I could not decide whether to swing at him or ask him to say more. And that surprised me, because I'd spent two months being talked down to by a man who'd left me for a dental hygienist, and I thought my skin had thickened up. This guy got under it in four sentences.

"Who asked you?" I said. "Seriously. I didn't ask for notes."

"Nobody ever does. That's why they need them." He stuck out his hand like we were closing a deal. "Finn Pac. I weld over at Kessler Fabrication. I read here most months."

"Tamara. And I don't shake hands with people who heckle me."

"I didn't heckle. Heckling is during. That was after." He kept his hand out, easy, no pressure in it, and eventually I shook it because it seemed rude not to, and his grip was warm and rough and I felt that shake all the way up my arm, which annoyed me very much.

Then, instead of walking away as anyone else would, he pulled a folded paper out of his jacket. "I've got one too," he said. "You don't have to stay. But you're the only person here who'd know if it's any good."

"That's a terrible pitch."

"I know." He unfolded it anyway.

He read it standing under the fluorescent tube by the entrance, where the light is that flat greenish color that makes everybody look like they're at a morgue viewing. The poem was about welding, about feeding a bead along a seam and watching the metal glow orange and then cool gray, about how you can't rush it, about waiting for the metal to tell you when it's ready. It was rough. There were two rhymes that made me wince. And there was one stanza in the middle, about how he'd learned to wait because everything he'd ever grabbed too fast had slipped, that was so plain and so honest that I forgot to be mad at him.

When he finished, the garage was mostly empty. A car started somewhere in the far rows and drove up the ramp and out, and its headlights swept over us and left.

"That's the one you keep the armor out of," I said, because it seemed only fair to return his own critique.

"Yeah. It doesn't win, though. The funny ones win. The judges here are undergrads."

"You win?"

"Twice." He folded the paper back up. "Not this month. This month I'm reading the welding one, and I'll lose, and that's fine."

The air down there is always a little damp, and it smells like motor oil and cold concrete, and it echoes, so every word you say comes back to you once, flattened. I had my hands in my coat pockets and I was digging around in one of them for my keys, and my fingers found something that didn't belong. A little rectangle of plastic. I pulled it out and my stomach dropped.

It was a microcassette. The answering machine tape from the machine I'd replaced in September, the one with Maxwell's goodbye message still on it, because I'd yanked it out of the machine the morning after and stuck it in my coat and never dealt with it. Two months in the pocket of the coat I wore every day.

"What is that?" Finn asked.

"Nothing. Old tape."

But my throat had gone tight, and he saw it, and he didn't smirk. He leaned against the wall and waited.

I don't know why I played it. Maybe because holding it felt worse than hearing it. There was a battery-powered player in my bag, a little thing I used for books on tape on long drives, and I dug it out and put the cassette in and pressed play right there by the entrance, my thumb shaking on the button.

Maxwell's voice came out thin and tinny through the little speaker. "Tam. It's me. Look, I'm not doing the three-hour version. I'm gone, I'm with Jess now, you know that. I guess what I'm calling to say is that I should've done this two years ago, and I'm sorry it took me this long, and honestly, I think you knew it too. Take care of yourself. Don't call me."

The tape hissed and stopped. The echo off the concrete made his voice sound like it was coming from behind me.

I stood there with the player in my hand and I couldn't look at anything. And Finn, who hadn't said one word through the whole thing, who could have made a joke, didn't. When I finally looked up he was watching me with his jaw set.

"Okay," he said. "That guy is garbage."

"He's not wrong, though. I did know."

"He's wrong about one thing. He left a message on a machine. That's a man who couldn't look at you and say it, which means he knew exactly what he was losing." He took the tape out of my hand, wound it back with his thumb, gave it back. "And 'take care of yourself.' Garbage."

I laughed, and it came out wet, and I wiped my face with the back of my wrist and hated that he was seeing it and was grateful he was seeing it at the same time.

He reached over and took my hand. Not grabbed it, but took it, the way you'd take a wrench off a bench. "Come here," he said. "I want to show you something before you drive off hating me."

"What could you possibly have to show me down here?"

"You'll see."

He led me past the entrance, past the empty metered rows, around a concrete pillar into the far corner where the forklift bay was. There was a battered orange forklift parked against the wall and a stack of pallets and, beyond them, a pocket of the garage where the fluorescent tube overhead had burned out years ago. Just one dim amber emergency bulb near the ramp. You could barely see your own feet. I knew the corner because I'd parked in this garage for eleven years and this was the corner nobody parked in because the lights were bad.

"So what am I looking at?" I asked.

"Nothing. I just didn't want to say this where the echo would carry it."

"Say wha"

And he kissed me. Hard, both hands on my face, wool cap knocked crooked against my forehead. He tasted like coffee and the beer he'd had during the slam, and his mouth was hot and I kissed him back before my brain caught up, my hands flat on his chest, feeling his heartbeat going fast through the flannel. Then he stepped back, one full step, hands up like he was backing off a hot plate.

"Okay," he said, breathing heavy. "Now you have to choose. We can keep fighting, I like fighting with you, or we can try something else. Your call. I'm not going to touch you again unless you say so."

My head was ringing. The tape was still in my pocket and his mouth was still on my list of things to think about and I stood there in the dim corner doing math I didn't have words for. "Something else," I heard myself say. "But I have to tell you something first."

"Tell me."

"I'm terrified of being seen naked. Like genuinely terrified. Maxwell spent six years