Diesel & Desire

The bus depot in Mio is nothing like the pictures online. It's a shed with a coffee machine and a row of dented lockers, and it smells like diesel and old rain. My bus was forty minutes late. I spent all forty standing at the window, checking my phone, wondering if I'd made a huge mistake.

Six months of messages. Six months of Ren sending me pictures of welds and sunsets over some lake, and me sending back pictures of blueprints and my lunch. We never talked on the phone once. I liked it that way. Texting is safe. Texting is for cowards, maybe, but safe.

Then I saw him. Leaning against a green Ford truck older than both of us, arms crossed, grin already going. He looked exactly like his pictures, which surprised me. Most men my age lie with their photos. He wore a flannel with the sleeves cut off and a ball cap that said ALVINE FABRICATION on it.

"Kelly," he said, pushing off the truck. "You're taller than your pictures."

"You're exactly the same as yours. Which makes you the honest one, I guess."

He laughed and held out his arms, half question, half offering. I stepped in. The hug was awkward. We both patted each other's backs like we were checking for hidden weapons. He was warm, and he smelled like woodsmoke and something metallic underneath.

"So," he said, stepping back. "You actually came. I figured you'd bail at Grayling."

"I considered it. The bus stopped in Grayling for fifteen minutes and I stared at the door real hard."

"I knew it." He grabbed my duffel off the ground before I could protest and tossed it in the truck bed. "Coffee first? There's a machine inside that's terrible, but it's tradition. Everybody who passes through Mio gets robbed by that machine."

"Can't argue with tradition."

The coffee was terrible. We sat at a wobbly table by the window, and I noticed he'd already picked up two sugars for me without asking. He'd remembered, from a message in March. I don't know why that got me more than anything else. Small thing. It shouldn't have been a small thing.

"So the talent show," I said. "You're serious. This is a real thing you're doing."

"Dead serious. Aluminum welding demo. Eight minutes on the clock. There's a guy from Cheboygan who thinks he's God's gift to TIG and I'm going to beat him in front of the whole fairground."

"That's your idea of a good weekend? Grinding metal in front of strangers?"

"That's my idea of a great weekend." He leaned back, chair creaking. "You build things for a living. Tell me you don't get it."

"I draw buildings that other people build. I don't get to touch anything."

"Yeah, that sounds like hell." He said it plain, no pity in it. Just a fact he'd filed away. "You're gonna like the boat then. Half-built, out at my shop. Come on, finish that swill."

The drive was two lanes of nothing, scrapyards giving way to pines giving way to a marina with three sad boats in dry dock. He drove with one wrist draped over the wheel and told me the name of every creek we crossed like I'd remember any of them. His hand came down on my knee to point at a heron standing in the ditch.

"See him? Big guy. Been there all summer, I swear."

"Yep," I said. His hand stayed on my knee a beat longer than it needed to. Then he put it back on the wheel like nothing happened. My skin buzzed where he'd touched me. I looked out the window so he couldn't see my face.

Forty-three years old and a hand on my knee has me squirming like I'm on my first date ever. The feeling is the problem. Six months of texting a stranger and one hand on denim and I was sitting there squirming.

The motel was exactly what you'd expect. Two stories, cinder block, a half-built boat on a trailer in the side lot like a beached whale.

"That's not your boat," I said, squinting at it.

"That's Donald's boat. Donald is all talk. Mine's better." He pulled past it and parked by the office. "I got us two rooms. Adjoining. Or not adjoining, whatever you want. No pressure either way, I mean that."

"I noticed the two rooms when I booked mine."

"Yeah, well. I'm old-fashioned and also a chicken." He grinned sideways at me. "One thing at a time."

His shop was ten minutes down a gravel road, near the lake. It was a big pole barn, clean, surprisingly. Tools hung on a pegboard in neat rows. And in the middle of it, on a cradle of sawhorses and steel, sat the hull. Half-built. Riveted aluminum, bright as a coin, curved like it was moving already.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, that's. Huh."

"Huh good or huh bad?"

"Huh good. She's beautiful, Ren. The lines are..." I walked around it, touched the cold metal. "The sheer is almost fair. Who taught you?"

"Youtube and cussing." He came up beside me, hands in his pockets. "Thirty-one feet. Overnighter. Cabin goes here, cockpit there. Been at her eleven months."

I looked at him. He was watching me look at the boat, not the boat, me. Like my reaction was the thing he'd built.

"Eleven months," I said. "You do this traveling? You said you travel for work."

"I do. Three weeks on, one off. She waits." He shrugged. "Things worth having wait."

I felt that one in my sternum. God help me.

* * *

The talent show was that evening at the fairgrounds. Folding chairs, a generator hum, a woman with a rhinestone microphone who kept saying "y'all" like it was punctuation. Ren changed into a clean black shirt in the truck and I tried not to watch him do it. Failed.

"You clean up mean," I told him.

"Mean good or mean bad?"

"Mean like a threat. Two hundred people are about to have a crush on you."

"Two hundred people can wait in line." He looked over at me. "You're first."

Smooth. Too smooth. I punched his arm and he laughed and the generator coughed and they called his name.

I won't pretend I understood half of what he did up there. Torch, filler rod, a tinfoil-looking sheet of aluminum, and eight minutes later there was a seam so clean it looked printed. The crowd went nuts. The guy from Cheboygan went nuts. Ren won a ribbon the size of a placemat and a fifty dollar gift card to a bait shop, and he came off the stage straight to me and hugged me, properly this time, no patting. Sweat and flux and woodsmoke. I held on maybe two seconds longer than strictly friendly.

"Gift card's yours," he said into my hair. "I don't fish."

"You do fish. You sent me a picture of a fish."

"That was Donald's fish. Donald is all talk, I told you."

We ate fried chicken on a bench and watched the greased pole contest, and somewhere around the third piece of chicken I realized I hadn't thought about work, or my inbox, or the dating app, in six straight hours. Six hours. That was the longest streak in maybe four years.

"You're staring," Ren said.

"I'm appraising."

"Of what?"

"Of whether you're actually this calm or whether it's an act."

"It's an act. Inside I'm screaming." He balled up his chicken wrapper. "Kelly. The weekend can be whatever you want. Tourist stuff, boat stuff, sitting on a dock. Or." He stopped. Rubbed his jaw. "Or not that. Your call, all of it. I don't move fast on land. Ask anybody."

"I thought you moved fast on water."

"That's different. Boats don't punch me."

I laughed harder than the joke deserved. Then it got quiet, that specific quiet, the one where both people know what's being decided and nobody wants to say it first. Fireworks went off somewhere behind the fairgrounds, early and off schedule, probably somebody's kid with a stash.

"There's the thing," Ren said quietly, watching the sparks fall.

"Yeah," I said. "There's the thing."

We drove back toward the motel with the windows down. Fireworks smell still in the air, that sulfur burnt-sugar thing. Ren drove slow. His right hand was on the wheel and his left was doing nothing, and I noticed that, the nothing.

"Rest stop up ahead," he said. "You want coffee?"

"Your coffee's a hate crime."

"There's a machine there too."

He pulled in. Empty lot, one semi idling, a light buzzing over the pop machine. He put the truck in park and looked over at me.

"I got a dare," he said.

"Uh oh!"

"You flash me from across the lot. Ten seconds. Then get back in the truck like nothing happened."

I laughed. Then I didn't. Because I was actually thinking about it.

"That's insane," I said.

"Yep. You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to."

"Okay." He got out and walked to the far side of the lot, stood by the pop machine like he was buying something. Looked back at me through the windshield.

Forty-three years old, Kelly. Architect. Two loans, one cat, a dating folder full of men who described themselves as "sapiosexual." And here you are, checking a parking lot for witnesses like a person with a fun life.