Eclipse over Elara

I woke up at dawn in a bed that wasn't mine, with my shirt missing and one sock on and one sock off, and for a good thirty seconds I had no idea what state I was in. Then I remembered the eclipse, and the party, and the woman named Celina who had kissed me on her own back porch while the sun went dark.

Fenton, I thought, you did it again. Drove two hours for a stranger and a spectacle, and now you're in a farmhouse in the high desert with a sock situation.

I was twenty-eight, and until three months ago I had run a saute station at a place in the city where people paid two hundred dollars a head to eat tiny portions off big plates. Then I burned out so thoroughly that I quit without another job lined up, which my mother still brings up on Sundays. I took a gig at a brewpub in a small town and told myself it was a fresh start. So far the fresh start mostly consisted of working nights and going on flat dates with people I met on apps.

Celina had been one of those apps. Thirty-one, a ranch between here and nowhere, a photo of her holding a goat like it owed her money. Her profile said she was looking for something uncomplicated. I drove out for the eclipse party because she said there would be a party, and there was, and it was good, and then the sun came back and everyone drifted off and she kissed me and asked if I wanted to stay. I said yes. Plainly. She asked again upstairs, in her way, and I said yes again. That part I remembered fine.

What I did not remember was falling asleep before her, which felt like a personal failure.

The room smelled like wood and clean laundry. Through the window I could see goats in a brown field and a long low barn and mountains past that, pink at the top. Somewhere below me a woman was humming, badly, the same four notes over and over.

I found my pants on a chair, put everything in order, and went down the stairs, which creaked in a way that announced me to the whole house.

She was in the kitchen with her back to me, barefoot, wearing a flannel robe, stirring something in a big ceramic crock on the counter. The crock was bubbling. It looked alive. She was humming those same four notes, then she stopped when she heard me.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning." She didn't turn around right away. "There's coffee. It's just the pot, nothing fancy."

"Fenton can't complain about pot coffee. Fenton works at a brewpub now."

"I know what you do. I read your profile." She turned then, and she had a wooden spoon in one hand and flour on her forearm and she was looking at the wall next to my head instead of at my head. "How do you take it?"

"Black is fine."

She poured two mugs and pushed one across the counter at me and then went back to the crock like it needed her more than I did.

"What is that thing?" I asked.

"Sourdough starter. It was my grandmother's, and she fed it for forty years, and now I use her crock too." She stirred it again. "You feed it flour and water every day or it dies. It's like a pet that can't love you back."

"Sounds like my last restaurant."

That got a small laugh out of her, which felt like progress. She sliced bread from a round loaf on the cutting board, toasted it in a skillet with butter, and set two plates down on the big wooden table without being asked. There was jam in a jar with a handwritten label that said APRICOT, DON'T TOUCH.

"Is that for me?" I asked.

"That's for nobody. Don't touch it."

I touched it. It was excellent jam. I said so and she pretended not to be pleased, but she refilled my coffee without me asking, which in New Mexico ranch language I assume means something.

We ate toast for a while and neither of us said much. Outside, a rooster did its thing, late to its own shift. She sat sideways on the bench with her knee up and her mug held in both hands and she kept glancing at me and then away, quick, like I was a cost she was still deciding whether to pay.

"So," she said finally. "Walk me through what you remember. Because I have a gap."

"Where's your gap?"

"Between the porch and the kitchen."

"Mine's between the kitchen and the bedroom." I set my mug down. "I remember the party. I remember those cardboard eclipse glasses and about forty people in your yard. I remember your cousin, or somebody's cousin, arguing that the corona was fake."

"That was Cyn. She's not my cousin, she just acts like family because she's been here since before I was born. She's sixty-two and she thinks NASA is a scam and she makes a green chile stew that could end wars." Celina smiled at the table. "Okay. Keep going."

"I remember the totality. Everybody went quiet. Chickens went quiet. That part was genuinely amazing, and I don't say that as a city guy being polite. And then it got light again and you were standing next to me and you said, quote, well, that ruined regular sunsets forever, and I said something charming, I'm sure, and you kissed me."

"You kissed me."

"I distinctly remember leaning in first."

"You distinctly remember wrong." She was grinning now, finally, for real. "I leaned in. You did that thing where you tilted your head like you were checking if I meant it. And then, well. You meant it back. That part I remember."

"And then?"

"And then I asked if you wanted to come inside, and you said yes, and we came inside." She shrugged, but her ears had gone a little pink. "And then the rest, you know. The rest we were both there for."

"The rest was good," I said, and then, because I am a professional idiot, I added, "for the record."

"There's no record. No phones got anywhere near anything, I checked, I'm not on that kind of website." She took a drink of coffee. "I meant it as a compliment, before you get weird about it. You were a gentleman about the whole thing. Asked first, every time. It was refreshing. Most guys my age, thirty-one, they treat a first night like a checklist they're speedrunning."

"I have been speedrun," I said. "It's not great."

"No, it's not!"

Her phone buzzed on the counter and she reached over and looked at it and her whole face changed, some of the looseness going out of it. She sighed and set the phone face down.

"Sorry. Work thing. I've got an inventory audit at the antique mall Tuesday and they always send these stupid reminders like the audit is my idea." She scraped a crumb off the table with her thumbnail. "I'm the housekeeping supervisor there. It's a real job, technically. I boss around a crew of five and we clean cases and dust three thousand pieces of somebody's dead grandmother's china."

"An antique mall. So you spend your days around other people's old stuff."

"Forty thousand square feet of it. Aisles and aisles of it." She said it flat, like a woman reciting the price of gas. "My ex used to call it the museum of things nobody wanted enough. He was a charming man."

"I'm sorry. About the ex, I mean. Not about the mall. The mall sounds like my kind of hell, actually, in a good way."

"You'd like it. There's a booth that's nothing but old kitchen tools. There's a whole bin of egg beaters." She looked at me then, actually looked, for the first time all morning. "Why are you smiling like that?"

"Because I spent eight years making food for people who photographed it before they tasted it, and the idea of a bin of egg beaters sounds like peace to me. That's where I am right now. A bin of egg beaters sounds like peace."

She laughed, a real one this time, and then caught herself and pressed her lips together like the laugh had gotten loose without permission. She stood and carried her plate to the sink and stood there with her back to me, and I could see her shoulders working through some decision.

"Your starter is very good," I said, to fill the space. "The bread. The crock is cracked, though. There's a hairline crack down one side, I noticed when I came in. It might be why it's bubbling so hard."

She turned around slowly.

"You noticed that?"

"It's what I do. I notice food things. It's the whole skill set."

"It's been cracked for a year. My grandmother's crock and I can't bring myself to toss it, so I keep feeding this thing in a broken jar and telling myself I'll find another crock." She wiped her hands on her robe. "Fenton."

"Yes!"

"You have a two hour drive. And I have an audit Tuesday. And last night was supposed to be one night, that was the entire arrangement, that's what the app is for." She said it all in one breath, and then stood there.

I looked at my coffee. I looked at the cracked crock, still bubbling away on the counter like it didn't know it was supposed to be dead.

"Okay," I said. "I'm listening."

"I haven't gotten to the part where I say anything yet. Sit still and eat your toast."

She sat back down across from me and wrapped both hands around her mug like it was cold out, which it wasn't. The high desert does that trick where the sun is bright and the air through the screen still has a bite to it. May mornings lie to you.

"Here's the crock situation," she said. "It's ceramic, it's older than my mother, and I keep meaning to deal with it and I keep not dealing with it."

"You don't have to replace it," I said. "If the crack is hairline and not through, you can seal it. Food-safe epoxy, the two-part kind. Chefs use it on cutting boards and serving boards all the time. You'd just want to empty the starter out while it cures, a day, maybe two, keep the starter alive in a bowl in the meantime."

She stared at me. "You can do that."

"I can do that. I keep a kit in my truck for the brewpub. Cutting boards, a serving plank, one memorable incident with a wooden spoon. I'd need to run out to the truck and get it."

"That's it? No ceremony, no fuss?"

"I sealed a cutting board for a woman I dated for three weeks. She cried. Not about the board, about other things, but the board was good."

Celina laughed again and I was starting to learn the shape of her laughs. There was the guarded one, the real one, and this new one that landed somewhere in between, like she was surprised at