Empty Nest, Fresh Spark

My name is Debbie. I'm forty-four years old, and I watched my daughter get on a train with two suitcases and a violin case bigger than she is. Well. Bigger than she used to be. She's twenty-one now, off to university in Manchester, and our flat has been so quiet since she left that I can hear the refrigerator think.

Reg is forty-six. He's my husband of twenty-two years. We met when I was twenty at a summer music festival, him hauling bread crates for the food tent, me massacring Chopin on a borrowed keyboard. He proposed when I was twenty-one, on a midnight shift at the bakery, with a ring taped to a warm roll. I said yes with flour on his chin. It's been a good marriage. A solid marriage. Lately it's been a quiet one too.

So when he suggested we take a weekend in Birmingham for that comic convention, I said yes before he finished the sentence. We booked a room at the big hotel attached to the convention center. He packed his vintage typewriter. Yes, he brought a typewriter to a comic convention. I'll explain.

Here's the deal with the typewriter. Reg leaves me notes on it. He's done it for years. Little notes, folded once, tucked into my music stand or the coffee tin. He types them slow, one finger at a time, because he never learned proper typing and refuses to. I have a shoebox of them. It's his thing and it's my favorite thing.

Anyway. Saturday morning. The convention floor.

Imagine a hotel lobby that swallowed a flea market and then ate a rainbow. That's what it was. Vendors crammed into every open stretch of carpet, banners hanging from the second floor rail, and people. So many people. Half of them dressed as characters I didn't recognize and the other half dressed as characters I did, badly.

Reg carried the typewriter case over one shoulder like it was a baby. He always holds it a bit too carefully.

"Stay close," he said, sidestepping a man in full silver armor. "You'll get swept off to the manga aisle and I'll never find you."

"I'd shout. I have a voice, I've done recitals."

"That armor bloke didn't scare you? He nearly clipped me."

"He's built like a wardrobe, love. Wardrobes don't scare pianists. Pianists fear silence and small children with jam." I dodged a stroller. "Speaking of fear. My composition. It's dead."

"It's not dead."

"It is. The third movement has been sitting there for five months with a hole in the middle of it. A hole the size of, I don't know, that poster." I pointed at a giant dragon banner. "Every time I sit down at the piano, I write four bars, hate them, and go water a plant. I've watered a lot of plants, Reg."

He glanced at me. "Your daughter just left. It's a big month."

"My daughter just left and the house sounds like a library and my brain sounds like nothing." I stepped around a cluster of people taking photos of somebody's enormous foam shoulders. "I need a spark. Something. Anything."

"Well. We're here to have fun. Sparks come when you're not hunting them."

Easy for him to say. His bread always rises.

We wandered for a good hour. I bought a badge with a cartoon frog on it. Reg admired somebody's hand-built robot costume for so long the poor man posed three times. There was a stall selling fudge shaped like gems. We did not buy fudge shaped like gems, which I now regret, because of what happened next.

The vending machines. Near the elevators, tucked in a little alcove away from the noise. Reg wanted a snack. He'd been hinting at crisps since eleven.

He fed coins into the machine. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. Then silence.

"Rude," he said. He jabbed the button. Nothing. He jabbed it again, harder. The machine rattled, hummed, considered its options, and delivered absolutely nothing.

"Is it stuck?"

"It's stuck." He pressed his palm flat against the glass and peered in, like the crisps might be hiding. "My coins are in there. I can see them. Little silver traitors."

"How much?"

"About two pounds. Maybe more." He gave the machine a gentle, dignified kick. The machine won. "There's a number to ring for refunds. It's a premium line. It'll cost me more to ring than I lost."

"So the machine has committed a perfect crime."

"It has, yes. The perfect crime!" He turned around and leaned against it, defeated. "No crisps then!"

"We have biscuits in the room."

"We have three biscuits in the room and I was saving those." He sighed, big theatrical sigh, the one I've known for two decades. "Fine. Biscuits. But this machine and I have unfinished business."

I was still laughing about it when we got back up to the room. Which is when the day went sideways in the best way.

Because Reg set the typewriter case on the desk, flicked the clasps, and went very still.

"What?"

"The R key."

"What about it?"

He lifted the machine out and tilted it toward me. There, between the E and the T, was a gap. A little black stump where the R used to live. The key was gone. Not loose. Gone. Vanished somewhere between the car park and the vendor floor, probably into a crowd of ten thousand people, never to be seen again.

"Oh no," I said, and then, because I am a terrible wife, "that's an omen."

"It is not an omen."

"A broken R. For Reg. On the weekend your wife is creatively barren. That's omen language, that is."

"It's a spring clip that was fatigued," he said, in the voice he uses for bread temperature and other settled sciences. "It's mechanics, not omens." But he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the gap in the keyboard, and he looked genuinely gutted. "I was going to write you a note tonight. Had one half drafted in my head since breakfast."

"Write it anyway."

"Can't. Every note starts with 'Dear', Deb. And half of what I want to say has an R in it."

Something in my chest went soft and then immediately went practical, because that's how I'm built. I sat down next to him.

"So we fix it. There are ten thousand vendors downstairs. Someone sells a prop or a toy or a bit of plastic tat that's shaped like an R. Or a letter key. Or, I don't know, a little golden something we could glue onto that stump."

"A golden something." He looked at me sideways. "You want to fix my grandmother's era typewriter with convention stall tat."

"I want to fix it with convention stall tat and I want it to look ridiculous. Think about it. A tiara. A tiny plastic tiara, glued right where the R was. Every note you type me comes out crowned."

He laughed. Actually laughed, head tipped back.

"A tiara on a typewriter."

"A crowned typewriter. It's very on theme for this weekend. There was a princess cosplayer downstairs, she'd approve."

"There was a whole family of princesses."

"There's always a whole family of princesses." I picked up the machine and turned it in my hands. It was heavier than it looked, that old thing. Warmish from the case. "And listen. If we're going to buy a tiara anyway, we could make it interesting."

"Interesting how?"

"A dare. A challenge. Whatever couples our age do instead of flirting like we used to." I set the typewriter down. "Whoever finds the best fixer object downstairs wins. Loser wears the winner's choice of costume piece for the rest of the day. The whole floor. Photos allowed."

Reg narrowed his eyes at me. Twenty-two years and I know exactly what that look means. It means he thinks I have a plan. I did have a plan, sort of. Mostly I had a feeling. The day had been flat and funny and I wanted it to keep going, wanted something to happen, wanted my husband to look at me the way he did before we had a daughter and a mortgage and a silent house.

"You're on," he said. "But if I win, I'm choosing the hat."

"The enormous foam one?"

"The enormous foam one."

"Deal. But if I win, you're wearing heels." I stood and grabbed my bag. "Actual heels. You've got lovely ankles, it's a crime nobody's seen them in heels."

"Nobody's going to see them. The vendor floor is going to see them."

"Then you'd better find a better object than me, hadn't you."

He was already digging coins out of his pocket for the vending machine, of all things, to get even with it first. He fed the coins in. Clunk. Clunk. He pressed the button with real malice.

The machine delivered crisps.

"Vindication," Reg announced, holding the bag aloft like a trophy.

"You bribed it."

"Persevered, is what I did." He tore the bag open and offered me the first one. "Right. Tiara hunt. Loser in heels."

"Loser in heels," I agreed, and we headed back down toward the noise, and for the first time in five months I had a tune going in my head. Just four bars. But moving.

The vendor floor swallowed us again. Rows and rows of stalls, banners overhead, that giant dragon still scowling down at everybody from its pole. We split the aisle strategy right away. Reg went toward the stall selling vintage-looking prop phones, and I drifted toward the fashion and wig end of the floor, telling myself I was hunting tiaras.

Reader, I was not hunting tiaras.

There was a stall piled with wigs, sorted by color like yarn in a shop. And right at the front, catching the terrible convention lighting, was a long auburn wig. Wavy. Glossy. The exact auburn I used to dye my own hair when I was twenty-eight and held strong views about everything.

I picked it up. Held it. Put it down. Picked it back up.

"You keep picking that up," said the woman behind the stall. Forty-ish, silver eyebrow ring, reading a manga upside down on purpose, I think.

"It's not my color," I said.