Finally Unpacking

Penelope stood in the middle of her new apartment and laughed at herself. Forty-two years old, a police officer with a pension building up and a gun safe in the corner, and she was grinning like a fool at a wall she hadn't even hung anything on yet.

It was the strangest feeling. For two years, Jeff had been a voice and a face on a screen. Late-night calls that started when she was forty and never really stopped, the two of them talking until one of them fell asleep mid-sentence and the other had to decide whether to hang up or just sit there listening to the soft breathing. Distance had been a wall between them, a thick one, but a predictable one. Now there was no wall. There was a hallway, and on the other side of that hallway was a man she had never touched, and she was going to have to figure out what to do with her hands when she saw him.

She looked around at the boxes. The movers had left them stacked in a maze, kitchen stuff marked in her own handwriting, books, the box she was most nervous about, the one full of framed photos. Bare bulb overhead, bare walls, the smell of new paint and somebody's leftover cigarette years. It didn't feel like hers yet. Maybe it would by morning.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

"Hey, it's me. I'm coming up with pizza and a bottle of something red. Don't argue, I already bought it."

"You bought wine before you helped me move anything?"

"I bought wine because you moved. The helping is free. Open your door, I've got my hands full."

She heard his footsteps on the stairs before she saw him, that heavy even tread she'd only ever heard through a phone speaker when he walked around his place talking to her. Then there he was in her doorway, Jeff, forty-four years old, holding a pizza box balanced on top of a paper bag with the neck of a wine bottle sticking out of it, looking exactly like his pictures and completely different at the same time.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi yourself. You're taller than I imagined."

"You imagined wrong for two years?"

"I imagined you from a webcam, genius. Those lie about everything." She stepped forward and then both of them hesitated, that half-second of two people who knew each other's whole lives but had never been in the same room. Then he shifted the pizza to one arm and she gave in and hugged him, and it was awkward and joyful at once, his chin over her shoulder, the box crinkling between them.

His hand settled on her back and stayed there, warm through her shirt, and she felt that warmth all the way down her spine. Two years of words and the first thing she learned about him in person was the heat of his palm.

"Okay," he said into her hair, "this is real. You're actually here."

"Apparently. Somebody signed a lease and everything."

They ate on the floor, because there was no table and no chairs, sitting cross-legged among the boxes with the pizza open between them like a campfire. He poured the wine into two coffee mugs because her cups were still packed, and she teased him about it and he shrugged and said mugs were underrated, and it was easy. That was the part that surprised her, how easy it was. The conversation was the same conversation they'd been having for two years, just with a body attached to the voice.

"So the drive," he said. "Three days? You really drove the whole thing?"

"Three and a half. I stopped in Denver to sleep because there was no way I was driving the mountains at night."

"You could have flown."

"I know. I wanted to see the country, and I wanted my car, and honestly I wanted the time to think. By the time I hit Nebraska I was asking myself what the hell I was doing, moving halfway across the country for a man I met on a forum about old cameras."

"And what did you answer?"

"I answered that I'd been asking myself that for two years and the answer never changed."

He turned his mug in his hands and looked happy in a quiet way, the way he did on calls when she said something that landed right. He told her about the school year starting, his art students, a kid who could already paint better at twenty-one than Jeff could at thirty. She told him about the transfer, the new precinct, the lieutenant who'd already assigned her a partner who chewed toothpicks and never stopped talking.

"You'll love him by Christmas," Jeff said.

"I'll tolerate him by Christmas. That's my promise to myself."

The light was going golden outside her one window, early autumn coming through the glass, and the pizza was half gone, and at some point she reached over and pulled the photo box toward her and cut it open with a kitchen knife that had been sitting on the counter because she hadn't unpacked it yet.

"Ooh, can I see?" Jeff said, already leaning.

"Sure. Careful with the frames, some of the glass is loose."

She lifted them out one at a time and set them against the wall where a shelf would someday go. Her parents at their anniversary party. Her and two academy classmates, all of them looking twenty-seven and invincible. Her old patrol car, which her brother had framed as a joke.

Jeff picked up one near the bottom of the box and held it with both hands. It was a woman, small and straight-backed, standing in a garden, holding Penelope's arm, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.

"Who's this? She looks like you."

"That's my Lola. My grandmother." Penelope took the frame from him gently and looked at it. "She raised a big chunk of me, honestly. My mom worked nights a lot when I was little, so I stayed at Lola's house. She had this garden she fought the neighborhood squirrels over like it was a war."

"She looks like she means business."

"Oh, she meant business about everything. Food, manners, prayers. Come Christmas, her house was the center of the whole family. Everybody crammed in, three generations at least, and she cooked for days beforehand. There was this one dish, embutido, steamed meatloaf she rolled herself, and she'd guard the pot and portion it out like it was gold. And after the meal, the kids had to do this thing where we'd take turns greeting the elders and they'd say a blessing over us. Hand on your head, words in the old mixed way she talked. If you did it right, you got money in an envelope."

"You did it right, I assume."

"I was the champion. I had a system. I memorized the respectful phrases before I could ride a bike." She laughed and set the frame down. "She's been gone six years now. But every Christmas I still make rice and try her pork recipe and it's never quite right, and I get mad, and my mom tells me Lola left something out on purpose so we'd all keep trying."

"That's a good trick," Jeff said softly. "Immortality through a withheld ingredient."

"Right? Sneaky old woman. She'd have liked you. She liked men who could cook and didn't talk too much."

"I can cook. I don't talk too much. So I'm in."

"You're in. She'd have fed you until you begged for mercy." Penelope looked at the frame leaning against the wall, the garden, the laugh, and something in her chest went warm and sore at the same time. It was odd, showing him this in person instead of over a screen. On calls she could describe things and keep them at a distance. Here the actual photo sat between them on the floor, and his knee was a foot from hers, and he was looking at her family the way he looked at paintings he loved.

"Can I ask," he said, "do you think you'll do all that here? The Christmas thing, the big house full of people?"

"Eventually. My parents will come out for the holidays, I'm sure, my mom already said so twice this week. And my cousins will find any excuse to visit. Filipinos don't really understand the concept of visiting light. They show up with food and stay four days."

"Sounds terrible," he said, deadpan, and she swatted his arm with a rolled-up sheet of packing paper.

"It's the best thing about me, honestly. It took me until my thirties to appreciate it. When you grow up with it, you just think every family argues about who made the best pancit. Then you grow up and find out most people eat alone."

He was quiet a moment. Then he reached over and straightened the Lola frame, tilted it a little more upright against the wall, careful with it.

"Then we'll start one," he said. "A house full of people. Or a small apartment full of people, at least. I'm not picky."

Penelope looked at him, at this man she had chosen from two thousand miles away and then driven three and a half days toward, and her chest did that warm sore thing again, bigger this time.

"You say that like it's simple."

"It is simple. The complicated part was getting you here. That part's done. You're here, I'm here, there's pizza." He picked up a slice and pointed it at her like a pointer. "The rest is just details."

"Details like what?"

"Details like helping you unpack, so you stop living out of boxes. Details like showing you where the good grocery store is. Details like..." He trailed off, and she watched him decide whether to finish the sentence. "...like figuring out what we are now that the wall's gone."

"Yeah," she said. "That detail."

Outside, the sky was going purple, and somewhere down the block a band was warming up in a garage, drums and a trumpet, the sound of a college town in September. Penelope poured the last of the wine into both mugs and handed him his, and their fingers touched on the handoff, and neither of them pretended it was an accident.

"So," she said. "You helping me unpack, or are you just here for the free pizza?"

"I'm here for the free pizza. But I'll unpack anyway."

They sat there a while longer, drinking, talking about nothing, the boxes all around them like a cardboard city, and Penelope kept catching herself looking at his hands and his mouth and thinking about how a person could know somebody completely and still not know the weight of their hand on your back until it was actually there.

They got up eventually, because the boxes weren't going to unpack themselves, and Jeff turned out to be the kind of helper who actually helped instead of standing around asking where things went. He cleared a path to the bedroom wall while she cut tape, and together they wrestled the box of books across the floor.

"This one weighs more than you do," he said, gripping one side.

"I was a cop for sixteen years, I could carry this up three flights." She took the other side. "Could. Past tense. My knees have filed their own paperwork since."

They lifted it together, shuffled it to the shelf wall, and the thing about lifting something heavy with a person is you end up pressed against them. His shoulder was solid against hers, warmer than she expected through his shirt, and for a second they were both just holding the box and breathing and not moving.

"Okay," he said. "On three. One, two..."

The box went onto the shelf with a thud that shook the whole unit. Penelope stayed leaning there a moment, hand flat on the cardboard, and Jeff was still close enough