Flying Kites at Dusk

I'd like to tell you I drove up to Gaborone that morning feeling calm and confident, but the truth is I'd been rehearsing what to say for three hours and every version sounded like something a coward would say, which was fitting, because thirty years of being a coward was the whole problem, if I'm being plain about it. My name is Brad, I'm sixty-five years old, I run a small winery outside Stellenbosch, and I have never been married, mostly because the one woman I wanted to marry told me I was too careful and then packed up and moved to another country. That woman was Luce, she's fifty-five now, and she'd sent me an email three weeks earlier with a subject line that just said KITES, and somehow that was enough to get me to drive eleven hours with a case of my own shiraz in the back seat like a man bringing a peace offering to a war he'd started by doing nothing.

The plan was the annual kite-flying evening at the Kang dark fiber facility, out in the Kalahari, where her old friends Karin and Edgar put on this thing every year for the staff and whoever they liked well enough to drag along. Karin runs the technical side of the place and Edgar is head of security, and I'd known them both back when Luce and I were a thing, if two dates and one kiss counts as a thing, which apparently it did, because here I was, thirty years later, combing my hair in the rearview mirror outside her apartment building like a fool.

She came out carrying a suitcase and a piano key.

Not a piano. A piano key. One single ivory-colored key, cracked down the middle, held up in her hand like she was hailing a cab with it.

"Okay," I said, getting out to take her bag, "I have to ask."

"It's from a spinet," she said, like that explained anything, and Luce at fifty-five talked exactly like Luce at twenty-five, fast and certain, brown skin and gray coming in at the temples and no patience whatsoever for slow people, which had always been the problem between us, hadn't it. "I bought the whole piano for two hundred pula at a junk auction, and it's junk, mostly, but the keys are nice and heavy, and I'm going to use them as weight on the tail of the big kite. A piano key kite tail, Brad. You can't tell me that's not wonderful."

"It's insane," I said, "and I've missed it. Give me that."

I put the key on the dash where it sat there gleaming like a tooth, and we pulled out of Gaborone around two in the afternoon with the case of wine rattling gently behind us, and for the first hour we did the polite stuff, the weather, the road works near Lobatse, whether the winery was doing well, whether the fiber facility was doing well, both of us saying fine, fine, fine like a couple of people reading off cue cards.

Then somewhere past the turnoff where the land starts going red and empty, she looked over at me and said, "You never called me again, you know. After that night. I used to sit by the phone like an idiot."

"I know," I said.

"You know? That's it? I waited weeks, Brad. Weeks. And then I got so mad I moved to another continent just to spite you, and you're sitting there saying I know like it's the weather."

"Well, what do you want me to say, Luce? You want me to say I was scared? Fine, I was scared. I was thirty-five years old and I'd kissed you on your doorstep and it was the best kiss of my life and I figured you'd kissed a lot of men and compared notes and I came in dead last, so I did the brave thing and never called."

She was quiet for a while, watching the acacia trees go by, one every few kilometers like fence posts.

"You absolute idiot," she said finally, but she was smiling when she said it, and her hand came off her knee and sat on the seat between us, not reaching, just sitting there, and I understood that was an invitation if I wanted to take it, and I did, I put my hand over hers and she didn't pull away. "I dumped you because you were too careful, you know that? That was my whole reason. One kiss and you went into hibernation, and I figured, well, if that's how he handles a good thing, imagine how he handles a hard thing."

"That's fair," I said. "That's painfully fair."

"Thirty years, Brad. Do you know what I did in thirty years? I got a doctorate. I built training courses for fiber technicians all over this continent. I dated four men, all of them wrong, all of them talkers. And every time I heard a piano, which is a strange thing to have happen to you, I thought about that kiss."

"Every time?"

"Luce," she said, imitating herself, "don't make me say it twice."

The sun was getting low and orange by the time we rolled into Kang, and there it was, the facility, low and pale against the sand, all cooling vents and cable trenches, with the racks inside humming the hum you can feel in your teeth if you stand in the wrong room. Karin came out of the door in a canvas hat with a kite spool already on her wrist, and Edgar was behind her carrying what looked like an entire hardware store tied to a pole.

"Brad!" Karin shouted, and she's sixty-one and has never once moderated her voice in her life. "You old fool, look at your gray hair!"

"Look at yours," I said, and we hugged, and Edgar shook my hand with the grip of a man who checks IDs for a living and said, "So you're the famous coward. She's mentioned you for thirty years, my friend, we had bets going."

"Edgar," Luce said warningly.

"Bets?" I said.

"Nothing," Edgar said, grinning like a hyena. "Dinner's at six, kites at dusk, wine is welcome, that case is very welcome."

Karin walked me in past the racks, and I'll admit I don't understand one bit of it, dark fiber they call it, fiber that's laid in the ground and lit up later, all that light waiting in the dark under the sand for somebody to decide to turn it on. Luce walked beside me and said, quietly, so the others couldn't hear, "That's us, you know. Laid thirty years ago. Just waiting for somebody to switch it on."

I looked at her and she looked at me, and there it was again, that same charge from the doorstep, and this time I didn't plan to sit by any phone.

Karin marched us out back past a fence of cable markers to a flat stretch of sand where about fifteen people were already setting up kites, and the wind off the Kalahari in the evening is a reliable thing, steady from the west, cool once the sun drops, exactly the sort of wind that makes a place like this worth staying in. She started handing out kites from a cardboard box like a dealer at a card table, and she held strong views about which kite went to which person, and she was not shy about them.

"Luce, you get the big green one, it's the steadiest, I know you overthink everything," she said, shoving it across. "Brad, you get the box kite, because a man who drives eleven hours to see a woman should have to work for it a little."

"Is that what this is, then?" Edgar said, stringing out his line from the pole. "Eleven hours. For a kite. In my day we called that courtship, and we did it in person, and we didn't wait thirty years for the follow-up."

"The follow-up was one kiss," Karin said, tying a knot without looking at it. "I heard about that kiss for a decade. Luce called me from Pretoria. She was still in Pretoria, weren't you, Luce, before the doctorate, before all of it, and she called me and she said, Karin, he kissed me, and then she said nothing else for a full minute, and I had to check if the line was dead."

"Karin," Luce said, and her face had gone a color the sunset would have been proud of.

"I'm just telling the man the historical record," Karin said, entirely unbothered, and handed me a spool. "Brad, your line, don't cross it with hers, I know how these evenings go."

So we stood out on the sand with the whole crowd of them, technicians and a couple of drivers and a cook from the common room who flew a kite shaped like a fish and flew it better than anyone, and I have to tell you, I hadn't flown a kite since I was a boy in Paarl, and my hands remembered more than I expected. The box kite went up crooked, wobbled, and then caught, and it pulled on my arms like something alive, and I laughed out loud like an idiot and didn't care who heard.

Luce's green kite went up clean and smooth, the piano key hanging off the tail turning slowly in the light, catching orange, and I watched it instead of my own kite and my own kite paid for it immediately by diving toward her line.

"Brad, your line!" Karin hollered from thirty meters away. "What did I just say."

"Well, he never was much good at keeping things separate," Edgar called back, and there was general laughter down the line of kite flyers, the kind that has been going on for years without you, the kind you have to earn your way back into.

The two lines crossed about twenty meters up, and then the wind did what wind does, which is wrap them around each other in three neat turns, and I reeled in as fast as I could and Luce reeled in and we met in the middle of the flat with both kites dropping and both spools hissing, and for about four minutes the two of us were elbow to elbow untangling string in the last of the light.

I'll be honest about the physics of it, because the physics is the whole point. You cannot untangle two kite lines without your hands ending up in the same place, over and over, and the fourth or fifth time it happened her fingers were under mine and neither of us moved them for a second longer than the job required, and the second after that was longer than the job required, and I felt it go up my arm like current in a cable, and she looked at me and I looked at her and we were both pretending to study the string.

"There," she said, finally freeing the last loop. "There, that's it, we're clear."

"Are we," I said, and I meant something else by it and she knew I meant something else by it, and she didn't answer, she just held the line between us with both our hands still on it, and then Karin's voice came over the sand and broke the moment like a rock through a window, which I forgave her for later, mostly.

"Right, everybody," Karin bellowed, reeling in with the efficiency of a woman who has done this a hundred times. "The braai is at the picnic ground, one kilometer down the road, cars leave in ten minutes, Brad, that case of shiraz is coming with us, Edgar, put the pole down, you're not taking a kite to dinner, we've talked about this."

"One time," Edgar said. "One time I flew a kite at a braai and I'm a legend for the wrong reasons."

"It hit the braai, Edgar," Karin said. "It caught fire. Over the meat. There are people here who still talk about it."

"It was a good kite," Edgar said to me, quietly, like a man confiding in a friend. "It was a great kite. It died with honor."

People started folding up kites and coiling lines, and I stood there holding my spool and Luce stood a step away from me holding hers, and the sun had gone mostly down and the first stars were showing over the facility roof, and somewhere under our feet, all that dark fiber was running out toward the horizon, full of light that hadn't been switched on yet.

"Ride with me," Luce said. It wasn't quite a question. "I mean, back to the braai. Karin will drive you otherwise and Karin drives like the road owes her money."

"I've survived worse roads," I said. "But all right. Yes."

She nodded, and we walked back to the lot past the lone acacia, and I carried the case of wine, which gave my hands something to do, which was probably good, because what I wanted to do with them was not something you do in a parking lot in front of your host's husband, even a husband who has clearly been running a betting pool about you for three decades.

At the picnic ground there was a fire pit already going, and meat, an enormous amount of meat, and Karin directed traffic the way she directs everything, loudly and correctly. I opened the shiraz and poured for anyone who held out a glass, and Edgar appeared at my elbow with his own glass and steered me a few steps away from the fire.

"So," he said. "The cautious years. That's what she called them, you know. She'd come out here for the kite evenings, back when she was flying down from another country twice a year, and somebody would ask about you, and she'd say, oh, Brad, and then she'd say, the cautious years, and change the subject."

"She said that?"

"Every time. Karin kept a tally on the whiteboard in the common room for a while, until I made her take it down