Gear Shift

The show ended around nine, and by ten the fairground lot was nothing but empty sawhorses and a few stragglers towing their trailers home. I hung around, because I always do. Vince Cummings, fifty-five years old, single, the guy who stays late to make sure the rope lines get stowed. Some habits you build at twenty and never shake.

Claire Kang found me at the refreshment table when there was nothing left on it but napkins.

"Vince Cummings," she said. "You got old."

"So did you. You look good doing it, though."

She laughed, and that laugh was exactly the same as it had been thirty-three years ago, when we were both twenty-two and arguing about suspension geometry at two in the morning. "Smooth. You always were smooth with a wrench and terrible with words."

"That's a fair summary of my whole life, actually."

We talked. That was the strange part. You'd think after three decades of occasional Christmas emails, there'd be this awkward gap to fill. There wasn't. She told me she does restoration consulting for a museum collection now, which sounded fancy until she said it mostly means arguing with trustees about original paint codes. I told her about my upholstery shop, the steady work, the quiet life. She nodded like she understood exactly what quiet life meant, and maybe she did.

"Come see the garage," she said. "The museum stores three cars in the back of Hollis's old place. I should check on them before I drive home tomorrow anyway."

That's how I ended up in the back room of a garage that smelled of oil and dust and old rubber, at eleven at night, with a woman I'd once built a race car with. There were disassembled engines on stands, tool chests with cracked red paint, and a worn leather sofa pushed against the wall next to a beer fridge that hummed like it was thinking about quitting.

She opened two beers and sat down closer than she needed to. I sat beside her and the leather creaked under both of us.

"So tell me about the team," she said. "The old team. What do you actually remember?"

"The year we lost the endurance event because your fuel calculation was off by four percent."

"My calculation? You were the one who insisted on the taller gearing."

"That's true. I was wrong and I own it. But the fuel was yours."

She smacked my arm, not hard, and we were both grinning like idiots. Thirty-three years fell away in about ten seconds. It was a good feeling. I don't get a lot of those.

"You know what I remember," she said, quieter now, looking at her bottle. "I remember the victory party. The year before, when we took second at Michigan."

I knew exactly what she meant. There had been one kiss, behind the truck bay, both of us too young and too scared to do anything about it. We'd never once mentioned it since. Not in thirty-three years of Christmas emails.

"The party, huh," I said.

"The kiss, Vince. You can say the word."

"You said it first."

"I did." She turned to look at me. The room had one work light on, way across the garage, so her face was half shadow. "I've thought about that kiss more times than I'd admit to most people. I was wondering if you had."

"Every time I do a headliner install I think about it. Don't ask me why. The brain makes weird connections."

She laughed again. "You think about me while you staple fabric to cardboard?"

"Roughly quarterly, yes."

"God." She shook her head, but she was smiling. "Okay. Full honesty, since we're apparently doing this. I've been single for six years. Divorced, then one long slow disaster of a relationship, then nothing. I'm not looking for anything."

"I'm not looking for anything either. Never been married. Never even close. I've always been too sensible for my own good, if you want the truth."

"Too sensible." She said it like she was tasting it. "That's a way to put it. I used to watch you in college, you know. You'd check the torque spec three times on a bolt nobody else had even touched. I thought, that man will never do anything reckless as long as he lives."

"That's a fair read. I've never done a reckless thing. Well. One."

"Which one?"

"You know which one."

"The kiss," she said.

"The kiss."

We looked at each other for a while then. Not a long dramatic stare, nothing like the movies. Just a long enough pause that I knew if I was ever going to be reckless, it was going to be right then, in a dusty back room, at my age, with a woman from a lifetime ago.

I reached over and brushed her knee. She didn't pull away. She looked down at my hand and then back up at me, and she said, "Well. Are you going to kiss me again or do I have to do everything myself?"

"Fair warning, I'm even worse at this than I was at twenty-two."

"Then we're even, because so am I."

I leaned in slow, so she had every chance to change her mind, and she didn't. The kiss was tentative at first, careful, two people relearning something. Then her hand came up to the side of my face and it wasn't careful anymore. We kissed until my beer was warm on the arm of the sofa and neither of us cared.

"Okay," she said finally, pulling back an inch, breathing harder than before. "Okay. So. What happens now? Because I like where this is going, but I'm fifty-five and I don't do guessing games anymore."

"Neither do I. Here's my thinking. No promises, nobody's phone number gets expectations attached, and either of us can call it off at any second, no reason needed. Just tonight. Then we go back to our sensible lives and quarterly thoughts."

"That is the least romantic proposal I've ever heard," she said. "I accept completely."

"Before we go anywhere, one thing. I've got a travel bag in the truck. Nothing planned, I want to be plain about that. But I hoped. There's condoms in there. And lube."

She blinked, and then she laughed, a real laugh, head back. "You hoped."

"I hoped. A man can hope."

"Vince, that's the most honest thing anyone's said to me in years. Go get the bag. I'm not