Hop Farm Heat

The fog came in over Frankfurt like it had a personal grudge against me. I found this out standing in the little terminal in Wuppertal's commuter airfield, watching the board flip my flight to Berlin from ON TIME to CANCELLED with all the drama of a curtain falling.

I was fifty-three years old, retired from professional racing, and currently employed as a driving coach at a hop farm, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say out loud. But there it was.

I called Sherrie from the terminal because my phone was at nine percent and I wanted to hear a familiar voice before the battery died.

"Let me guess," she said. "Fog."

"Fog. The whole flight's grounded. Something about Frankfurt being socked in and everything backing up like a bad drain."

"So you're stuck."

"I'm stuck."

"Then get back here. You can have the spare room. It's got the good mattress, the one my sister complained about, but she complains about everything." Sherrie has owned this farm and the driving school attached to it for longer than I've known her, which is twenty years now, and she has never once let me pay for anything, which is its own kind of problem.

"You sure? I don't want to impose."

"Petra. You drove four hours to cover for Hans when his hip went out. You're staying the night. End of discussion. There's soup."

"Well, when you put it that way."

"And bring my thermos back. You've had it since October."

I laughed and hung up and drove the rental back through the grey. The hop fields were bare, all the bines cut down for winter, the poles sticking up in rows like a giant had been playing pick-up sticks and gotten bored. The barn was warm when I came in. The classroom still had the broken jukebox in the corner. Sherrie kept saying she'd get it fixed, and she'd been saying it since before the last federal election, and the jukebox knew she was lying.

I made myself tea and sat in the classroom grading nothing in particular, since my last student had cancelled because of the fog too, and that's when the door opened and I stopped breathing for a second.

Aki.

Aki Takahashi, forty-nine years old, court stenographer, the woman I dated for three years back when I was thirty-nine and too stupid to know a good thing. She stood in the doorway with a laptop bag and a wool coat and an expression like she'd walked into the wrong room, which in a way she had.

"Oh," she said.

"Hi," I said. Brilliant. Twenty years of vocabulary and that's what I had.

"I'm sorry, I'm looking for the, there was a man at the desk, Hans, he said the classroom was..." She trailed off. She was staring at me. I don't blame her. I was staring at her too. "Petra?"

"Yeah. Hi. It's me."

"What are you doing here?"

"I work here. I coach. Sherrie's the one who hired me, she's an old friend. What are you doing here?"

She came in another two steps and set her bag down on a desk like her arms had gotten heavy. "I have a deposition tomorrow. In Wuppertal, of all places. There's a patent dispute and the steno firm farmed it out to me because I have family an hour from here, or had family, anyway. And my flight back is cancelled, the fog, and there are no trains running through the valley tonight because something with the tracks, and the man at the desk said I could wait here because it's the only building with heat for kilometers."

"You're stuck here too."

"I'm stuck here too." She laughed, and it was the same laugh, and that did something to my chest that I didn't care for. "Of course we are. Of course this is what happens. Fourteen years and the universe picks a fog bank."

"Fourteen years," I said. "Is it that long?"

"You know it's that long. You sent me a Christmas card in March last year."

"The postal service is slow."

"The postal service is not that slow, Petra."

I will admit here that I did not know what to do with my hands, so I picked up the thermos and poured her a tea without asking, the way you do for someone you used to know how she took it. Two sugars. I remembered. I put two sugars in and handed it over and she looked at the cup like it had a message written on the bottom.

"Two sugars," she said. "You remembered."

"Don't make it a thing."

"It's a small thing."

"It's tea, Aki."

"It's two sugars after fourteen years. Sit down before you spill that."

I sat. We drank tea in a barn classroom while the fog ate the hop fields outside the window. The jukebox sat in its corner being broken and useless, which I could relate to.

"So," she said finally. "Driving school. On a hop farm."

"It's Sherrie's idea. Adults who are scared of driving, or lost their license, or never learned. She runs the farm, I teach the lessons, everyone's happy. Mostly. Some of them cry. One man cried about roundabouts for forty minutes."

"That sounds familiar. You cried about a parking garage once."

"I did not cry. I had strong feelings about the architecture."

"You called it a concrete throat."

"It is a concrete throat. That garage in Düsseldorf, you remember it, the ramps go the wrong way on purpose, it's a design crime."

She was smiling into her tea. God, I had missed making her smile, and I hated that I'd noticed I missed it.

The door banged open then and one of my actual students came in, early, apologetic, covered in a fine mist of fog-damp. Ingrid, sixty-one, terrified of highway driving, sweet as anything.

"Hans said you could fit me in today even though my usual is Thursday," she said, and then she saw Aki and stopped. "Oh. Hello."

"This is Aki, an old friend. Aki, Ingrid. She's doing her highway module today."

"Old friend," Aki repeated, quietly, like she was tasting the word. Then she said, louder, "I'll just sit in the back. I have transcripts to mark up."

"Or you could watch," Ingrid said. "The more the merrier, my husband always says, though he's wrong about most things."

So the lesson happened with Aki in the back row. I took Ingrid out in the dual-control car and we did the low roads first, the ones between the fields, and I talked her through the mirror checks and she did them all twice and still asked me if she'd done them, which she had. When we came back for the break, Ingrid went off to the kitchen to find the soup, and Aki was standing by the jukebox.

She had her hand flat on its glass top.

"This thing still doesn't work?" she said.

"Never has. Sherrie bought it at an estate sale. It eats coins and plays nothing. It's basically a very heavy liar."

"I remember it. That first weekend I came to visit you here, before we were, you know. Before." She tapped the glass. "You put a mark in it. Coin slot. You said the machine owed you."

"I did say that."

"You were very certain the machine owed you."

"I am a very certain person."

She looked at me then, properly, the way she used to look at me across a breakfast table, and I had to remind my lungs to keep working. This is the part where I admit I don't remember exactly what I said next, because my head went somewhere loud, but the shape of it was this: I said the breakup was my fault, and she said it wasn't, it was both of us, and I said no, listen, you wanted to settle down and I wanted the next season and the season after that, and I made you feel like a stop on a route.

"You didn't make me feel like a stop," she said. "You made me feel like the destination. That was the problem. You kept driving anyway."

"That's not fair."

"It's completely fair. It's the fairest thing I've ever said to anyone." She was quiet a second. "I never dated anyone after you. There. That's my card. Flip yours."

"You never..."

"Fourteen years, Petra. A few terrible dinner dates that I left early. Then nothing. You?"

"A woman named Claudia for about a year. It didn't take. She said I talked about the past too much, which was rich, because I never talked about you."

Ingrid came back in with soup for everyone, because Sherrie had clearly briefed her, and we ate it at the little desks like schoolchildren, and Ingrid told a story about her husband reversing into a ditch that had nothing to do with anything and everything to do with how grateful I was for the interruption.

After, Ingrid said she wanted to try the highway stretch while there was still light, and I said there was no light left, the fog had eaten it, and she said that was fine, she'd do it in the fog or not at all, she was in a mood, and who was I to argue.

"I'll drive with you," Aki said, surprising both of us. "If that's all right. I want to see you do the coaching thing."

"You've seen me drive."

"Racing. Not this. Not patience."

So we all three got in the car, Ingrid at the wheel with her hands at ten and two like she was holding a bird, Aki beside me in the passenger seat, and the fog sat on the road ahead like a wall we were going to have to talk our way through. Ingrid asked a question about merging. I started to answer. And under my breath, quiet enough that only the seat between us could hear it, I said, "We're going to finish that conversation later."

"I know," Aki said. "I'm counting on it."

We dropped Ingrid back at the farm at four forty. She was glowing. She had done a highway merge in fog and lived, and she told us so twice in the barn while taking off her boots.

"You're a miracle worker, Petra," she said. "Both of you. Even the quiet one in the back."

"She's not quiet," I said. "She's a stenographer. She's transcribing us."

"Oh, is she? Well, put down that my husband owes me an apology about the ditch."

And then she was gone, headlights cutting a small cone into the fog, and it was just us and the barn and the jukebox.

Aki walked over to it again. She put her hand flat on the glass top the same way she had before, like she was taking its temperature.

"There is one trick to it," I said.

"You're lying."

"I never lied to you about machines. Only about myself, and we've covered that." I came over and stood next to her, close enough that our shoulders touched. "Sherrie showed me. You don't press the buttons. You press the buttons and then you rap the left side, twice, about here." I knocked the cabinet with two knuckles. "Some spring inside sticks. The knock knocks it loose."

"That can't work."