Keys in the Ink

I'm forty-four years old, newly divorced, and I was standing in the parking lot of the Snowy River Curling Club arguing with a laminated sign. That's about as good a summary of my life as any.

The sign said the weekend retreat cabins were assigned by email. My email said I had cabin three, single occupancy, which was the whole reason I'd said yes to this trip. Kendra had talked me into it back in October, when I was still eating supper off a cardboard box because my forks were in a storage unit across town. "One weekend," she'd said. "You drink bad wine, you throw some rocks down the ice, you remember who you were before the wedding." I'd said yes mostly because Kendra has never once talked me into anything I regretted, in twenty-two years of friendship.

The cabin situation, it turned out, was not one of her wins.

"Here's the thing," said Damian, who owns the place, holding a clipboard like it might defend him. "We've got five cabins and eleven people this weekend. Everyone paired off except you two."

"Except me two?"

"You and Kendra. Cabin one has two beds. It's actually the nicest one." He said it the way people say things when they're reading off a list of problems that are not his problems. "There's a wood stove. Decent mattress, at least on one bed. The other one's from the seventies but it holds up."

"Does it have a lock on the bedroom door?"

He laughed. I did not laugh. I'd known Damian eight years through this club and he'd never once done anything useful in an argument, but he was good at renting cabins and worse at apologies. "I can drive to town and get a cot," he offered, "but honestly it'll snow tonight and the road's not great."

I looked at the sky, which was doing that flat grey Manitoba thing where it isn't snowing yet but is clearly thinking about it. Then I looked at my car, a Corolla with a hundred and ninety thousand kilometers on it that I'd been told in the divorce settlement was mine, which felt less like a prize than it sounded.

"Fine," I said. "The seventies bed better not have a vibe."

"It has a vibe," he said. "It's very authentic."

* * *

Kendra was already at the cabin when I got there, because of course she was. Forty-four years old, probate lawyer, and she still arrives everywhere fifteen minutes early with a thermos and a plan. She had the wood stove going and her bag unpacked and she'd claimed the decent bed, which she announced without shame.

"Legal training," she said. "You snooze, you lose, you get the mattress with a divot shaped like a hunched old man."

I dropped my bag inside the door and looked around. The cabin was the kind of place that had been furnished by donation. A couch that had clearly lived its whole previous life in a church basement. A rug with a pattern that hurt to think about. And on the shelf above the fireplace, an old typewriter, the bulky black kind with the round keys, sitting there like it had been placed by a set decorator.

"Look at that," Kendra said, nodding at it. "The R key doesn't work. I tried it."

I walked over and looked. She was right. There was a gap in the keyboard where the R should be, a little round hole of absence. I hit the E instead and it typed fine, smug about it.

"Someone should write to the owner," I said.

"Can't," she said. "They'd be missing an R."

I laughed, and she looked pleased with herself, and I had the specific warm feeling I always get around Kendra, the one I'd spent two decades folding up small and putting in the back of a drawer with the other things I didn't look at.

"There's a metaphor in there somewhere," she said, pouring coffee into the thermos lid and handing it to me. "Things left unfinished. The story that can't quite say its own name."

"You've been reading the retreat brochure."

"Damian wrote it. It's six pages and it rhymes twice." She sat down on the good bed and looked at me with that direct look she has, the one that got her through law school and about four hundred estate disputes. "How are you doing? Actually."

"Actually, I don't know." I sat on the bad bed, which was, in fairness, not as bad as advertised. "Eight months ago I was married. Now I'm sharing a cabin at a curling club with my best friend and there's a typewriter judging me."

"The typewriter isn't judging you. It's incomplete. There's a difference." She sipped her coffee. "Besides, you always wanted to write. Maybe it's a sign."

"A sign to do what, type things without the letter R?"

"A sign to finish something," she said, and then she stood up and changed the subject, which is very Kendra. She can open a door onto the real conversation and then decide the room's too cold and shut it again. I've watched her do it for twenty-two years.

We got ready for the evening social. The retreat schedule, laminated, like everything here, said supper at six, band at eight, bonfire at ten, weather permitting. Kendra wore a green sweater that made her eyes do the thing they do, and I wore the first clean thing I found, and we drove the four minutes back to the club because the wind had come up and neither of us had dressed for it.

* * *

The bar at the Snowy River is a stretch of counter with eleven stools and a trophy case from 1998 that nobody's opened since. The band was setting up in the corner, and the band was Otis, which meant the evening was going to be loud and good. He's fifty-one now, greying at the temples, still plays drums like a man getting even with the kit for something it did in a past life. He'd known both of us for twenty years, since the days when Kendra and I used to go watch whatever local band would let us stand near the stage.

"Adelaide!" he shouted, though I was four feet away. Otis communicates at one volume. "Heard about the cabin situation. You and Kendra, one roof. Scandalous."

"It's a booking error."

"Sure it is." He winked at me and went back to tuning something that did not want tuning.

I got a beer and found a spot at a table with some of the club people, and then the band started and the evening turned into what these evenings turn into. Otis's band plays everything too fast and everyone dances anyway, or in the case of the curlers, sways in a way that would get you penalized on ice.

And I watched Kendra.

She was across the room laughing with the Fletchers, who are club people from way back, and she had her head tipped back the way she does when something is genuinely funny, and the green sweater caught the string lights, and I felt the old pull. The one from when we were twenty-two, in my kitchen on Barton Avenue, the night before her birthday, when I kissed her once and she kissed me back and then I said something cowardly about how it didn't have to mean anything, and she agreed, because she was as scared as I was, and we never spoke of it again except in the code of a friendship that has carried it quietly ever since.

Twenty-two years of carrying a thing gets heavy. You don't notice until you put the bag down for a minute.

Otis kicked into a song we used to dance to, and Kendra caught my eye across the room and pointed at me with her beer bottle, which meant get over here, and I went, because I always go. She pulled me into the sway of people and we danced the way we danced in our twenties, badly, laughing, and her hand found mine and neither of us let go.

"So," she said, close to my ear, over the drums. "The cabin. The typewriter. Missing R."

"I know."

"You want to write something on it? Something unfinished?" She was grinning, but there was something under the grin, the way there has sometimes been something under the grin for two decades, and I looked at her and felt the whole folded-up drawer of my chest rattle open about an inch.

"Maybe," I said. "If the wine's bad enough."

Otis counted off the next song and the floor got loud, and Kendra squeezed my hand once, quick, like punctuation, and let go.

The band played three encores, because Otis has never met an exit he didn't want to ruin, and by the time we got back to the cabin it was past midnight and the wind had decided to become a proper Manitoba wind, the kind that shoves you through your own front door. Kendra got the fire going while I found the wine, which was not good, which was the whole point.

We ended up on the couch with our feet on the coffee table, the way we've sat a thousand times, and the fire did its crackling thing, and the typewriter sat on the shelf above the fireplace with its little gap where the R should be, and I don't know why I kept looking at it. Maybe because a thing with a missing piece is easier to look at than a person with one.

"So," Kendra said, turning her glass by the stem. "The divorce. You've said approximately nine words about it all day."

"There aren't that many words. He got the house. I got the Corolla. We signed things in a strip mall office with a fake ficus, and then I drove home and ate cereal for supper. That's the divorce. It wasn't dramatic. That's almost the worst part. Fifteen years and it ended like a lease not being renewed."

"How are you actually doing?"

"I don't know yet. Ask me in a season." I looked into my wine. "I keep waiting to feel worse than I do, which makes me feel worse, if that makes sense. He's fine. I'm fine. The dog, and I'm aware we never had a dog, would have been the only casualty."

"You always wanted a dog."

"I always wanted a lot of things." I said it before I'd decided to, and the fire popped, and Kendra went still in the way she goes still when a door she opened earlier swings back on its hinge.

"Such as," she said, carefully casual, which is not a real thing anyone is.

I could have let it pass. Twenty-two years of practice at letting it pass. But I was forty-four and sitting in a rental cabin with a broken typewriter and half a bottle of something cheap, and I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the drive.

"You know such as," I said.

"Do I."

"Kendra." She turned her glass another quarter turn and said nothing, and I realized she was nervous, actually nervous, and that helped somehow, that we were both holding the same hot pan. "I've been thinking about it since the parking lot this morning. Probably since the dance floor. Honestly, probably since Barton Avenue, on a loop, with the volume turned down so low I could pretend it wasn't playing."

"The kiss," she said quietly.

"The kiss. One kiss. The night before your twenty-second birthday, God. I kissed you, you kissed me back, and then I panicked and told you it didn't have to mean anything, and you said okay, and we shook hands on it, essentially. We shook hands on not talking about it and then we didn't talk about it for twenty-two years."

"Twenty-two years. I counted once." She took a breath. "Not recently. Years ago. I want to say that up front, that I'm not sitting on a ledger."

"I know you're not. You'd have told me. You tell me everything else." I set my glass down because my hands wanted something to do and wine wasn't it. "What did you count?"

"Days. For a while. It stopped mattering and I stopped counting and then I was a probate lawyer with a thermos and a plan and a life that runs on time." She laughed, a short one, mostly air. "You want to know the thing I wondered? All this time, off and on?"

"Tell me."

"I wondered what would have happened if we'd tried. If you hadn't said the thing about it not meaning anything, or if I'd said, actually, it means something to me. Would it have worked? Would we have been terrible for each other and blown up the friendship by twenty-four? Would we be divorced from each other by now instead of you divorced from a man with a fake ficus?" She looked at the fire. "I never regretted not saying anything, exactly. I regretted never finding out."

"That's the same thing I regret. Exactly that. Not the not-doing, the not-knowing." I laughed too, because of course it was the same, after all this, of course. "We wasted a perfectly good symmetry."

"We're efficient people."

"Kendra, I'm tired of wondering." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I've been divorced for four months and I keep making lists of what I want next, and every list has the same item at the bottom that I keep crossing out and rewriting, and the item is you, and I'd like to stop crossing it out. If you'll tell me no, tell me now, and we'll go back to being the two best friends in this cabin and I will never bring it up again, I swear it on the typewriter."

She didn't answer right away. She looked at me, and I mean really looked, the way she reads a will, line by line, and I sat there and let her, because if this was the audit then I wanted the audit done right.

"You kissed me first last time," she said finally. "Twenty-two years ago. In your kitchen, with the dishes still on the table."

"I remember."