Late Shift Relief

I can't believe we're still scrubbing mulch off our boots at this hour! That's what I said to Hal when we finally got out of the truck, eleven forty-five on a Friday night, both of us looking like we'd lost a fight with a flower bed. I'm Christy, by the way, forty-two years old, landscaper, tired, and honestly a little proud of it. Hal is forty-five and he's been my boyfriend for three years now. We met on a crew job back when I was thirty-nine, and he flirted by handing me a shovel. It worked. What can I say, I'm easy.

The restaurant is this mid-range Italian place over on Mason, the kind with checkered tablecloths and a menu nobody reads past page two. Cyndi runs the kitchen. She's thirty-five and she knew Hal from back when they both worked at a brewpub a decade ago. No romance there, never was, just old friend energy. We'd promised her we'd stop by after the job, and she said the owner, Leroy, would be around too. Leroy is thirty-eight, owns the place, and from what Cyndi lets slip after her second glass of wine, he owns a few other things of hers she doesn't put on the menu. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We came in through the back door, which was cracked open to let the night air in, and stepped into that big clean kitchen all lit up with work lights. You know the look, stainless steel everywhere, prep tables wiped down, the whole room glowing as if designed for a theatrical production about dinner.

"Hello the kitchen!" Hal called out, because he's the kind of man who announces himself like he's arriving at a ranch.

Cyndi came around the corner wiping her hands on a towel and grinning at us. "There they are! The mulch people!" She had a bottle of red already open on the counter and four glasses set out, which told me she'd been expecting us for a while. "Sit, sit. You look like you crawled out of a hedge."

"We crawled out of a hedge and the hedge won," I told her, and I dropped onto a stool at the prep table like my knees had clocked out without telling me.

Leroy appeared from the office with his sleeves rolled up and a dish towel over one shoulder. "Landscapers," he said, shaking his head. "You people keep worse hours than my dishwashers, and my dishwashers have a union of one."

"His name is Davey and he's very passionate about breaks," Cyndi said, and we all laughed, because of course we did. That's the thing about four people who are all tired on a Friday night. Any joke lands.

So we drank. Leroy poured and Hal told the story of the Henderson job, the one where the client wanted a water feature and got a mud feature, and Cyndi laughed so hard she had to put her glass down. It was nice. It was really nice, actually, and that's part of why what came later caught me off guard, because I wasn't looking for anything. I was just tired and warm and holding a decent glass of red in a clean kitchen at midnight.

Somewhere around the second round, Hal put his hand on my knee under the table, which he does, and I realized I couldn't remember the last time he'd done it. That sounds small. It isn't small. That's the kind of thing you notice when it stops.

"So how are you two?" Cyndi asked, casual, refilling my glass. "Really?"

Hal and I looked at each other, and there was one of those silences. You know the kind. Four seconds long and heavy as a wheelbarrow of wet topsoil.

"We're good," Hal said, and then he made a face, because even he didn't believe it. "Okay. We've been better. We've been sort of... parallel lately, haven't we?"

"Parallel," I repeated, and it came out more surprised than I meant. "That's the word, though. We work together, we live together, we sleep in the same bed, and some weeks I feel like we're two trains on adjacent tracks. Going the same direction. At the same speed. Never actually touching."

Cyndi reached over and squeezed my arm. "Oh, honey."

"What about you?" I asked, because I'm not great with sympathy aimed at me and I'll deflect every time. "You and Leroy. How's that going?"

And here's where the night tilted a little. Cyndi did this thing where she looked at Leroy first, like she was asking permission, and he shrugged in a way that meant go ahead.

"It's simple," she said. "That's the entire pitch. Leroy and I keep it simple. No strings, no expectations, nobody asking where anybody was on a Tuesday. It works. Most of the time it really works."

"But?" Hal asked, because Hal is direct in a way I usually admire.

"But sometimes," Cyndi said, and she turned her glass around on the steel counter, leaving a little ring, "sometimes I want the strings. Isn't that stupid? I set the terms. I was the one who said let's not complicate this, and now I catch myself wanting somebody to ask where I was on a Tuesday. Wanting somebody to notice I got a haircut without me pointing it out first."

"It's not stupid," I said, fast, maybe too fast.

"You two are doing parallel tracks," Leroy said, not unkindly, pointing his glass at Hal. "She's doing no strings. Look at us. Four adults, thirty-five and up, all pretending we've got it figured out."

"How old do you think we are?" Cyndi asked him, laughing.

"Old enough to know better," he said, "young enough to keep doing it anyway."

And that's the truth of that room, right there. I was forty-two, Hal was forty-five, Cyndi thirty-five, Leroy thirty-eight, and every one of us had built something that looked tidy from the outside and had a loose hinge somewhere. Hal's hand was still on my knee. I moved mine on top of his, and he looked at me like he'd just noticed I was sitting there, which, honestly, after three years, I'll take. Being noticed was the whole craving, wasn't it? Cyndi wanted it. I wanted it. Hal, I think, wanted to be wanted on purpose.

"Can I say something?" Cyndi asked, and she was doing the wine-brave thing where she talks a little faster than usual. "The other night I was here alone doing inventory, and Leroy came in, and he just... he sat on this stool, right there, and watched me count napkins. Didn't say anything for ten minutes. And it was the best ten minutes of my week. I wanted to cry. Over napkins."

"Best ten minutes of my week too," Leroy said, quiet, and he wasn't joking. That's what got me. He wasn't joking at all.

Hal cleared his throat. "Maybe that's our problem. We stopped sitting on stools."

"We never sit on stools," I said.

"Exactly. That's my point."

Cyndi refilled everybody, and her hand shook just slightly on the bottle, which I pretended not to see because that seemed kinder. "So what do we do about it?" she asked the table, generally, the way you ask a question you already know part of the answer to.

"Another bottle?" Leroy offered.

"That's a start," Hal said, and he grinned at me across the prep table, that old grin from the shovel day, and I felt something unclench in my chest that had been clenched so long I'd stopped noticing.

The kitchen hummed its hum. The back door let in a thread of cool air. Somewhere out front, the parking lot was empty except for Leroy's car and our truck, and four glasses sat on clean steel, and nobody said the next thing yet, but everybody was thinking it. I could feel it sitting there between the wine and the napkins like a fifth guest.

I took a sip and waited to see who'd be brave first.

It was Cyndi, sort of, except it was Leroy first. She got up to grab the second bottle from the rack by the walk-in, and on the way back her hip caught the corner of a prep table and she knocked a stack of small plates loose. Nothing broke, but she fumbled the catch and swore, and the wine sloshed over her wrist, and I watched something small and tired cross her face. The kind of tired you've been carrying so long it doesn't even register as tired anymore.

Leroy got up without a word. He crossed the kitchen and put his hand flat against her lower back, right between her shoulder blades and her belt, and he steadied the bottle with the other hand, and he just stood there. Didn't take the bottle. Didn't fix it for her. Just put his hand where her back ached and waited.

"Thanks," Cyndi said, not looking at him. "I've got it."

"I know you've got it," he said. "I just wanted to be here while you've got it."

Oh. Oh, that got me. That got me right in the ribs, I'm telling you. Christy, forty-two years old, runs her own crew, can mulch a twenty-yard bed before lunch, and I sat there with my throat tight over a hand on a lower back that wasn't even mine. When's the last time Hal touched me like that? Not a grope, not a habit-hand on the knee, not passing salt. Just I'm here, you've got it, I wanted to say so.

The thing in my chest shifted. I didn't even have a name for it yet, but it was leaning somewhere. Toward wanting. Toward, what if tonight we stopped being parallel?

Cyndi set the bottle down and sat, and Leroy went back to his stool, and everything looked normal again, except nothing did, because I'd seen it. Hal had seen it too, I think. He'd gone quiet in a way that wasn't his usual quiet.

Then his hand found mine under the checkered tablecloth. Not on my knee this time. My actual hand, his fingers laced through mine, and he squeezed.

"Hey," he said, low, just for me. "I've been thinking about something."

"Uh oh," I whispered back, and squeezed his hand to show I was kidding, mostly.

"No, listen. I don't want to make this a speech." He took a breath. "What if we tried something new tonight? That's all I'm saying. Something new. No pressure, either of us. If you hate the idea, we drink the wine and go home and this never happened."

My heart did something complicated. "New how?" I asked, and I'm proud my voice stayed level, because inside I was doing arithmetic I hadn't done in years. "New like a restaurant? New like a hobby? Or new like the thing everybody in this kitchen is dancing around not saying?"

He grinned, that shovel-day grin again. "New like the thing we're dancing around. Maybe. If you want. We don't have to decide anything right now, and Cyndi and Leroy haven't said a word about it either, so nobody's proposing anything. I'm just saying we could be open. Both of us. Together. Or not at all, and I'd be fine, I want you to know that first. Fine is the floor, not the ceiling."

"Hal."

"Yeah?"

"You rehearsed that."

"A little," he admitted, and his ears went pink, and God love him, forty-five years old and his ears still go pink. "On the drive over here. While you were complaining about the Hendersons' mud feature."

"It was a legitimate complaint. That water feature cost four thousand dollars and it became a swamp."

"It was a very legitimate complaint." He turned his hand over so my fingers were still laced with his, palm to palm. "So? Talk to me. Not yes or no. Just talk."

And I did, right there at the table, voice low, while Cyndi poured the second bottle and Leroy hummed something off the radio. "I want to be wanted on purpose," I told him. "That's what I want. Not new people, necessarily. Not yet, anyway. I want you to look at me like you looked at that napkin thing. Like Leroy looked at her. Like I'm the best ten minutes of your week and you'd sit there and say so."

"Christy." He said my name the way he says it when he means it, and he means it maybe four times a year. "You are the best ten minutes of my week. Have been since the shovel. I just stopped saying it out loud because we got busy and I figured you knew."

"Well, I didn't. I never know. Say it out loud. Say it in the car. Say it in the hardware store aisle," I was laughing a little and my eyes were stinging a little and both of those at once is a very Christy experience, believe me.

"Noted. Loudly noted." He squeezed my hand again. "So the open part. Where are you actually at?"

I looked across the table. Cyndi was leaning on Leroy's shoulder now, casual, easy, the two of them fitting like people who've done it two hundred times. Leroy caught me looking and didn't look away, just raised his glass a half inch, a little nod, hello there, no