Leather and Feathers

The museum annex sits on top of a rock spire like a hat somebody left on a fencepost. I still don't know how Maxwell gets up here every day. Eagles built the original nest, some rich guy built the room around it, and now the historical society calls it an annex. I call it the craziest commute in Stevens County.

I'm Tilly Slater. I'm sixty-two, I've been a deputy for thirty-one years, and I've been single for eight months. Not that I'm counting. I'm counting.

I park my pickup and climb the stairs with two coffees balanced in one hand. That's a trick I learned working graveyard shifts. Don't try it at home.

The door's already open. Good sign. Then I hear swearing from inside. Not loud swearing. The kind a polite man does when he's losing.

"Maxwell?" I call out. "It's Tilly. I brought coffee and my tool bag, so hide your dignity."

"In here," he says. "Sort of. Mostly here."

I find him in the back hall, wrestling with the dehumidifier. The thing is forty years old and it's leaking like a guilty witness. Water's pooled around its feet and run under the vault door. Maxwell is crouched next to it with a roll of duct tape and an expression I remember from climbing days. The expression that says gravity is winning.

"Oh, honey," I say. Then I hear myself. "Sorry. Old habit. I say honey to everybody."

"You do not," he says. "You say honey to me and you say sir to the mayor."

He's right, actually. I hand him his coffee. He takes it with tape still stuck to his fingers, which tells me how his morning's going.

Maxwell Browne is fifty-eight, six foot one, built like someone who still climbs three times a week. Gray in his beard now. Same laugh. We met at a climbing gym when I was twenty-nine and he was twenty-five, which means I've known this man longer than I've known my own roof. Longer than my ex, even, and that marriage lasted nineteen years.

The vault is where they keep the leather stuff. Journals from the 1890s, saddles, harness, a coach whip I'm not allowed to touch. The dehumidifier died Tuesday and everything down there is drinking the water. I volunteered to look at it because I'm good with machines and because Maxwell asked, and I'd have said yes if he'd asked me to inventory gravel.

"Where do we start?" I ask.

"Save the papers first. I had the condition reports on a folder." He points. "There."

The folder is on the floor. It's been coffee'd. Old coffee, too, the rings are brown and layered, somebody spilled on it months ago and just set the folder in the stain. Maxwell picks it up too fast and it opens like a bird. Papers everywhere.

"Oh no," he says. "Oh, no, no, no."

We both drop to our knees at the same time. This is how these things happen, I'm telling you. Not the romance-novel way. The kneeling-on-a-wet-concrete-floor way, gathering condition reports about a harness from 1902.

My hand lands on the same page as his hand. His fingers are warm. I pull back, he pulls back, the page stays put like it's the only adult present.

"Sorry," he says.

"It's paper, Max. It doesn't mind."

We keep gathering. I'm aware of him next to me in a way I haven't let myself be aware of in years. Shoulder to shoulder. He smells like saddle soap. That sentence captures the whole man, honestly. Saddle soap and duct tape.

I hand him the last sheet and stand up, knees cracking loud enough to echo.

"Okay," I say. "Show me your patient."

He leads me into the vault and there it is. A saddle laid out on a table, water-dark at the skirt, and he touches it the way you'd touch a sleeping cat. Fingertips first. Then the flat of his hand, slow, following the stitching.

"Poor girl," he murmurs. "She was made in 1888 and she's survived everything but a broken hose."

"You and your leather obsession," I say, grinning. "I swear, Max, if you loved people the way you love this saddle, you'd be married with grandkids by now."

I mean it as a joke. A friend joke. The kind I've been making for thirty years.

He goes still. His hand stops on the saddle and he looks at me, and his ears go red. Actually red, up to the tips.

"That's," he starts. Stops. "That would depend on the person, I think."

Huh.

I open my mouth to say something light and the light goes out. Not all of it. The hallway light. The vault door has swung partway closed on its own, and now it finishes the job with a click that I feel in my teeth.

Both of us turn our heads. Slow, like owls.

"That latch has been loose since spring," Maxwell says.

"I told them," I say. "I told George at the society meeting. I said, George, that latch is going to lock somebody in someday."

"Well. Congratulations to us."

I walk over and try the handle, in case physics has had a change of heart. Nope. The bolt is out and the mechanism is jammed, and I can hear it not working, which is a sound a machine makes on purpose, I swear.

"How long?" I ask.

"Ray comes Saturdays. Today's Thursday."

"Maxwell."

"But there's a phone in the front office."

"There's a phone in the front office," I repeat, "and we are in the vault."

"Then we're fine. The vault door is steel but the frame is wood, and you brought a tool bag."

I did bring a tool bag. I love my tool bag. I go get it while he hammers on the door anyway, out of politeness, the way you do. Nobody answers. The nearest human is four hundred feet straight down, unless the eagles count, and they don't.

So here we are. Two grown adults, fifty-eight and sixty-two, locked in a windowless room with a wet saddle, a dead dehumidifier, three hundred condition reports with coffee rings on them, and about six hours of daylight.

Maxwell sits down on the workbench and looks at his hands.

"Tilly," he says. "Before we start breaking things. What you said before. About loving people the way I love the saddle."

"I was teasing."

"I know." He rubs his jaw. "But I've been teasing myself about something for about thirty years, and being locked in a vault seems like either the worst time or the only time to say it."

My heart does something unscheduled.

"Say it," I say. My voice comes out lower than I planned.

"If I loved somebody the way I love this saddle," he says, "it'd be you. It's been you since the gym. Since the day you fell off the traverse wall and laughed before you even landed."

The vault is quiet. The dehumidifier drips once, like applause from a very small audience.

"Max," I say.

"You don't have to," he says fast. "We've got six hours in here, we never have to mention it again, I'll learn French or something, I'll"

"Maxwell Browne. Shut up and look at me."

He looks at me.

"Come here," I say.

He comes here. Six foot one of nervous curator crossing a vault like it's a ledge he's not sure about.

I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart is going. Mine too, probably. Symmetry.

"Max," I say. "I've been single for eight months and bored for seven of them. And I've known you for thirty-three years. So I'm gonna ask you plain, the way I do everything."

"Okay," he says. His voice cracks a little on it.

"Do you want to kiss me?"

"Yes," he says. No pause at all. "God, yes."

"Then kiss me."

And he does. Careful at first, the way he handles everything old and valuable. His hand comes up slow and cups my jaw, and I swear my knees consider resigning. Thirty-three years. Thirty-three years of Tuesday lunches and belay lessons and him pretending not to look at me in that green climbing harness, and it turns out the answer was just asking.

I pull back an inch. "You've wanted that since the gym?"

"Since the traverse wall," he says. "You were twenty-nine. I thought, well. I thought I'm in trouble."

"Well, I was thirty-three when I finally noticed you back," I admit. "Slow on the uptake. It's the graveyard shifts."

"Understood."

"Max, I'm sixty-two and divorced and I drive a pickup with dog hair in it. Just so we're clear on the merchandise."

"Tilly." He says my name like a condition report. "I've been in love with the merchandise since the Clinton administration. Wait, no, that's a joke people make. Since the gym. I mean the gym."

I laugh. I actually laugh, right against his mouth, and he laughs too, and that breaks the last of the