Lodge Mix-Up

So it was my birthday, and I spent the morning of it driving a van full of pool chemicals up a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. Forty-four years old, single, and my big celebration plan was fixing a broken pump filter at a hunting lodge called Gartside's Stuart. My sister had called me the night before and told me I was pathetic, and honestly I couldn't argue with her.

The lodge sat in a clearing in the northern woods, all logs and stone chimneys, with a handful of guest rooms spread around the main hall. There was a separate pool house off to one side, which is why I was there. The manager had called my shop on Wednesday saying the pump was making a noise like a dying goose, and I was the only tech free this week.

I parked the van, grabbed my tool belt off the passenger seat, and headed for the main door. A guy was waiting on the porch, older, silver hair, wearing one of those quilted vests that lodge people always wear.

"You must be the pool girl," he said. "Oliver Gartside. Welcome to the Stuart."

"Denae," I said. "Happy birthday to me, right?"

He didn't even blink at that, which told me everything about how much attention he'd been paying. "Yes, well, the filter is in terrible shape, terrible. Follow me."

He walked me through the main hall, past a big stone fireplace and a rack of antlers, then stopped at a hallway off the east wing and pointed.

"Room seven," he said. "Go right in, she's expecting you."

"She?"

"The guest. Wilma. Lovely woman, city type, here for a quiet week." He checked his watch. "I have a call, but you know your work. Room seven, first door on the right."

Well, I thought that was a little odd, since usually I go straight to the pump room and nobody chats with me at all. But Oliver had worked at the lodge for twenty years and seemed to know what he was doing, so I figured the pool equipment must be accessed through one of the guest rooms or something. Lodges are weird like that. So I knocked on the door of room seven.

"Come in!" called a voice from inside.

I pushed the door open, and there was a woman lying on the bed in a white bathrobe. She was holding a vibrator. Not hiding it, not fumbling with it, just holding it in her hand like a remote control, this sleek purple thing with a curved tip.

She looked me up and down and smiled. "Oh, you're early. And not at all what I expected."

I looked down at myself. Tool belt, work shirt with the shop logo, boots with pool dust on them. I looked exactly like what I was.

"Ma'am," I said slowly, "I think there's been a mix-up. I'm here about a pool pump."

"I know, I know," she said, waving her hand. "Well, sit down, take your load off. I'm Wilma. You're early, that's all, and honestly the pump can wait ten minutes."

She was about forty-two, I'd guess, short dark hair, bare feet, with the kind of relaxed sprawl that people have when they've been on vacation for exactly one day and are already a different person. She had a suitcase open on the floor and clothes half-unpacked across a chair.

"Oliver sent me to this room," I said. "He does that, apparently. Gets people confused."

"Oliver sent you here?" She laughed. "Of course he did. He booked me a massage for this afternoon and I bet he put the appointment on your ticket instead of mine. Or yours on mine. The man has been calling me Wilma from the front desk, but last night he called me Diana twice at dinner."

"That tracks," I said. "He called me 'the pool girl.'"

"Well, you're not the massage therapist."

"Nope. Pool technician. I'm supposed to be in a pump room somewhere being miserable about a filter."

She grinned at me and sat up a little, still holding the purple toy. "So you came all this way on your birthday, and you're telling me your big plan is a filter. I heard you, by the way. Birthday. You said it out loud on the porch."

"The windows were open," I said, feeling my face go warm.

"I don't know what to tell you, Denae. It's your birthday, you're here anyway, and I have a brand new toy I bought at a shop in the city that I've been too nervous to even turn on." She held it up. "Forty-two years old and I bought a vibrator at lunch like somebody buying a CD in 1998."

That made me laugh, which loosened something in my chest. "And you can't figure out the buttons?"

"I can figure out the buttons. It's the doing it here, in a strange lodge, with a stranger in the next room, that's got me wound up. Which is exactly why I booked a massage, to unwind, and instead Oliver sends me a woman in a tool belt." She winked at me. "Say. Would you mind starting with a bit of relaxation first? Before your pump?"

Here is where I should have said something sensible. I should have said no ma'am, wrong room, wrong day, wrong everything, and walked to the pump room like a professional. That's what a normal person does.

Instead I stood there in my boots and heard myself say, "What kind of relaxation?"

"Oh, nothing wild. Just company. Someone to talk to while I try this thing out. I've never used one with another person in the room. It seems less lonely that way." She patted the edge of the bed. "You can keep the tool belt on if it makes you feel official."

I snorted at that. Then I shrugged the tool belt off anyway and set it on the dresser with a clank, and sat down on the edge of the bed. My heart was doing a stupid happy drumroll and I told it to calm down, because this was just two grown women sitting in a lodge room, and one of them had a toy, and nothing had happened at all yet.

Wilma turned the vibrator over in her hands and found the switch. It came on with a low hum and she jumped a