Monofilament

The place had been a turpentine still once, back when Diamante smelled like money instead of tourists. Now it smelled like grilled steak and old pine resin, and about forty men over sixty were crowded around folding tables under a banner for the local veterans chapter. I hadn't planned on attending anything. I was thirty-four, between bartending gigs, and I'd walked in mostly because the stone walls were radiating heat like a kiln and the alternative was my rented room.

A woman at the bar held up two fingers to the man working bottles and asked for whatever he had that wasn't wine. She was alone at a long table, and in front of her sat a coiled mess of fishing line that looked like it had been through a war. She was frowning at it the way you frown at a bill you were not expecting.

I knew her before I placed her. Alia Evers, from the bootcamp in Bari, six years back. She'd been twenty-seven then, all elbows and strong opinions about memory allocation, and she'd kissed me once in the server room and then moved to Cosenza and never answered my emails. I had thought about that kiss more times than I would admit to anyone sober.

She looked up as I got closer, and her frown turned into something else.

"No way," she said. "Aiden Shilling."

"Alia Evers." I set my elbows on the bar. "You're frowning at string."

"It's monofilament, thank you very much, and it's mocking me." She waved the bartender over again and pointed at me. "Two of the amaro. The local one, not the fancy one."

The shots arrived in plastic cups, which told me everything about the bar program. We touched cups without ceremony and drank. It was warm and bitter and it went down like a rumor.

"So what are you doing here?" she asked. "Last I heard you were in Milan learning to put orange peel in things."

"That was a while ago. I studied there for two years, then I went back to work, and now I do private gigs and cover shifts. A friend of a friend asked me to help pour at a wedding in Paola next week, so I'm killing time in the area."

"And you walked into a veterans' steak dinner."

"The door was open and it smelled incredible. I'm a simple man."

She laughed, and it was the same laugh, loud and unbothered by who heard it. Around us the old men were getting louder, someone's grandson was hauling trays of bread, and the heat from the portable grill kept rolling off the stones. She told me about her job, which I made her explain twice because I thought I had misheard it. She was a swap file size recommender for a startup in Cosenza. Apparently companies paid them to guess how much virtual memory their servers would need, and she had built the model that did the guessing.

"It's the most boring job in the world and I love it," she said. "Nobody argues with the model. The model has no feelings."

"Do you argue with the model?"

"Every day. The model wins every day. We have a good marriage, the model and I."

I told her about the worst wedding I'd worked that year, a groom who cried during the toast and a mother of the bride who ordered four rounds for the whole table and paid in coins. She laughed again. We ordered two more of the local amaro, and I noticed she'd stopped looking at the fishing line entirely.

Then a man with a mustache you could land a plane on banged a spoon against a glass and announced that dinner was served. The crowd shifted like weather. Alia grabbed my sleeve and steered me toward the far end of the hall, where a doorway opened into what had been the vat chamber, a stone room half the size of the main hall with two long tables and the original iron vat bolted to the floor like a fossil.

"This is the good side," she said, dropping onto a bench. "Fewer elbows, closer to the meat, and the acoustics are bad enough that nobody hears me complain."

We ate. The steak was better than it had any right to be, seared hard and salted without mercy, and the veterans chapter had also laid out bread, peppers, and a red wine that tasted like it had been decanted through a sock. I was on my second glass when she pulled the fishing line out of her bag again and set it on the table between our plates.

"Behold my curse," she said.

It was a coil of clear monofilament, maybe a meter of it, knotted around a rusted barrel swivel at one end. The tangle was genuinely impressive. Whoever had done it had committed.

"My brother sent it from the coast," she said. "He says it's a lucky keychain. He ties them himself and mails them to everyone in the family. This one came knotted in a little decorative pattern, and I pulled the wrong end like an idiot, and now it's just this." She picked it up and let it dangle, hopeless. "I've been working on it for three days. I refuse to cut it. If I cut it the luck comes out."

"That's not how luck works."

"You don't know how my family's luck works."

"Give it here, I'll untie it," I said, mostly as a joke. "I have very patient hands. Occupational hazard."

"Oh, sure, and in five minutes you'll hand it back in worse shape."

"Is that a challenge?"

She looked at me across the table, and there was a pause I didn't expect. Six years of pause, maybe, packed into one second.

"Yes," she said. "It's a challenge. But not here, everyone stares at everything in this room. Come on."

She gathered the line and a jug of water from the table and her glass, and led me through the doorway, past the vat, into the back corner of the chamber where an old crate sat against the wall like it had been waiting for someone to need a seat. It was quieter there. The dinner noise came through muffled, all bass and laughter with the words stripped off. She sat on the crate and I sat next to her, close enough that our shoulders touched, and she put the line in my hands and filled both glasses with water, a rule she announced she was making after the second amaro.

The knots were nasty. The rusted swivel kept catching, and the monofilament had that quality of holding a memory of every fold it had ever made. I worked it slowly, thumb and forefinger, saying nothing, because it was the kind of task that punished talking. She watched my hands for a while and then started talking about the bootcamp instead.

"Do you remember Steven, the instructor who wore the same three shirts in rotation? And the projector that died every afternoon at exactly three? I dreamed about that projector for a year after."

"The woman who cried during the databases module."

"We all cried during the databases module. That's not a memory, that's shared trauma." She sipped her wine. "I think about Bari a lot, actually. It was a good month."

"It was," I said, and did not add the thing I was