Mudjack and Lemon Lime

The fluorescent strip over the filing cabinets had a bad ballast, so it buzzed and flickered every few seconds, and Mallory Moreau had stopped noticing it sometime around her thirty-eighth year of working under it. Tonight was her last night under it. At 7 a.m. the payroll clerk would hand her a card that said THANK YOU, 38 YEARS, and by 8 she would be on Highway 28 with a fifth wheel hitched to her truck, pointed at absolutely nothing in particular.

That was the plan, anyway. Plans had a way of forgetting things.

She stood in the doorway of the single-wide at eleven minutes past ten, keys in her hand, keys that no longer mattered, staring at the dark lot and thinking about a garment bag.

Greg Murphey's truck was still parked by the shed, which meant he was still doing his end-of-job paperwork, which meant she still had a chance.

"Mallory?" He leaned out of the shed door, a clipboard in one hand and a hard hat pushed back off his forehead. Forty-three years old, forearms like rope, the same flannel jacket he wore ten months out of the year. "Thought you'd be gone by now. Thought you'd be in Tucson by now."

"Retirement starts at 7 a.m., not 7 p.m.," she said. "Greg, I got a problem and it's sort of embarrassing."

"Those are my favorite kind." He set the clipboard on the tailgate and came across the gravel. "What'd you do, lose the master ledger? Burn the place down? Tell me it's something I can bill for."

"I left something in your trailer." She winced saying it. "The mudjacking trailer. Three weeks ago. It's a garment bag, it's hanging on the rack behind your level kit, and I need it back before morning."

He blinked at her. "You forgot the dress in the shed?"

"I forgot the dress in the shed," she confirmed.

"What dress? You don't wear dresses. Twenty-two years I been mudjacking for this office and I have never once seen you in a dress. You wear those khaki pants with the coffee stain, bless them."

"There's more than one coffee stain, actually, and they're all load-bearing." No, that wasn't the word. They all had history. She waved the thought off. "It's not a work dress. It's a dress dress. Yellow. I bought it four years ago and I never wore it, and tomorrow I leave town forever, and I wanted to wear it once. Just once, just to see. And it's sitting in your shed behind a bag of limestone screenings."

Greg stood there a second, working through it the way he worked through everything, slow and methodical, like leveling a slab. "Okay. So this is a simple fix. You come by the shed, you get the bag, you drive off happy. Except."

"Except you locked the trailer at six and the key's in your other jacket and the jacket's at your brother's house where you watched the game Sunday." She had done the math on this twice already. "And the spare shed key is in the office, and I dropped my office key in the payroll drop box an hour ago, and the box doesn't open until seven."

"Chain of custody," he said, nodding. "You'd make a decent mudjacker, Mallory. Ruined by paperwork."

"Ruined by paperwork," she agreed, and surprised herself by laughing.

"Come on, then. I'm not done with the Delacroix job report anyway. Could be an hour. Could be two, if the rain numbers don't add up, and they never add up." He unlocked the single-wide with his own key, because contractors got one for job reports, and she stepped up into the office.

The office smelled like old paper the way it always did, but tonight there was something else under it, sweet and a little sharp. She flipped on the desk lamp and the buzzing strip and found the source sitting square in the middle of her desk: a bakery box with a receipt taped to it, from Coteau's, a dozen slices, lemon.

Greg came in behind her, wiping his boots twice on the mat because he was the only person in the parish who did that. "Oh, good, you found it. That's mine. Well, it's half mine. I grabbed it off the tasting table at the Guidry job this afternoon. They had two cakes, the bride couldn't decide, and the caterer was just gonna toss the extras. Seemed criminal. Want a slice? I got lemon."

"That's the funeral cake money box," she said, tapping the tin next to it, then flipped the box open. "But sure. It's my last night. Hand me a fork."

He cut two slices with the plastic knife from the box and they ate standing up, which was how they had eaten every lunch for two decades, her at the counter, him leaning against the filing cabinet because he said sitting down after a lift was bad for the back.

Mallory took a bite, chewed, stopped chewing. "Greg."

"Yeah?"

"This isn't lemon."

"It's lemon. Box says lemon."

"It's lime. Taste it. That's key lime pie filling in a yellow cake. That's not lemon at all, that's lime."

He took a bite of his own slice, dubious, then his eyebrows went up. "Well, hell. That's lime." He looked at the receipt, which did say lemon, and back at the cake, which very much did not. "Somebody at Coteau's is getting chewed out by a bride tomorrow morning. They ordered lemon, somebody keyed in lime, and neither the baker nor the decorator could tell the difference."

"Or they could tell the difference and didn't care."

"Or that, yeah." He laughed, a low surprised sound, and took another bite. "It's good lime, though. You have to admit it's good lime."

"It's excellent lime," she said, "fraudulently labeled," and they were both laughing now, standing in her office at half past ten on her last night, sharing a stolen wedding cake that wasn't the flavor anyone paid for.

The laughter settled into something quieter. Greg set his fork down and looked at the box, then at her.

"So. The dress."

"The dress," she said.

"Why'd you buy it and never wear it? Four years is a long time to keep a dress on a rack."

Mallory looked at her slice for a while. She was sixty-two years old and had exactly one secret she'd never told anyone at this office, and it seemed like the right night to spend it.

"There was a wedding," she said. "Four years ago. A man I knew, back when I was twenty-four. We worked together, and it was a whole two-month thing that ended about as badly as a two-month thing can end, and I found out four years ago he was getting married. And some part of me, the dumb part, bought a yellow dress thinking I'd go, thinking I'd walk in looking better than I did at twenty-four, and he'd see what he..." She stopped, shook her head. "I never went. Obviously. RSVP said no. Dress went in the closet. Closet became the shed when I was clearing out for the RV. And then I forgot it in your trailer like a fool."

Greg was quiet through all of it, chewing slowly, which was his way of being kind. "You didn't want him to see what he missed?"

"No. God, no. I wanted to feel like someone who got invited to things." She smiled, small. "Sixty-two years old, that's the whole confession."

"Nothing wrong with wanting to feel like someone who gets invited to things." He finished his cake. "So here's a thought, and you can tell me it's a dumb thought. The office is locked but you're standing in it. You got the box somewhere close?"

"It's in my trunk. I put it there this afternoon, planning to swing by the shed after."

"Then go get it." He said it plain, the way he said everything. "Put it on here. In the office. Try it on, look in the mirror, wear it for an hour. I'll sit right here and do my rain numbers and not peek. What's the harm? It's your last night. Seems a shame to leave town without finding out how it looks."

Mallory stood very still, the fork warm in her hand, the fluorescent strip buzzing its old tired buzz. "You'd do that?"

"Wouldn't be doing anything. You'd be doing it. I'd just be a fella doing paperwork." He picked up his clipboard, already flipping pages, giving her space to think, because he always gave her space to think.

"Give me ten minutes," she said, and went out to her trunk.

The supply closet was really just a corner of the back wall with a shower curtain on a tension rod, and it smelled like floor wax and old paper. Mallory hung the dress from the hook on the doorframe and changed out of her work clothes, folding them over the chair like she had a hundred times in a hundred break rooms. The dress went on over her head. She worked the zipper up her side with two fingers, holding her breath a little, the way you do when you try something on that cost too much and might not fit.

It fit. That was the strange part. Four years in a shed behind a level kit and a bucket of slab patch, and it fit like it had been sewn on her this afternoon. Yellow, sleeveless, a modest swing to the skirt that stopped just below the knee. She had bought it in a hurry at a mall in Alexandria, and she had never once looked at herself in it, because looking would have meant admitting why she bought it.

There was no mirror in the office. There never had been. The closest thing was the dark window, and she stood in front of it anyway, seeing a shape, a smear of yellow, a woman with her hair pinned up for a night shift she would never work again.

"I'm decent," she said.

Greg looked up from his rain numbers. He had his pen in his hand and the clipboard on his knee and he was halfway through some remark, she could see it forming, some joke about traffic cones or the price of lime. Then it died. His face did a thing she had never seen it do in twenty-two years of mudjacking. It went quiet. The amusement drained out of it, not into sadness, but into something careful and still, the way a man reads a pressure gauge and finds the number exactly right.

"Well?" she said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

"That's." He stopped. Started again. "That looks like it was made for you."

"You don't have to say that."

"I don't say things I don't mean, Mallory. You know that. Twenty-two years, I ever once fluffed a concrete report for you?" He set the clipboard down on the desk, which he never did, the clipboard went in the truck. "It fits like it was made for you. That's all I got."

She turned back to the dark window, and in the glass she watched him watch her, and neither of them moved for a while. The fluorescent strip buzzed. The cake box sat open on the counter with two plastic forks in it. Somewhere outside a frog started up in the drainage ditch, and then another answered