Needle and Flame

Desiree closed the shop at six and stayed till eight anyway. She did that most nights now. The apartment upstairs over the bakery was quiet in a way that had teeth. Her daughter, Madeline, had left for university in Krakow in October, and the apartment had been loud for twenty years and quiet ever since.

Madeline was twenty. Desiree was forty-four. She had done the math on that a hundred times lately, sitting on the couch with the TV on mute, adding it up and coming out the same every time. Twenty-four years old when Madeline was born. Twenty-four when the shop opened, the same year she became a mother. Forty-four now, with a full booking sheet and an empty kitchen table set for one.

The shop was better. The shop hummed. There was the buzz of the machine, the radio Jace played too loud, clients gasping at the mirror. Iron & Ink was one room and a curtained alcove in the back, and the alcove had a fold-out couch that nobody admitted to sleeping on, plus a shelf of stuff clients had left behind over the years. A brass lamp with no cord. A box of marbles. A ceramic frog the size of a fist. Things people didn't want to carry home.

Desiree liked the shelf. It made the room feel lived in, like the shop had a past that wasn't just hers.

On a Tuesday in February she was wiping down the stations when Jace stuck his head in from the back.

"You want me to empty the sharps bin before I go?"

"It's half full. Thursday."

"Right." He pulled his jacket off the hook. "My cousin's thing tomorrow, so I'll be late. Not this Thursday, the next one."

"The next one. Got it." She waved him off. Jace was twenty-four and good with a needle and terrible with dates, and she had decided two years ago that both of those could be true at once.

She was locking the front door at ten past six when Tyler knocked on the glass.

He was holding a leather case. Not a briefcase. Something longer, softer, worn brown at the corners. He held it up when she squinted at him.

"Are you closed?" he called through the door.

"I'm always closed when you show up."

"Then it's lucky I have a key to your heart and not your shop."

She let him in. Tyler was forty-eight, a land agent for rural acquisitions, which meant he drove a grey Skoda three hundred kilometers a week and knew the price of every hay field in the county. They had met at an open house two years ago, when she was forty-two and he was forty-six, and they had been together ever since. Never married. No kids on his side. He still lived in his own place across town, which she liked, and which lately had started to feel less like independence and more like two people agreeing not to bother each other.

"What's that?" she asked, nodding at the case.

"Juggling clubs." He set it on the waiting bench and unsnapped it. Three clubs, leather-wrapped, scuffed at the ends. "They were my father's. Can you believe I found them in the attic at my mother's?"

"Can you actually juggle?"

"No. That's the problem." He picked one up, turned it over. "You remember I told you about the charity show? The firemen's thing, at the cultural center?"

"You said you were doing a circus act. I laughed at you."

"You laughed at me."

"Because you're forty-eight, Tyler."

"Forty-eight and limber." He tried to flip the club in his hand and nearly dropped it on the waiting bench. "Anyway, the dress rehearsal was tonight. The whole act. Marek and I were supposed to run it at his garage, and Marek texted me at four to say his wife's car died and he has to pick her up from work until further notice."

"So you came here."

"So I came here." He looked around the shop. "You've got floor space."

"I've got a floor, yes."

"Is that a yes?"

"It's a maybe. Sit down first." She flicked the kettle on behind the counter. She kept a kettle and a tin of black tea at the shop, because clients sometimes waited an hour for a friend to hold their hand, and friends need tea. She poured two mugs and carried them to the back, past the curtain, to the alcove, where the fold-out couch sat against the wall under the shelf of orphaned props.

Tyler followed her back and sat down heavily. The couch was low and he was tall, so his knees stuck up.

"This couch is terrible," he said.

"The couch is fine. You're just tall."

"You could say that nicer."

"I could say lots of things nicer. Drink your tea."

He drank his tea. She sat next to him with her feet tucked under her, and she watched him set the clubs out on the floor in a row, adjusting them twice, like alignment was the problem. He stood up. He tossed one club a few feet in the air and caught it. Then two. Then he tried all three and one bounced off his thumb and rolled under the shelf by the ceramic frog.

"Ow," he said.

She laughed. She tried to hold it in and couldn't, and it came out as a snort, and the snort made it worse.

"Oh, that's nice," Tyler said, retrieving the club. "That's very supportive. The firemen will love you."

"I'm sorry. It's the way it went under the shelf. Like it had somewhere to be."

"Everyone's got somewhere to be tonight except me." He said it lightly but not entirely lightly, and she heard the other thing under it. The same thing she'd been hearing from herself in the apartment at night. The house is quiet. The calendar is empty. Find something.

He set the clubs down and sat back on the couch next to her.

"I've been practicing in the kitchen," he said. "You can't juggle in a kitchen, Desiree. There's a ceiling. There's a light fixture. There's a wife's good glasses on the counter, except there's no wife, there's just glasses, and the glasses judge me."

"Your kitchen has a light fixture, so you came to my shop with its nine-foot ceilings, and you want me to what. Watch?"

"Actually, yes." He turned on the couch to face her. "That's the whole favor. Stay and watch me practice. A couple evenings a week. An audience helps. Marek's an audience, but Marek checks his phone every forty seconds."

"An audience helps you juggle?"

"It helps everything. You know that. You watch people under the needle all day. People perform better when someone's looking."

She thought about that. It was true, in her line. Clients who came alone flinched more. Clients who brought a friend held still and acted brave.

"If you drop a club on my floor and crack a tile, you're paying for the tile."

"Fair."

"And if you hit yourself in the face, I'm photographing it first."

"Also fair."

She looked at him properly then. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up, and there was grey coming in at his temples that she liked, and his hands were big around the club. Two years together and lately they sat on her couch and watched a screen and said maybe four sentences an hour. Here he was asking her to watch him. Not to talk. To watch.

"Okay," she said. "Wednesday and Friday, after six. I'm usually doing touch-ups till six anyway."

"Wonderful." He stood up again, picked up the clubs. "Now watch this. I've almost got the two-club exchange."

The exchange went badly. The second club went behind him instead of in front of him, and he caught it behind his back by pure luck, and turned around with an expression of total surprise, like the club had signed something for him.

"Did you see that?"

"I saw it. Don't do it again, you'll hurt yourself."

"It's called a blind catch, Desiree. Very advanced."

"It's called luck. I know luck. Luck comes in here every day and books a skull with barbed wire."

He laughed and tried again. This time he dropped both clubs, and one landed on the couch cushion between them, and he left it there, and sat back down, breathing a little hard.

"Two weeks," he said. "The show's in two weeks. Marek says if I can do three clubs for thirty seconds without a drop, I can go on. Thirty seconds. That's all."

"And what's the act called?"

He hesitated. "The Amazing Tyler."

"No."

"It's on the poster already."

"The Amazing Tyler. You paid for a poster."

"Marek paid for the poster. Marek has regrets now too."

She picked up the club from between them and turned it over. The leather was worn smooth where a hand had held it, decades of holding, and it smelled like her grandfather's garage, which was a strange thing for a tattoo parlor couch to smell like on a Tuesday.

"Show me the three-club start," she said. "The real one. Not the blind luck one."

"You're staying?"

"I said Wednesdays and Fridays. Tonight's Tuesday, Tyler. You get tonight as a freebie, because I closed late anyway."

He grinned at her, and it was the grin from the open house two years ago, the one that had made her give a fake phone number and then, twenty minutes later, the real one.

"Three clubs," he said, and stood up again.

Tyler stood and pulled his shirt over his head without thinking about it, the way a man does when a shirt is fighting him. "This thing is too tight," he said. "I can't get my elbows up. Marek told me to buy something loose and I said I'd manage. I can't manage."

"Clearly."

He tossed the shirt on the couch arm and picked up the clubs again. He was forty-eight and soft in the middle in a way he'd stopped apologizing for years ago, and his back had a patchwork of old freckles across the shoulders. Desiree watched him while he tried the start again. There was a scar low on his left side, from a fence post, he'd told her once, some land deal out past the river, and she had touched it a hundred times and never once watched it move.

He moved differently without the shirt. The shoulders did more work. She could see the whole machine of it, the twist starting at the hips, the little hop he did without knowing.

"You're staring," he said, without turning around.

"I'm the audience. Staring is the job."

"The firemen will appreciate your professionalism."

One club hit the floor. It rolled under the shelf and stopped against the ceramic frog, which was the only thing on that shelf that ever held its ground.

"Every time," Desiree said. "That frog has better nerves than either of us."