Night Shift at the Cannery

I arranged the pillows on the couch for the third time that evening, which was ridiculous because nobody was coming, or at least nobody I knew of was coming, but my hands kept fussing anyway. The apartment upstairs in the old cannery was my friend Beverly's inheritance, a strange little box of rooms built into what used to be the front office, and she had asked me to housesit for the month of October while she chased some man to Portugal. I was sixty-two years old, recently divorced for the second and final time, and I had said yes mostly because I needed somewhere quiet to figure out what the rest of my life was supposed to look like. The couch was a big orange thing from the seventies that Beverly refused to replace, and I kept moving the pillows around like the geometry of them mattered, like if I got the angles right something good might happen.

Something had happened once, twenty-one years ago, at our college reunion. I had been forty-one then, standing near the bar with a plastic cup of wine, and Lachlan Kessler had walked up to me looking exactly like himself only older, silver at the temples, and he had said my name like he had been saving it up. We talked for an hour about nothing, professors we had both hated, the winter the dorm pipes froze, and then at some point in the middle of a sentence about the dining hall he leaned in and kissed me, just once, soft and quick, and then he pulled back looking absolutely horrified with himself. And I had laughed, I remember laughing, and I said it took you only twenty years, and he laughed too, and then his wife at the time called his name from across the room and he went. That was all of it. One kiss, one laugh, twenty-one years of nothing, and here I was arranging his ghost's pillows.

I had heard through Beverly that he still lived in town, that he carried mail in the cannery district, which struck me as a funny detail because Lachlan had been the fastest walker in our dormitory, always three steps ahead of everybody going somewhere. I had not sought him out. I want that understood. I sat on the orange couch with a glass of the cheap red wine Beverly had left in the cupboard and I watched the river through the big window that used to be the foreman's window, the one that looked down over the main floor, and I did not think about him constantly, but I thought about him more than I had planned to.

So when the knock came at the apartment door around seven on a Thursday I was not expecting anybody, and I opened it with my wine glass still in my hand, and there he was. Sixty-four years old, divorced eleven years by then, as I would learn, mail bag slung over one shoulder like he had just walked off his route, holding a six-pack of beer in one fist and a dented metal box under his other arm, and his face did that thing faces do when somebody opens a door you were half hoping would not open.

"Juliette," he said, and then he looked down at the beer like he needed to explain it, "I heard you were staying here. Beverly told my ex-wife's cousin's barber, or something, the way news works in this town. I was delivering on the block and I thought, well, I thought twenty-one years is long enough to wait before saying hello again."

I said hello again and stepped back to let him in, and my heart was doing something I am not going to describe because I was sixty-two and dignified, mostly. He came in and looked around the little apartment with its low ceiling and its odd angles, the office that somebody had turned into a home, and he said it was smaller than he remembered the foreman's office being, and I said it had shrunk along with everything else in town. He set the six-pack on the counter and held out the metal box instead, and that was when I saw it properly, an old steel locker box, the kind workers used to keep in the rows of lockers down on the main floor, with a cracked combination lock still hanging off the latch.

"I've been clearing out the building for Beverly," he said, turning the box over in his hands like it was warm. "Doing her mail, doing her favors, she owes me about forty favors by now. Anyway, last week I was pulling the old lockers off the wall so the scrap guy could take them, and this was welded shut behind number forty-two, wedged in the frame. Been sitting there since before I was delivering mail, I'd guess. And it's got your name on it."

He turned it around and there it was, J. MERCE, written in white paint pen on the front, my maiden name, in handwriting I recognized as my own twenty-two-year-old handwriting, the fancy J with the loop. I had forgotten. I had genuinely forgotten that I did that, that a group of us had made a time capsule the spring before we graduated and somebody had presumably shoved it in a locker and forgotten it too. I set down my wine and took the box and just held it, and Lachlan stood there with his hands in his pockets watching me hold it.

"You going to open it?" he asked, and I said not up here, and he said what do you mean not up here, and I said come on, I want to sit on the stairs, the big ones going down to the floor, Beverly keeps them swept.

So we carried the beer down the metal stairs, which are broad industrial things with a railing of pipe, and we sat side by side near the top with our legs stretched out on the steps below us, and the main floor of the cannery spread out dark and enormous in front of us, the old conveyor belts and the stainless tables all pale shapes in the light coming through the high windows. It smelled like rust and river and cold metal, and I cracked the lock with a screwdriver Lachlan produced from his mail bag, of course he had a screwdriver, he was a mail carrier, he was prepared for everything.

Inside there were letters, a dozen of them, folded into thirds and rubber-banded, and two bottle caps and a cassette tape labeled PROM PLAYLIST in somebody else's writing and a photograph of the nine of us taken on the loading dock, all of us squinting into the sun. We passed the letters back and forth and read them out loud, and I laughed until my ribs hurt at Jared's letter, which was mostly a list of grievances about the cafeteria meatloaf, and Lachlan read his own letter in a low voice and then tried to hide it behind his back, and I grabbed for it and he held it away and we ended up wrestling over a forty-year-old letter on the metal stairs like a couple of fools.

And then I read mine, the one in my handwriting, and I had to stop in the middle because of what I had written. I had been twenty-two and dramatic and I had written about a boy I never named, a boy who was three steps ahead of everybody going somewhere, and how I hoped that someday he would stop somewhere near me. I did not read that part out loud. I folded it back up and put it in my lap and looked out over the dark floor, and Lachlan was quiet next to me, and I could feel that he had understood what the letter was even though I had skipped the middle of it, because he had probably written something similar in the letter he would not let me see.

"Anyway," he said finally, popping the tab on a beer and handing it to me instead of taking it himself, "that's probably enough archaeology for one night. God, Jared really did hate that meatloaf."

"He mentioned it in every letter he wrote me for two years after," I said. "He's in Phoenix now. He sells insurance!"

"Of course he does," Lachlan said, and we both laughed, and the laugh trailed off into the quiet of the big dark room, and neither of us moved from the stairs for a long while, and the river made its noises somewhere beyond the walls, and we sat there like two people who had all the time in the world and one night to spend it in.

We sat there until the beers were gone and the moon had moved far enough that the light through the high windows had crawled across the floor and found the end of the nearest conveyor belt, and then Lachlan turned his head and looked at me, and I could tell by the way he was breathing that he was working himself up to something.

"I always wanted to kiss you again," he said, and his voice came out quieter than I think he meant it to, down at the bottom of his chest. "Since the reunion. Twenty-one years, Juliette. That kiss lived in my head the whole time, and I never did one single thing about it, because that was never the right moment, and then my life went one way and yours went another, and now you're sitting on these stairs holding a box with your own handwriting on it and I figured I'd better say it out loud before I lose my nerve."

I set the box down on the step above us so it wouldn't get knocked over, because I could feel where this was going and I didn't want to break anything of my own twenty-two-year-old self tonight. "I'm glad you're here," I said. "I'm glad you knocked. I've been arranging those couch pillows three times a night for two weeks and telling myself it was because Beverly likes them a certain way, and it wasn't, it was because I was lonely and I remembered what it felt like to have somebody in the room who knew me before everything got quiet." I reached over and took his hand, which was warm and rough from