Operator, Please

My name is Lindsay Hill, I'm 38 years old, and for the last four years I've made my living talking dirty to strangers. Not in person, thank God. On the phone. I work the graveyard shift for a line called Night Whispers, my shift starts in half an hour, and I'm good at it. Really good at it. I can make a bored husband in Ohio forget his wife is watching reruns in the next room, and I can make a lonely widower feel like the only man on earth.

The trick is the voice. I keep it low and a little scratchy, like I just woke up and I'm thinking filthy thoughts, which honestly by hour four I usually am. The rest is just listening. Men want to be heard more than they want anything else, and I figured that out my first week.

I set up my workstation every evening around nine, even though my shift doesn't start till ten. Old habit. The spare bedroom of my little bungalow has a desk, a good chair, a lamp with a warm bulb, my headset, and a wall of sticky notes with my regulars' files. Yeah, I keep actual paper files. Wanda says it's creepy. I say it's professional.

Wanda Arnold works the same shift, forty-six years old, been at this longer than me. She keeps her files on a spreadsheet like a normal person, and she never lets me forget it.

So there I was Tuesday night, coffee mug in hand, flipping through my stack, and I stopped at the card near the front. Bruno Fischer, age 54, calls maybe twice a week, always asks for me by name. In the notes section I'd written: funny, polite, asks about my day like he means it, never pushes for stuff I don't want to do. And underneath that, in pen, because it happened too late to type: made me almost snort, do NOT let him know.

That was from last night. This guy had been going on about his neighbor's inflatable Christmas decorations, in October, mind you, and he said the thing sagged so bad it looked like Santa was having a medical emergency on his lawn. I laughed so hard I snorted, just a little, and I prayed the line didn't carry it. Of course it did. He said, "Was that a snort? Oh my god, the fantasy is ruined, the fantasy is RUINED," and I laughed for real, which we're not supposed to do, and it was the best call I'd had in months.

Let me tell you about Bruno. He never asks for the girlfriend experience or the naughty nurse. He just wants to talk first, and then get to it, and then he says thank you and hangs up like a gentleman. After four years of guys who want you to pretend you're their boss's wife, that kind of politeness sort of wrecked me a little.

My phone buzzed on the desk. Wanda.

"Hey, you working?" she asked.

"Setting up. What's up?"

"Okay, so you know how I've been saying forever that me and my husband want to do a casual dinner thing with a couple people? It's happening. Tomorrow. Your night off, I checked. Denny's or somewhere equally fancy, my treat."

"Wow, a Wednesday extravaganza. Who's going?"

She paused, and Wanda never pauses. That woman talks like she gets paid by the word.

"Okay, don't be mad. There's this guy, a friend of mine, and he might be the guy who always asks for you."

I sat down slow in my chair. "Bruno? Bruno Fischer is going to be at a diner with me tomorrow?"

"His name is Bruno, and he's a sweetheart, and you two have been doing this weird phone friendship for months and I figured it was time. Don't make it weird."

"YOU'RE making it weird! How do you even know he calls the line? Isn't that, like, your private info?"

"He told me himself, ages ago, before you even knew his name probably. He's a buddy from my hiking group. Big guy, gray beard, laughs like a truck backfiring. You'll like him."

I stared at my sticky note. Funny, polite, asks about my day like he means it.

"And what if he recognizes my voice? Wanda, my voice is my whole thing. What if he goes, hey, wait a minute?"

"Then you have a story for the grandkids. Dinner, tomorrow, seven o'clock, say yes so I can stop sweating."

I told myself it was just a meal between coworkers and a friend of a friend. I told myself that about four times, which is how many times it takes me to believe a lie.

"Fine. Seven. But if it's awkward, I'm blaming you on the call tomorrow night, live, in character."

"That's my girl."

* * *

The diner was one of those older places near the highway with vinyl booths and a pie case that hums. I got there first because I figured I'd rather be sitting down when the moment came than standing in a parking lot. I ordered a coffee I didn't want, just to have something to do with my hands.

Wanda and her husband Roger came in with a big guy in a flannel shirt and a gray beard, and I knew him before anyone pointed. Not from seeing him. From the way he was already grinning like he'd spotted something good.

We did the chair scrape and the handshake thing, and Bruno Fischer looked at me for about two seconds, and I watched it happen. His eyes went wide, then he laughed, and God, Wanda wasn't kidding, it was like a truck backfiring.

"You look nothing like I imagined," he said, sitting down across from me. "Better. Way better. I had you pictured as like a tiny woman with a raspy little voice, and you're..." He gestured at all of me with his menu. "You're a whole person!"

"What did you think, I was a cartoon character? Tall, dark, and husky?"

"Kinda! Kinda exactly that. Okay, now I have to ask, and tell me to go to hell, but is the laugh real? The one from last night? Because I have thought about that snort more than any man should admit."

I felt my face go hot. "Oh my god, you heard it!"

"I heard it and it made my whole month. I've been telling that story at work like it's a fishing tale. Caught a snort on the Night Whispers line, biggest one in Maricopa County."

Roger and Wanda were cracking up and I was sinking into the booth, but I was laughing too, I couldn't help it. He was funnier in person, that was certain. On the phone he's good, but in person there's a whole face attached to the jokes, and the face has eyebrows that do half the work.

The coffee came and it was bad, that burnt diner coffee that's mostly brown water, and Bruno took one sip and made a face like he'd been betrayed.

"This is criminal. They should arrest somebody for this."

"You want pie instead? The pie case has been staring at me since I sat down."

"Is that a line, or are you actually hungry?"

"Both. Maybe. Order the pie, big guy."

He got the banana cream, I got the coconut, and we split them in the middle of the table like we'd known each other ten years instead of being two strangers who'd technically heard each other at our most intimate and were now arguing about whether diner pie counts as dinner.

"It absolutely counts as dinner," he said, pointing his fork at me. "You've got your fruit, you've got your dairy, you've got your... pie."

"That's not a food group, Bruno."

"It's the MOST important food group. Wanda, back me up here."

"Don't drag me into this," Wanda said, mouth full of fries. "I invited you two to be normal people, not to do your little comedy act."

But she was smiling, and Roger was smiling, and I caught myself doing something I hadn't done on a first anything in years. I wasn't performing. I wasn't managing the conversation, listening for cues, steering. I was just sitting there being a woman who likes pie and coconut cream specifically, laughing at a big bearded guy who thinks pie is a food group.

Somewhere in there I noticed his hands. Big, careful hands, and I thought about what those hands would feel like, and then I took a big drink of my terrible coffee to stop that train, because I was at a diner with my coworker and this was NOT a date and I did not want to make it weird.

Except it was sort of already weird, the good kind, because he caught me looking and he grinned, slow, like he knew exactly what I'd been thinking, and he said, "So. Lindsay. You do anything besides work and pie?"

And I realized I hadn't the faintest idea how to answer that honestly, because the honest answer involves a headset and a graveyard shift, and for the first time in four years, I kind of wanted to.

We closed the place down, sorta. The waitress started stacking chairs around us around nine-thirty, and Wanda declared it a sign. "We're being evicted. Roger, settle the bill and let the children go."

"Children," I said. "I'm thirty-eight."

"You're twelve, both of you, it's disgusting," Wanda said. Bruno held the door for me and the night air was that perfect October thing where it's finally cool but the sidewalk's still warm from the day. We said goodbye to Wanda and Roger in the parking lot, and Wanda hugged me and whispered, "Well?" like I was supposed to have a report already. "Shut up," I whispered back, and she cackled all the way to their car.

Then it was just us, and it got quiet, but not the bad kind of quiet. We started walking and I realized my bungalow is like six blocks from that diner, which I knew, obviously, but I'd never thought of it as walkable-with-Bruno distance. He asked if he could walk me home and I said it's literally around the corner, and he said perfect, then, I get six blocks of material.

And he did use all six blocks. He told me about his job, he does HVAC, and about the worst attic he ever crawled into, and a raccoon story that made me stop walking I was laughing so hard. "You're making that up."

"I swear on my mother's lasagna, there was a raccoon in the air handler and it had gotten into the ductwork and every vent in that house was blowing raccoon smell."

"Oh no!"

"Oh YES. And the homeowner, this little old lady, she goes, 'Well, at least he found a warm place for winter,' and she wanted me to LEAVE HIM." He was walking backwards in front of me at this point, arms going.

"Bruno. No!"

"I moved him. Humanely! But she didn't speak to me for a year."

"You got fired over a raccoon?"

"I got a Yelp review over a raccoon. One star. 'Rude to wildlife.'"

I live on a street with big palms and little houses and I got to my gate way too fast, is what I'm saying. I stopped with my hand on the latch and turned around and he just stood there in the streetlight, big and rumpled and still grinning, and my brain did that thing where it offered me three sentences and all of them were phone-voice. Husky, practiced, well, here's where you say goodnight, sugar. And for once I just didn't pick one.

"So," he said. "This was..." He waved a hand. "Yeah. This was good. Weird and good."

"Weird and good. That's my brand, actually."

He laughed, that truck-backfire laugh, and then he went a little quieter, which I didn't expect. "Can I call you sometime? Your real number, I mean. Not the... you know. The other one."

And I heard myself say it before I could think too hard. "Give me your phone." I typed my real number into it and handed it back. "It's a free call this time."

His eyebrows did the thing. "Free? No charge? No per-minute?"

"First call's free. After that I can't promise anything, I gotta eat."

"Lady, I've been paying a dollar ninety-nine a minute to make you laugh for eight months. Free is a steal." He stepped back off my walk and pointed at me. "Tonight. I'm calling tonight, you know that, right?"

"It's already ten."

"TONIGHT, Lindsay."

"Okay, okay! Goodnight, big guy." He walked off down my