Patina of Want

Delilah Fairchild was fifty-five years old, and she had carried a double boiler across a volcano's doorstep before she had ever carried a torch for anyone. That was a joke she made to herself, standing at the crater gateway with the thing wedged against her hip. Nobody else would have found it funny. Nobody else was there.

The gateway was a gap in the tuff walls where the old road came down into the maar. The walls rose in layers above her, pale and banded, the way butter sits in a tub if you drag a knife through it. She had seen them every working day for three seasons of ferry work, and they still stopped her, sometimes, when the light hit right. This was one of those times. She let it stop her for about four seconds, which was all the light allowed before the heat came back and reminded her she had a job.

The double boiler was heavy. It was copper, old copper, the kind with a skin of green across the lower third that no amount of scrubbing had ever been able to shame off it. Verdigris, said the note taped to its lid, written with a little flourish, like the word was being presented at a dinner party. The note was signed Edwin Swanson. Fifty-seven years old, head cook at the dig canteen, and a man who could make the word verdigris sound like a compliment.

She had borrowed the boiler ten weeks ago off the canteen's loan shelf, while its owner was away on a supplier course, and she had not seen him since the county extension building. She was telling herself, for possibly the ninth time that morning, that she was returning it because returning borrowed things was simply what a decent person did. The fact that the decent person had taken a bus, then a shared taxi, then walked the last two kilometers in heat that could cure plaster, was not a fact she was examining too hard.

Ten years ago, when she was forty-five, she had taken a catering course in the county extension building. It was the kind of course where sixteen adults stand around a demonstration table and pretend they don't know how to chop an onion. There had been a story, one evening, about a woman in another class whose soup had split, all of it, at once, in front of an inspector. Edwin had told that story, and he had laughed at his own punchline before he got to it, which should have ruined it, and instead somehow made it funnier. Delilah had laughed until her sides hurt. Nothing happened after that. That was everything, or nearly everything. A week of sitting at adjacent stools, a flirtation conducted entirely in raised eyebrows over stock pots, and then the course ended and she went back to her ferry rope and he went back to whatever seasonal kitchens took him.

She had never forgotten the laugh. That was the embarrassing part. She could lose her glasses twice a day and forget the name of a neighbor she'd had for six years, but the laugh had stayed filed and exact.

Her shoulder ached under the boiler's handle. The ferry landing was on the river at the crater's northern lip, and her job was the cable rope, keeping the tension true so the flat-bottom ferry could ride its line across without wandering. It was work for strong forearms and a suspicious mind, and she had both. But hauling a copper boiler the size of a small dog across a dry field was a different set of muscles entirely.

The field at the crater floor was dry that year, cracked clay gone the shade of old bone. Halfway across, a dust devil stood up out of nowhere, maybe two hundred meters off, thin and white and spinning. She stopped to watch it. It wandered a little, like it was deciding, then kept going in the opposite direction from her. Fine, she told it. Fine.

The canteen was a low stone building with open sides on the south wall, shaded by a wide terraced roof that stuck out like the brim of a hat. Through the openings she could see long tables, stacked chairs, and at the far end, past the serving counter, the kitchen with its big breathing fireplace wall. A pot was going on the fire. Something with tomatoes in it. The smell reached her before she reached the shade and her stomach spoke up without being asked.

Edwin had his back to her. He was stirring, and he was humming, and the humming was off-key in a way that suggested he knew it and didn't care. He was broader than she remembered, or maybe just the same and she had edited him down over ten years. His forearms were bare to the elbow and there was flour on one of them, which was strange, because nothing on that stove needed flour.

"You're humming flat," she said.

He turned around with the wooden spoon still in his hand. For a second his face did something complicated, like he was a man opening a door he'd painted shut years ago and finding the room exactly as he left it. Then it settled into a grin.

"Delilah Fairchild," he said. "In my kitchen, carrying my boiler."

"Your boiler? I thought we'd settled this. It's mine for as long as I say it is."

"That was ten weeks of tenancy with no rent paid. I'm evicting you."

"Then I'm in luck," she said, and lifted the thing onto the counter between them with a thump that rattled a spoon rest, "because I came to be evicted."

He came around the counter. That was when the air changed, and she noticed it the way you notice a drop in pressure before weather. He was close enough that she could see the gray had moved further up his temples than the last time she'd stood this near him, and that his eyes hadn't changed at all, which felt like a small kindness the universe had left lying around.

He reached out to steady the boiler, out of pure habit, and his fingers landed on the handle at the same place hers were. She didn't move her hand. Neither did he. His knuckles rested against hers on warm copper, and the touch went through her like current through the ferry cable, that same singing tension, and she watched him feel it too. His eyebrows went up a fraction. His mouth opened, closed, opened.

"Well," he said.

"Well," she said.

Neither of them moved. The pot behind him puttered. Out in the dry field, faintly, something spun.

"Ten years," he said. "You held onto my boiler for ten weeks and took ten years to bring it back."

"The ferry rope doesn't tension itself."

"No. I heard. They say the cable sings when you've been at it all morning."

"The cable is a liar and a gossip."

He laughed then. It was the same laugh. It came out of him from somewhere down low and it bent forward at the top, and she stood there in the shade of the terraced roof feeling forty-five again, which was a trick, because the mirror held its own judgments and she had heard them.

"Can I get you tea?" he asked. "Or lunch. I'm cooking for forty in two hours but there's always a pan that belongs to nobody."

"There's always a pan that belongs to nobody," she agreed. "That's the first true thing anyone's said to me today."

He pulled a chair down off the stack and set it near the counter, and she sat, and he put water on, and they talked about nothing. The weather, the dig, the new students who burned rice. All of it ordinary. All of it a grind of small words laid down over the one big word neither of them would say, the way you lay planks over a live wire. Underneath, the wire hummed.

Once, reaching past her for the honey, his arm brushed her shoulder and stayed a half second longer than an arm needed to. She looked at the window. He looked at the honey jar.

Outside, far off across the bone-colored field, the dust devil stood up again.

The dust devil leaned as it spun, drifted toward the canteen, and gave up halfway there. It laid down in the clay like a man deciding against a long walk. Delilah watched it go and thought, well, there is the sign, if a person believed in signs. She had three seasons of rope tension behind her and she knew about waiting on weather. You could feel a cable hold its breath. This was that, only in her chest.

"Edwin," she said.

He looked up from the tea he was pouring. "Mm?"

"I didn't come all this way, bus and taxi and two kilometers on foot in this