Peony Season

I have been a court docket clerk in Třešť for thirty-eight years, and if you had told me at twenty-five that I would spend four decades alphabetizing other people's misfortunes, I would have laughed at you. Yet here I am, sixty-three years old, and the most exciting thing that happened to me last month was a filing cabinet that jammed on a Tuesday. I actually looked forward to fixing it. That is how low the bar has sunk.

The walk to Caitlin's place takes eleven minutes if I cut behind the church, and I have timed it so many times that the number has stopped meaning anything. Caitlin is sixty-one now, a retired florist, and she has been my friend since we both worked at the feed store when I was twenty-two and she was twenty. Forty-one years of friendship and nothing romantic ever happened between us, which I used to think was a failure of nerve on somebody's part and now think was probably the best decision neither of us ever made. Some friendships survive romance. Most don't. Ours survived because we never tested it.

Or so I believed, walking up her gravel path that Thursday in late May, when the peony row along her south fence was in full bloom and looking like something out of a painting nobody had the decency to hang. She had called me the evening before. "Bo, I bought a book on the glass harmonica and I need a second pair of hands, and before you say you're busy, I know for a fact that your busiest evening activity is rearranging your spice rack alphabetically by origin." She had me there. The spice rack was alphabetical by origin. Cumin sat between the Croatian sea salt and the Dutch cocoa and it had been bothering me for weeks.

The garden gate squeaked the same way it has squeaked since 1994. She swears she'll oil it. She has sworn this for thirty years and I have come to understand the squeak as a form of greeting, like a dog that barks at you every visit without any actual malice behind it.

Caitlin was waiting by the shed, wearing gardening gloves and that expression she gets when she has planned something and wants to pretend she hasn't. "You came," she said, as if there had been doubt.

"You threatened me with my own spice rack."

"I said nothing of the kind. I said cumin. That's not a threat, that's a spice." She was smiling, though, and it did something warm to the inside of my chest that I hadn't felt in a while and didn't examine too closely. "Come on. First I want to show you the peonies, because they won't last the week and you always miss them."

I always do miss them. Every year she tells me to come see the row and every year I put it off until the blooms have gone brown and defeated, and every year she acts surprised, and every year I feel vaguely guilty. Not this year. This year I stood at the fence and looked at maybe forty feet of them, pink and white and that deep red color that seems too heavy for a flower, all of them open at once because peonies have no patience and no manners. They bloom all together or not at all, like a family argument.

"They're showing off," I said.

"Of course they are. I've been fussing over them since March. They'd better show off." She snapped a glove against her wrist. "Now. The shed. The important business!"

The shed is her second home, cluttered with old flower pots stacked in unstable towers, bags of soil with the corners chewed by something she refuses to acknowledge exists, and a workbench covered in twine and shears and dried debris from at least three seasons ago. On the bench, arranged in a careful line, sat eleven wine glasses. All broken. Not shattered, but chipped, cracked, missing stems, the casualties of four decades of dinners and clumsiness. She had never thrown a single one out.

"Here's the collection," she said, with the pride of a museum curator whose museum is insane. "Cracked in 1987. Chipped at my fiftieth birthday. That one lost its stem when Katie did a toast that involved both arms and no sense. I couldn't throw them out. Each one is a memory of a good evening gone slightly wrong."

"So you've kept a shelf of failures for thirty years."

"I've kept a shelf of evenings, thank you. And now they have a purpose." She opened the book she'd bought, some translated thing about glass harmonicas, and showed me the principle. You wet your fingers and run them around the rim, and the glass sings. Different sizes, different notes. Different water levels, different pitches. Simple physics, apparently, though I have learned to distrust that word when Caitlin uses it.

We spent the better part of an hour at it. She had brought out a pitcher of water and we experimented, filling one glass high and one nearly empty, listening to them argue with each other in tones that were somewhere between a choir and a cat in distress. My first attempts produced sounds that made her laugh so hard she had to sit down on an upturned crate. Hers were better. Forty years of florist's hands, steady and patient, and when she got a rim singing properly it was an eerie, floating note, the kind of sound you'd expect in an old church, not in a shed that smelled like potting soil and old rain.

"I could learn this," she said. "I could learn this and play at the harvest festival and horrify everyone."

"You'd be a sensation."

"I'd be a menace, which is better." She looked around the shed, dissatisfied. "The book says a wet finger isn't the only way. It mentions strikers, little hammers, for a different sound. Percussion glass. We don't have a striker." She rummaged through a drawer of things that had no business sharing a drawer, a rusted hinge, corks, a length of ribbon, three buttons, and came up holding something small and metal and greasy.

"What on earth is that?"

"A throwout bearing." She said it the way you'd say antique vase. "From the old van, before the old van died. The mechanic gave it back to me and I kept it, obviously, because I keep everything, as established." It was worn smooth, a steel ring with a cage of small rollers inside, and when she rolled it between her palms it made a soft ticking. "It's got weight. It's got a nice edge. Watch." She tapped the rim of the smallest glass with it, gently, and the glass answered with a clear little ping, brighter than the wet-finger note, almost cheerful.

"Oh, that's good," I admitted.

"Isn't it? A bearing from a 1981 van, conducting an orchestra of broken wine glasses. Write that down for my obituary." She handed it to me and I tried, tapping out a clumsy rhythm across the line of glasses, and she conducted me with a twig, badly, on purpose, so I would get worse out of spite.

And then she paused, bearing in hand, and looked at me with that expression again, the planned-something one, and I felt the afternoon shift under my feet like a loose paving stone.

"Bo," she said. "I dare you to do something."

"This sounds like a trap."

"Of course it's a trap, I set it in advance." She picked a petal from the bowl of fallen peony heads she'd collected on the workbench, dipped it in the water glass, shook it once, and held it out to me on her open palm. "Taste it. Water and peony. I've always wondered whether it tastes like anything at all and I refuse to be the only one who finds out."

I looked at the petal. Pink, water-soaked, lying in the palm of a woman who had been my closest friend since before either of us knew what we were doing with our lives. She wasn't teasing, exactly. Or she was teasing, but underneath it was a real question, an open door she was holding with both hands and a raised eyebrow, and I could say no and we'd go back to tapping glasses and it would cost nothing.

Or I could say yes.

My whole life had been alphabetized. Cumin between salt and cocoa.

"All right," I said, and leaned over her palm.

The petal tasted like cold water and something faintly green and sweet, like the idea of a flower rather than the thing itself. She watched me the whole time, and when I straightened up she was grinning like she'd won a bet I didn't know we'd placed.

"Well?" she said.

"Like rain on a windowsill. If the windowsill were a flower."

"My turn, then." She took another petal, dipped it, and looked at me over it for just a moment before she put it on her own tongue, deliberate, eyes still on mine, and I understood that the afternoon had turned some corner I hadn't seen marked on any map, and that neither of us was in a hurry to find the way back.

* * *

She tasted it slowly, then swallowed, and licked a drop of water from the corner of her own lip in a way that could not have been accidental and did not pretend to be.

"Verdict?" I managed.

"Sweet. Barely. Mostly it's the cold." She set the bearing down on the bench with a soft clink against the glass. "Bo. I'm sixty-one years old and I have decided to stop being careful with nice afternoons. You can leave whenever you like. The door's right there and I'll never mention it. Or you can stay, and we see what else this shed is good for."

I looked at the door. I looked at her.

"I fixed a filing cabinet last month," I said. "On purpose. For fun."

"That's the saddest thing anyone has ever told me."

"I know. I'm staying."

She went to the back of the shed, past the bags of soil, and came back with a jar of honey, the cheap clear kind, a squeeze bottle with a crusted yellow cap. I have no idea how long it had been living out there. That is part of the trouble with Caitlin's shed, every drawer is a small museum of things that refused to die.

"Honey," I said. "You keep honey in the shed."

"Bees live in sheds, roughly. Close enough." She set the jar on the bench between the glasses. "Close your eyes."

"Why?"

"Because the whole point of a dare is that you don't get to audit it first. Eyes closed, hands on your knees, and hold still. I promise nothing is going to hurt and nothing is going to be on fire."

I closed my eyes. The shed went dark and quiet in a