Promotion and Petticoats

Leila is twenty-eight, and she has driven a forklift at the base depot for six years. She is good at it. She can thread a pallet between two corners with two inches to spare, and she can do it while the radio plays garbage and somebody yells about a missing manifest.

The review notice went up on the board on Monday. Shift supervisor slot, open, take the interview if you want it. She took it. Then she lay awake half the night doing math on the raise versus the extra stress, and decided the raise won.

The same week, Floyd told her his thing.

He does it after his shift, sitting at the kitchen table with his boots still on, which is how she knows it is serious. He is twenty-nine, a cooper over at the barrel shop, forearms like rope from hauling staves. Works nights. Smells like oak shavings most of the year, and that is the once she allows herself to notice it.

"So I been meaning to say something," he says. He turns his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table. "Been meaning to say it a while."

"Say it then."

He looks at the window. The yard. The fence he keeps meaning to fix. "You know how you work late some nights. Tuesdays and Thursdays mostly."

"Yeah."

"I been wearing your clothes."

She puts her fork down. Not because she is mad. Because she needs a second to make sure she heard it right.

"Which ones," she says.

"The dresses, mostly. That black one with the zipper. Some of the panties, and I'll buy those back, I know that's..."

"Floyd."

"Yeah."

"Are you telling me you're leaving me, or telling me you look better in my dress than I do?"

He laughs. Then he looks scared again, and that is what gets her, that he sat there scared about it. "Second one. Mostly. It's not... it's not a thing I want to do instead of you. It's a thing I want you to see. Maybe. If you'd want that."

"Okay," she says. Because what else do you say. But her heart is doing something and she takes her plate to the sink so she can stand with her back to him and think.

She thinks about it for three days. At work she thinks about it between pallets. At the salon, where she picks up evening hours shelving stock and doing the books, she thinks about it in the storeroom surrounded by boxes of acetone and towels.

Here is the thing about the salon gig. She took it the day the supervisor slot opened because she wanted a cushion in case the review went sideways and she ended up stuck at her current grade. Money settled up front, cash at the end of each shift, no funny business. Dee runs the place and does not ask questions, which Leila appreciates.

Thursday night, she clocks in for her evening shift at the salon, and the storeroom goes quiet except for the little fridge humming. She texts Floyd.

review is Friday 9am. Got my speech ready and everything

He answers fast, which he never does, he is mid-shift.

come by after. Got something to show you

if it's a barrel i'm going to scream

not a barrel

She shelves three boxes of polish and thinks about that.

* * *

He shows up at ten-forty, still in his work clothes, holding a small canvas bag. Dee gives him the nod through the curtain and leaves them to it, because Dee has seen everything a salon storeroom can hold and then some.

"What's in the bag," Leila says.

"Two things." He sets it on the counter between the paper towels and the wax warmer. "First thing." He pulls out a tuning fork. Metal, plain, the kind a piano tuner would carry. "This one's yours."

"What am I supposed to do with that?"

"You tap it if you want me to keep going. That's all it means. Keep going. If you don't tap it, I stop." He turns it over in his fingers. "I figured, you're not much of a talker when you're thinking something over. So this way you don't have to talk. You just tap or you don't."

She looks at the fork. It is a small stupid object and it has made her chest go tight.

"And the second thing?"

He tips the bag. Out comes a black dress on a hanger, and a pair of heels in a size that is definitely not hers.

"Those are mine," she says. "I wondered where that dress went."

"I bought it back. New one, same one, I paid for it." He sets the heels beside it. "And this is the thing I want. If you'd do it. I want you to watch me put them on. That is the entire request. You watch, and if you like it we figure out what comes next, and if you don't, we never..."

"Floyd. Sit down before you vibrate through the floor."

He sits on an overturned crate. She sits on the counter stool. The little fridge hums.

"Okay," she says. "Here's my side of it. I don't know what I think yet. I never thought about it once in my life until Tuesday. But I'm not disgusted, and I'm not going anywhere, and I want to see it before I decide anything. That's honest."

"That's fair."

"And you said it yourself, the fork means keep going. So." She picks up the fork and taps it against the counter edge. It rings, a clear little note that hangs in the room. "Keep going."

He stands up. His hands shake a little getting his shirt off, and she almost says something soft, and then decides he would rather she didn't.

He dresses slow. That is the part that gets her, how slow. He steps into the dress and works the zipper up his own back with a practiced twist of the arm, which tells her exactly how many Thursdays she has missed. The heels go on easy, like he has done that part a hundred times in her bedroom with the door locked and the television on.

And then he is standing there in her black dress, in the ugly fluorescent light of a nail salon storeroom, between a pallet of hand towels and a stack of empty boxes. Six foot of cooper in a size eight dress. It should look like a joke. It does not look like a joke. The dress fits him better than it ever fit her, for one thing, because he has narrower hips and broader shoulders and the fabric does something different over all of it, something she keeps looking at.

"Well?" he says. His voice is still his voice. That is the strangest part.

"Hold still." She gets off the stool. Walks over. Touches the skirt first, because she has to know if the fabric feels the same on him as it does on her. It does. It is just cotton and a little polyester, same as always, except now it moves when he breathes.

"You're gonna crease it," he says.

"Shut up." She smooths it anyway. Her hand stays on his hip longer than smoothing requires. "You look... okay. You look more than okay. You look like somebody I'd check out across a parking lot and then pretend I didn't."

He laughs. The laugh shakes the dress.

"I'm not saying I understand it," she says. "I'm saying the fork rang."

He taps it himself this time, holds it up between them, and the note hangs in the little room a long while.

* * *

Friday morning comes and goes. Leila sits through the first half of the review, answers every question the board asks, and walks out feeling like she either nailed it or bombed it, no in between. Results by the following week. She does not think about it once on the drive home, which means she thinks about it the whole drive home.

Saturday night, Floyd works. Coopers run a weird schedule and his is the weirdest, four nights on, two off. His shift ends at ten. The coopering shed sits behind the main barrel shop, a low building he half rents from the owner, and he keeps a key hidden under the third bucket stack as someone who never expects to be robbed.

She lets herself in at 10:40.

* * *

The shed smells like oak shavings and steel wool. One work lamp burns over the big bench. A half-hooped barrel sits in a stand at the far end, staves splayed open like a broken flower. Floyd is already there, showered, in jeans and a flannel, sitting on the same kind of overturned crate he sat on Thursday.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey!" She holds up the canvas bag. "Brought your little fork."

"And the bag."

"And the bag."

He has laid things out on the bench while she drove over. The black dress. The heels. And two things that were not there Thursday, a makeup case and a wig on a styrofoam head. The wig is brown, shoulder length, blunt cut. Not her color exactly. Close enough that her stomach does a small thing about it.

"Okay," she says. "Before you start. Tell me what tonight is."

"Same thing as Thursday. Dress, heels. Plus the