Puppet Strings and Mortar

I want to start this off by saying everyone in this story is a grown adult. I'm Axel Schultz, thirty-four, I do tech support for an insurance company, and I was visiting my friends in a little coastal town in Scotland when everything I'm about to tell you happened.

Here's how the night started. Marvin Mendoza, who is thirty-three and works at the climbing gym where I first met him three years ago, had talked me into helping him and his girlfriend Willa carry a crate of puppets back to her workshop behind the old theater. Willa Weasley is thirty-two, she makes puppets for a living, and she's been dating Marvin for two years. The workshop is down a narrow alley behind the stage door, and it smells like sawdust and glue and whatever they use to seal wood.

We'd been drinking a little at dinner. Not a lot. Enough to feel bold about a crate of puppets at ten at night.

So we get the crate inside, and Willa gets this idea that she wants to show us a trick she's worked out for toasting spices. She's got this mortar and pestle, a big stone one she uses for pigments and resin and, tonight, dinner, and she'd been heating whole spices in it over a little hot plate for tomorrow's lamb. Which, in hindsight, is not something you do while drinking wine.

"Watch this, it's going to be perfect," she said, reaching for the mortar with her bare hand.

"Will, the hot plate was on like twenty minutes ago," Marvin said.

"It's stone, it doesn't stay hot, stone cools..."

"YOWCH. Okay. Okay okay okay."

She snatched her hand back and stood there holding it like she didn't know what to do with it. The skin on her palm and two fingers was going red fast.

"Willa, that's a real burn," I said. I set down my beer.

"It's fine. It's fine. It's a little red."

"It is not a little red, love, that's proper red," Marvin said. He was already pulling the tap over her hand, running cold water on it.

"It stings, it genuinely stings," Willa said, and she laughed, but it was that laugh people do when they're trying to be brave about something.

"Pharmacy," Marvin said to me. "There's one two streets over. We need burn cream. She'll whine all night otherwise."

"I will not whine."

"You whined for a week when you burned your thumb on the oven in March."

"That was different, that was the oven, ovens are serious."

So we turned off the hot plate, kept her hand under the cold tap for a while, and then the three of us headed out into the alley. The theater loomed over it, this old stone thing with the stage door half open, and there was a single lamp at the far end that buzzed. Willa held her hand out in front of her like she was feeling her way in the dark, which she wasn't, the alley was lit enough.

"Ten at night, chasing burn cream," she said. "This is the most exciting Friday I've had in months."

"That's sad, Will," Marvin said.

"It's honest."

The pharmacy was shut. Metal shutter down, lights off, a little sign that said hours ended at six. Marvin knocked on the shutter anyway, which I told him was pointless, and he said maybe a pharmacist lived above the shop, you never know. Nobody came.

"Well," I said. "There's the 24-hour place. Across town. Near the garage."

"That's like a half hour walk," Marvin said.

"I'm game," Willa said. "My hand's fine under my sleeve. It's a nice night."

It was a nice night, actually. Cool, dry, the kind of coastal air that smells like salt and nothing else. We started walking, and about ten minutes in Willa started narrating her injury to anyone with ears.

"I want it stated that the mortar was a betrayal. That mortar and I have a relationship. Three years we've worked together."

"The mortar didn't do anything, you grabbed it," Marvin said.

"I grabbed it out of trust."

"You grabbed it out of wine."

"Those are the same thing when you think about it."

I laughed. I probably laughed too hard, but the night was going well and I'd had two glasses of wine and I was walking around a Scottish town at night with two of my favorite people. About halfway there, Willa stopped at the park that sits between the old town and the harbor. There's a bench there facing the water.

"Let's sit a minute," she said. "My legs are short, you two walk like giraffes."

So we sat. Marvin in the middle, me on his other side, Willa on his far side, leaning around him to talk at me. The harbor lights were on across the water and a boat was going somewhere slow.

"Axel," Marvin said, "can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Why do you go stiff every time Willa touches you?"

"I do not go stiff."

"You do. You did it at dinner when she passed you the bread and your hands touched. You went like a plank."

"That's called manners, Marvin."

"That's called something," Willa said, and I could hear the grin in her voice even though Marvin was between us.

"There's nothing going on," I said. "You two are my friends. You're together. I'm just, I'm aware of the geometry, is all."

"The geometry," Marvin repeated.

"Of three people on a bench. It's a shape. Shapes have tension."

Willa leaned forward so she could see me past Marvin. "Axel. Sweetie. Are you nervous?"

"A little, yeah," I said, which surprised me coming out. "Not of you. Just of whatever this evening is turning into. It's been a weird good night and I don't know the rules."

"There are no rules," Marvin said. "It's a bench."

"Benches have rules. Public benches especially."

Willa reached across Marvin and put her hand, the burned one, palm up, flat on my thigh.

"Is this okay?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "That's okay."

Her hand was warm through my jeans. She turned it over gently so the burn faced up, like she was showing me proof of the evening's disaster, and her fingers just rested there.

"Your heart's going," she said.

"It does that."

Marvin watched us both, and then he said, "We've talked about this, you know. Me and Willa. Twice now, actually. In case you were wondering why I keep teasing you instead of shutting it down."

I looked at him. He looked at me. Behind him, Willa was doing a very bad job of looking casual.

"Talked about what, exactly," I said.

"You," Marvin said. "And us. And whether the geometry works."

"The geometry," I said, because I didn't have anything better.

"He's been angling for this for months," Willa said. "I keep telling him to just say it and he keeps saying it's not his place, it's your friendship, blah blah."

"It is my friendship," Marvin said. "That's why I'm careful with it."

"You're careful with everything. You alphabetize the spice rack."

"Somebody has to."

I sat there with Willa's hand on my leg and Marvin's shoulder against mine and the boat going somewhere slow on the dark water, and I thought, okay, this is the moment where you either say something honest or make a joke and go home. I'd been making jokes all night. The mortar, the pharmacy, the shapes.

"Okay," I said. "Here's mine, then. I've thought about it. Not in some lurid way, mostly. Just, you two are the best part of my trips up here and every time I leave I feel like something's missing and I couldn't name it until right now on this stupid bench."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me and it involved a burn injury," Willa said.

"So what happens now," I asked. "Do we just, do we walk to the pharmacy and pretend this conversation was about burn cream?"

"First the pharmacy," Marvin said. "Burn cream, real one, she'll milk this all weekend otherwise. Then we go back to the workshop, and we talk like adults about what we're all actually agreeing to. Nothing happens until everybody says yes out loud. That's the deal, that's always been the deal with us."

"That sounds right," I said. "I like a deal with clear terms. I work in insurance."

"I know you work in insurance, you bring it up constantly," Marvin said.

Willa stood up and held her bandaged-ish hand toward the harbor like she was pointing the way. "Pharmacy first. Then workshop. Then terms." She grinned at me over Marvin's head. "And Axel? For what it's worth, the plank thing is cute."

"It's manners," I said.

"It's cute," she said.

We walked on, the three of us, and I noticed I wasn't stiff anymore, and that the night had officially stopped being about puppets.

The pharmacy across town was the ugly modern one with the blue sign, near the garage, and the walk took us the full half hour because Marvin and Willa kept stopping to argue about which streets were "actually" shortcuts. I trailed behind with my hands in my pockets like a man on a guided tour of his own decisions.

"Left here," Willa said.

"It's straight," Marvin said.

"Left is shorter."

"Left takes you past the church and the church has a wall."

"The wall is fine, I've walked the wall a hundred times."

"You have a burn on your hand, you don't get an opinion on walls tonight."

She held the hand up over her shoulder at him without turning around. "This burn is your fault anyway. You're the one who said the mortar trick would speed things up."

"I said heat helps the spices open up. I did not say put the mortar directly on the hot plate and then grab it."

"You implied it."

I let them fight about it. It was nice, actually, having the argument happening around me instead of about me. We got the burn cream, the pharmacist asked if it was a cooking injury and Willa said "sort of, it was a puppet injury" and he didn't follow up, which I respected. Then we walked back, and the town got narrow and dark again, and Marvin turned down the alley behind the old theater without announcing it, like we all already knew that was where the night was going.

The stage door had a light over it that buzzed. The workshop was the little stone building behind it, one window, dark. Marvin dug out his keys.

"So," I said, on the doorstep. "Terms. You said terms."

"Inside first," Marvin said. "Terms are better said sitting down."

The workshop smelled like sawdust, glue, and wood sealant, the same as it always did, and under that now there was the sharp ghost of whatever spices Willa had been heating. There was a workbench along one wall with the hot plate on it, switched off, and the stone mortar sitting there like a defendant. Half-finished puppets hung from pegs on the other wall, arms and legs separate, waiting to be strung.

Willa went to the sink and ran her hand under cool water for a bit, mostly for show I think, then dried it and looked at us both.

"Okay," she said. "Adult conversation. Go."

Marvin filled three mugs of water from the tap and handed them round. "Before anything else, water. Two glasses of wine each at dinner, hours ago, and a long walk since. I'd say we're sober. If anybody isn't, say so now and we do this another night."

"Sober," said Willa.

"Sober," I said, and drank the whole mug to prove it.

Marvin pulled a stool over and sat on it backwards, arms on the backrest, which was his serious meeting posture from the climbing gym. "Right. Axel. Willa and I have been together two years. We've talked twice about bringing someone in, both times it was you, both times we agreed we'd only ever bring it up if it felt natural. Tonight it felt natural. That's the whole pitch."

"You're pitching me?"

"Everyone gets pitched. Willa got pitched in March."

"And I said yes then, for the record," Willa said, sitting up on the workbench next to the mortar, which she then pulled into her lap like a cat. "Eventually. I made him wait a week because he was being so careful about it."

"I'm careful," Marvin said. "We've covered this."

"Okay," I said. "My terms. One, if anyone says stop, at any point, we stop, no negotiating, no checking later whether they meant it. Two, nobody is weird about me in the morning. Three, I'm not a gift you're giving each other, so if this goes sideways I want to know we can still get a pint and complain about it."

Willa pointed the pestle at me. "That's fair, all three. Our terms. We're a couple first. That doesn't change. And we like you, separately and together, this isn't a filling a slot situation."

"Good. I was worried it was a slot situation."

"Was your last relationship a slot situation?"

"My last relationship was a woman who cried at a car park barrier for twenty minutes because the machine wouldn't take her five pound note, so, no, it was not."

Marvin laughed and then stopped laughing, and looked at Willa, and she looked at him, and then they both looked at me, and he said, "So. Everyone says yes out loud. Axel, do you want this? Tonight, with us, yes or no?"

I made myself not joke. "Yes. I want this!"

"Willa?"

"Yes. Obviously. Since March, apparently!"

"And us," Marvin said to her. "Yes!"

"Yes," she said.

"That's the deal, then," Marvin said, and got off the stool, and the room got very quiet in the way rooms do after everyone has said the true thing.

Willa was still sitting on the workbench with the mortar in her lap. She looked down at it and then back up at us with a face I can only describe as an idea arriving.

"I was in the middle of something when I injured myself," she said. "The spice paste. For the lamb tomorrow. Axel, hold this."

She put the mortar in my hands. It was heavy, dark stone, still faintly warm.

"Okay," I said. "Now what."

"Now you stand there looking useful while I grind the rest of the paste, because if I leave it half done I'll think about it all night instead of thinking about either of you." She took the pestle out of Marvin's reach when he offered it. "Not you. You've done enough damage with equipment tonight."

"That was one incident."

"It was tonight's incident, that's a recent enough record."

She hopped down off the bench and stood at the counter, and I stood next to her holding the stone bowl, and Marvin drifted over to my other side, and the three of us were suddenly arranged around one small workbench like it was a campfire. She tipped in dried chillies