Quarry Hour

The haboob was supposed to come through around four. I gave myself that reason for driving out there, like weather was a thing you could schedule a life around. I'm Davey Brandt, I'm forty-four, I turn forty-five in eleven days, on Thursday, and I fix cars in a town nobody's heard of, forty minutes from a quarry in Serbia that most maps don't bother naming.

The bluestone was that color it gets in late afternoon, almost blue enough to believe the postcards. Half the old rails were underwater, showing like scars in the turquoise, and the crane was still standing at the edge, rusted orange, leaning like it was a drunk uncle. I parked my van by the maintenance shed because the door was open and an open door is an invitation to a mechanic. That's how I found the harmonium stop on the workbench. A theater organ stop, ivory tab, splintered down one side, sitting in a shed at a rock quarry like it had always lived there. Somebody had carried that thing a long way to leave it nowhere.

I had it half apart when I heard footsteps on gravel.

"You've got grease on your cheek," Isabel said.

I looked up. She was thirty-nine now, five years older than the last time I'd seen her, and she was wearing the pale blue uniform of a woman who polishes elevator buttons for a living, which is a real job, I checked, because when she told me about it back then I laughed and she made me apologize. Her hair was shorter. Everything else was where I'd left it.

"You still work here," I said. Not a question, but it came out like one.

"Nights at the hotel. Three elevators, forty buttons a night, give or take." She came closer and looked at the workbench instead of me, which I understood, because I was doing the same thing. "You took that apart."

"Somebody broke it. The tab's splintered. It's a stop key, it shouldn't have force on it like that."

"Five years and you're still fixing things nobody asked you to fix." She smiled when she said it, so I didn't take it the wrong way.

I wiped my hands on a rag that had been a rag for twenty years and told myself to say the true thing. I'd promised myself on the drive I would say the true thing if she showed up, and I'd figured she wouldn't show up, which is how I talk myself into promises.

"I came out here because of you," I said. "Not the weather. I heard through Marica at the fuel station that you still worked nights at the hotel, and I wanted to see you before my birthday. Before forty-five makes me officially old."

Isabel pulled a stool over and sat on it backwards, arms folded on the backrest, the way she used to sit at my kitchen table. "You're not old. You're a man with a splintered organ stop in front of him and dust coming in an hour."

"I remember when you left," I said. "You were thirty-four. You had the job offer and I said go, because I wasn't going to be the reason you stayed, and then for five years I've wondered if that was noble or just cowardly with better posture."

"That's a very mechanic way to put it." She laughed, short. "I wondered too. For about a year. Then Lapovo happened and I stopped wondering and started polishing buttons, which is what I do now, apparently."

"Is it good? The job?"

"It's quiet. The buttons are very clean." She looked at me over the backrest of the stool. "You didn't answer the question I didn't ask yet."

"Which is?"

"Why now. Forty-five in eleven days, you said it yourself. What is it about the number?"

I turned the stop key over in my hands. The splintered ivory had a clean grain under the damage, the kind of material they stopped using because it wore out and looked beautiful doing it.

"When I was a kid my father said a man should want something on every birthday or he starts wanting nothing," I said. "And this year I noticed I wanted nothing, and it scared me more than the number did. So I drove out here. That's the honest answer. I wanted to feel something before the birthday, and you're the last thing I remembered feeling."

The shed went quiet. Outside, the crane ticked as the metal heated, a sound I'd never noticed in all my visits to this quarry, or maybe there had never been anyone in the shed with me to hear it.

Isabel stood up off the stool. "Davey."

"Yeah."

"When we were together, before I left, what didn't we try?"

The question caught me off guard. "What do you mean, didn't try?"

"You know what I mean. We were careful with each other. Six months and we were so careful. Polite in bed. You never asked for anything, I never offered anything, and then I got on a train and I've thought about that sometimes, that we ran out of time before we ran out of caution." She said all this looking straight at me, which she always could do and I never could. "Because here's my confession. I turned thirty-five in Lapovo and decided I'd been adventurous at work and cautious everywhere else, and that's a stupid way to spend a decade. So I want to know. What didn't we try?"

"You first," I said, because my mouth was dry.

"Fine. There was a night you almost asked me for something and then didn't. You started the sentence and turned it into asking if I wanted tea. I still think about that tea." She grinned. "I've decided it wasn't tea."

I put the stop key down. There was no reason to keep lying to a woman who could see through a sentence about tea from five years away.

"It was about your backside," I said. "I wanted to take you that way and I didn't know how to ask and I didn't want you to think I saw you like a list of things. So I asked about tea."

"Davey." She said my name slow. "I have thought about that too. Not the tea, but the thing behind the tea. I'm thirty-nine, I polish elevator buttons, and I've decided this decade I ask for what I want instead of waiting for men to work up the nerve. So." She walked to the shed door, and I watched her, and she slid the bolt across with a sound that resembled a knuckle cracking. Then she turned around. "The haboob hits in about an hour. Marica's station will close, the road will close, the hotel generator will cough and everyone will stay inside. Nobody walks to a maintenance shed in a dust storm. We have an hour to be honest about what we never tried, and then the storm decides the rest."

"That's a lot of trust to put in a weather forecast."

"I read the sky, Davey. I've lived out here five years. The dust is already up over the ridge, look." She pointed through the window at the far bluestone wall, and there it was, a brown smudge climbing the horizon like it had somewhere to be. "And I locked the door so we don't get visitors, not so you can't leave. To be plain about it. You can leave anytime. I'd rather you stayed."

"I'd rather I stayed too," I said.

"Good. Then let's not spend forty of our sixty minutes being careful." She came back and stood close enough that I could see the little scar on her chin I'd forgotten about and then remembered all at once. "We're both adults, we both know what we're asking, and nobody here is drunk or confused or talked into anything. Yes?"

"Yes," I said. "But I'll ask it plain, once, so there's no tea misunderstanding. Isabel Bennet, do you want to go to bed with me, here, now, and do we finish the thing we started five years ago?"

"Yes," she said, and it wasn't shy at all. "And we finish it properly. All of it. Including the thing you asked about tea."

Outside, the light had started going the color of an old lemon, and the crane ticked again, and somewhere up the ridge the dust was getting its story straight.

She undressed the way she used to read the sky, slow and certain, like there was no version of this where she rushed. The pale blue uniform came off in pieces. Shoes first, set by the door. Then the uniform top, unbuttoned from the collar down, hung on the stool she'd been sitting on.

"You're staring," she said.

"You're giving me things to stare at."

"Well. Don't waste the hour." She sat on the edge of the workbench, next to the harmonium stop, which I moved a foot away so it wouldn't get broken by an elbow. Her bra was plain and gray and she reached back and undid it without ceremony, and then her breasts were just there, and forty-four years of me had nothing clever to say about it.

"Can I touch you?" I asked, because I had learned something in five years, apparently.

"That's why they're out, Davey."

So I touched her, and she caught my hands and turned them over and traced the calluses on my palms while I did it, like she was checking my work. My thumbs moved over her nipples and they hardened under them, and she made a small sound and kept reading my hands.

"Still a mechanic," she said. "You've got a scar I don't remember. Here, on the thumb."

"Fan belt, four years ago."

"You didn't have that when I left."

"A lot's happened since you left."

She laughed and pulled my face down and kissed me, and that was the second kiss, the first having happened while I was still holding the stop key like an idiot. This one was longer. Her mouth tasted like the coffee she'd admitted to drinking all shift.

Then I did the thing I'd wanted to do at thirty-nine and never worked up the nerve for. I knelt on the concrete floor of a maintenance shed in Serbia, put my hands on her knees, and asked.

"Can I use my mouth on you?"

She looked down at me on my knees and something in her face went soft and sharp at the same time. "Yes. God, yes. The careful years are over."

I pulled her underwear down and off, over one boot-sock she'd kept on for no reason she explained, and she spread her knees and I went in. She