Ramp Song

I woke up with a strange weight across my ribs and for a second I couldn't remember what year it was. Then I remembered. Lyle. His arm was heavy and warm and his breathing was slow, the kind of slow breathing a person does when they're really gone. The morning light was coming through the grimy window above my bed, cutting a dirty yellow stripe right across the floorboards.

My little room sits above the costume loft at the community theater. It's not much. A bed, a hot plate, a sink with a drip I've stopped noticing. Racks of sequined dresses hang in the loft downstairs, and on the way in last night I'd nearly tripped over a box of vintage suits someone donated in June. But it's mine, and cheap, and the walk to work is a flight of stairs.

Lyle's arm across me. I lay there a minute, careful not to move, and did the math on the night. Did that happen? Yes. Yes it did. There was an empty condom wrapper on the nightstand, so at least one of us had been sensible. My face got hot just lying there thinking about it.

I slipped out from under his arm the way you see people do in movies, slow and stiff, like I was defusing something. He didn't stir. I pulled on his flannel shirt, because it was the closest thing and because it smelled like sawdust and coffee, and padded down the stairs to fill a glass of water at the loft sink.

The loft in the morning is a different animal. All those dresses hanging there look kind of sad in daylight, like actors without makeup. I stood by the sink drinking water and replaying the whole thing, because apparently that's what I do now.

It started Tuesday. The ramp.

The theater is getting a wheelchair ramp built at the stage door, which honestly should have existed since about 1974, but here we are. Some community group sends volunteers around, and this guy Lyle showed up with a trailer full of lumber and a pencil behind his ear. He's fifty-two. He told me his age on day one like it was just a fact he carries around, same way you'd say what kind of truck you drive. Silver beard, big forearms, glasses he kept pushing up with his knuckle because his hands were full.

"So you're the costume person," he said.

"I'm the costume person. Mel. Twenty-three, in case you were going to ask and then feel weird about it."

"Wasn't going to ask. But good to know." He grinned. "I'm Lyle. I build ramps and I invent things nobody asked for."

"What kind of things?"

"Toys. Not those kind. Well." He paused. "Sometimes those kind."

I laughed so hard I had to sit down on a paint bucket. That was the moment, if I'm honest with myself. Right there on the paint bucket.

Anyway. Wednesday he was back, and Thursday, because the ramp is half-finished and the town only releases volunteers to you in slices, apparently. We talked every day. He asked about the dresses. I asked about the toys. He told me about a thing he designed, a something or other with a flexible joint, and I told him I once sewed forty sequins onto a bodice in one night and cried about it.

Then Friday happened. Friday, Aria from the box office asked me to haul a rack of costumes up from storage, the big rolling rack, the one that weighs about as much as a piano and has a wheel that only points wherever it feels like. I was wrestling it through the doorway, swearing, when Lyle came around the corner with his tool belt on.

"Need a hand?"

"I need six hands and a miracle."

He took the whole thing like it was a laundry basket. One hand on the bar, wheeling it smooth as anything, while I trotted behind like a duckling. And when it was parked where Aria wanted it he looked at me and I looked at him and something in the air went sort of thick.

"Thank you," I said. "That was actually heroic."

"Part of the service."

And then, and I still can't fully explain this, I heard myself say, "Do you want to come see my apartment? I mean. It's upstairs. From here. It's twelve stairs."

Twelve stairs! I gave him the stair count! Like that was the selling point!

He pushed his glasses up with his knuckle. "I'd like that."

"I should say, I don't usually do this."

"Me neither. Last time was three years ago, if you want the full embarrassing record."

"That IS the full embarrassing record. Okay. Come on then."

And that's how we got here. I filled my glass, drank half of it, and stood there in his flannel shirt with morning coming through the windows, thinking, well. Now what.

Because here's my problem, and maybe you'll get it. I don't know if what I feel is gratitude with a costume on, or the real thing. The man built a ramp. The man carried my rack. The man was kind to me for three days straight and then was kind to me in a completely different way for most of the night. At what point does thank you turn into something else? Is there a form I fill out?

I heard the bed creak above me. Then footsteps. Then Lyle's voice from the top of the stairs, careful and a little rough.

"Mel? You down there?"

"Just getting water. There's coffee if you want it, I think. The tin says coffee. It might be gravel."

He came down in his jeans from last night, hair sticking up on one side, and stopped on the bottom step. The light through the loft windows was hitting all the sequins and he was lit up in little silver dots, which felt like the theater itself making a joke.

"About last night," he started.

"Okay, so here's where I need you to not do the thing," I said.

"What thing?"

"The thing where a nice man gets up early and tries to gently let a woman down before she's even asked for anything. I've seen it. It has a smell."

He laughed. "It doesn't have a smell."

"It absolutely does. It's like cedar and apology."

"I was going to say," and he came down the last step, slowly, "that I don't do this. That's not a line, I already told you the three years thing. What I mean is I don't know what the morning-after rules are. I've been lying up there making a list."

"A list?"

"Things I might say. Rated by how stupid they'd sound."

"What's number one?"

"'Thank you for the hospitality.'" He said it in a deep radio voice and I cracked up.

"Terrible. Rejected."

"See? That's why the list."

I handed him the rest of my water, which felt like a big gesture for some reason, and he drank it. Then we just stood there among the dresses, two people in a room full of other people's fancy clothes, neither of us dressed for it.

"So," he said. "I should probably get going. The ramp's not going to build itself, and the crew shows at nine."

"Right. The ramp."

"And there's that reunion thing at the barn across town tonight. They asked if I'd put a temporary ramp up there too. Everybody's turning fifty this year and suddenly everyone cares about stairs."

"Class of whenever?"

"Class of '93. Don't."

"You're going to a reunion?"

"I'm going to BUILD for a reunion. Building and leaving. That's the arrangement."

I picked at a loose thread on his flannel shirt, which was still, I'll note, his shirt, on my body. "Lyle."

"Yeah?"

"Last night wasn't a mistake on my end. I want to say that before you leave, so you're not out there sanding something and doing math about it."

He looked at me and something in his face let go a little. "It wasn't on mine either."

"Good. Because I have a whole day of work now and I can't be inventing what you're thinking in my head. I'll invent it anyway, but it's better with data."

That made him laugh, that big quiet laugh he has, like the sound is coming from somewhere down near his boots. He kissed me on the forehead, which, okay, wasn't what I was braced for, and went up the stairs to get his boots. I heard the door, heard the trailer hitch up outside, heard his truck pull away toward the lumber yard.

And I stood alone in the loft in a borrowed flannel shirt, drinking the last of the water, with about twenty minutes until I had to be a functional person. The ramp downstairs was half done. The barn across town was getting decorated by people my parents' age. Somewhere in all of that there was a question with my name on it, and I had until the crew showed up to decide whether I was brave enough to ask it out loud.

The tin, let it be known, was gravel. Or something. Do not drink it.

He came back. I want that noted, because I had already written the whole thing off as a nice weird memory with sawdust in it, and then there was a knock at the stage door at 8:40 in the morning and there he was, holding a thermos as if offering peace.

"I forgot my pencil," he said.

"Your pencil."

"The one behind my ear. It's not there. Which means it's here."

"And that required a full drive back from the lumber yard?"

"It required a full drive back from the end of the driveway, actually. I got about forty feet and then I sat in the truck arguing with myself, and the truck lost."

I stepped aside and let him in. The morning light had shifted and now it was doing the thing where it comes through the high windows and sets every sequin in the room on fire. Lyle stood in it and pushed his glasses up with his knuckle, which I had already decided was my favorite thing he did, and that was a strange thing to have decided overnight.

"There's no coffee," I said. "I told you. The tin lied to me."

"I brought my own." He held up the thermos. "I don't go anywhere without it. That's not sad, that's logistics."

We went up my twelve stairs to my room, which suddenly looked different in daylight with a second person in it. The bed was still a disaster. The hot plate had my one pot on it. The sink was doing its little drip, drip, drip like it had been up all night too.

"Nice place," he said, and he meant it, which was worse.

"It's a room above a costume loft with a hot plate. Don't be nice about it."

"I'm not being nice. I had an apartment like this at your age. Except mine had a mattress on the floor and a roommate who sold his half of the couch."

"You had half a couch?"

"Half. The other half went with him. It was a whole thing."

So we made coffee on the hot plate, one cup, which we took turns with, and that felt more intimate than anything from the night before, honestly, because anyone can do the night stuff but sharing one mug while sitting on the edge of a bed at 8:50 in the morning is a commitment.

"Tell me about the ramps," I said. "Because I had you filed under contractor and now I don't know what file you go in."

"Volunteer, mostly. There's a group, we build ramps for people who need them. Porch ramps, stage ramps, church ramps. The theater thing came through and I took it because I like old buildings." He turned the mug in his hands. His forearms did that thing again where I lost the thread of my own sentence. "And the toys. That's the day job. I invent toys."

"You invent TOYS?"

"Toys. Mostly things for kids who can't use the standard ones. Adapted switches, big-grip stuff, that kind of thing. Somebody has to."

"Wait. So you build ramps for free and you invent toys so kids who got left out of the fun get included, and you were going to open this morning with 'thank you for the hospitality'?"

"That was on the rejected list."

"It better have been rejected!"

"It was rejected. Number one, rejected, unanimous vote."

"And I thought you were just some contractor Aria's cousin hired. I gave you exactly zero credit on Tuesday. You showed up with a trailer of lumber and a pencil behind your ear and I thought, great, a man with a pencil."

"That's a fair read. That's most people's read."

"It's a terrible read. It's an insult of a read."

He laughed his low laugh and looked around my little room, at the costumes hanging on the back of the door, at the drip in the sink. "So how does a twenty-three year old end up living above a costume loft in the middle of nowhere?"

"Twenty-three is a fine age to live above a costume loft."

"I didn't say it wasn't."

"You were about to say something dad-shaped. I saw it coming."

He held up both hands. "I was going to say it's a better story than mine. I did machine design for twenty years and then one day I quit and started making toys that squeak."

"That's not a better story, that's a midlife crisis with glitter on it."

"That IS what it is. It says so on my business card."

Later, when the coffee was gone, I took him downstairs into the loft because I wanted him to see it properly. Not the sequins-at-night version. The working version. I pulled the show costume off its form, the one I've been altering for three weeks, a green dress with beading coming loose at one shoulder.

"This is what I actually do all day," I said. "Watch." I turned it so the light caught the beadwork. "This came in with a rip under the arm and about four hundred loose beads. Somebody wore it in 1978 and danced like they were fighting it."

Lyle reached out and touched the fabric, just two fingers, careful, the way he'd touched the ramp lumber on Wednesday to check the grain. "Who wore it?"

"I don't know. Some lead. There's a photo in the front office of a woman in it holding a fake cigarette holder. She looks like she'd have eaten me alive."

"It's good work," he said, and he was looking at the stitches, not the dress. "You re-set the beads individually."

"Obviously I re-set the beads individually."

"Obviously," he said, smiling.

And something in my chest unclenched, is the only way I can put it. All morning I'd been doing the math, gratitude versus wanting, thank you versus something else, and here was this man crouched down looking at my stitch work like it mattered, and the question stopped feeling like a question.

"Do you regret it?" he asked suddenly. "Last night. You never actually answered. You gave me a whole speech about not doing the thing, which was great, top notch, but you never said the word."

And the word was right there. No. One syllable. I opened my mouth to say it and it felt too simple, like answering "how are you" with "fine." Because no was true and also not the whole shape of it.

"No," I said. "But it's a cheap no. Like, no, I don't regret it, and also I've been sitting here