Road Trip Blues

The piano slid again when I hit the brakes, and this time it hit the wheel well hard enough that the whole van rocked.

"Easy," Blair said from the passenger seat, one hand flat on the dashboard. "The thing weighs more than you do."

"Thank you for that."

"It's true. You're a string bean and that piano is a small car." She craned around to look back at it, all eight hundred pounds of retired music teacher's upright strapped down with two ratchet straps and a lot of hope. "We're okay. Straps held."

I wasn't so sure we were okay. The GPS had sent us off what it claimed was Route 9 and what turned out to be a nameless dirt stretch between two hills in the dark, and now the engine had made a sound like a hammer dropping into a bucket of bolts and quit. No lights ahead. No lights behind. Just a barn with stained-glass windows down the slope, glowing warm, and a sign I could barely read that said something about tabletop gaming, which would have been a funny coincidence if Doreen's cafe weren't still twenty miles off.

I coasted us into the gravel lot behind it and put the van in park, and the engine ticked and died all the way.

"Well," Blair said.

"Well."

"That's not the good noise, Lenny."

"No, that's the opposite of the good noise."

I turned the key. Nothing. Turned it again. A sad click. I let go and put my forehead on the steering wheel for a second, because I am forty-two years old and I quit a perfectly steady job at a brewery seven months ago to start my own operation out of a rented barn in Bennington, and every dollar I had was now wrapped up in tanks and hops and a lease, and tonight was supposed to be the simple favor before the leap. Drive to Rutland, pick up Mrs. Farley's old piano, deliver it to Blair's cousin's new game cafe, done. One tank of gas and a handshake.

Instead we were dead in a parking lot at eleven forty at night in rural Vermont with a piano and a three-day weekend of brewing ahead of me.

Blair was already thumbing at her phone. She's thirty-seven, has been a dental hygienist since before I met her three years ago at that beer festival where I gave her a free sample and she told me my saison tasted like a lawn. She was right. She's usually right.

"Okay, I texted Doreen," she said. "Told her the piano's coming but the van died and we might be late. She says there's a tow guy in town who does nights, she'll call him." Her phone lit her face blue. "Also she says the cafe has a lockbox and we can crash on the couch if we're really stuck."

"I'm not crashing on my customer's couch smelling like stranded."

"You smell fine." She put the phone down and looked at me, and I could feel her doing the thing she does where she reads my face like a chart. "Hey. Breathe. It's a dead battery or a belt. It's not the brewery."

"I know."

"It's not your fault."

"I took the exit."

"The GPS took the exit. The GPS is a liar and we will tell it so in the morning." She popped the glove box open and started digging through it one-handed. "Do we have a flashlight in here or is it all napkins and your CD collection?"

"There's a light in the door pocket."

"Found napkins. Found a tire gauge. Found a cassette of... Lenny, why do you own a cassette of Skynyrd?"

"Ask your questions in the morning."

She laughed, that short snort-laugh I'd have married her for already if we'd gotten around to it. She kept digging and then her hand stopped. "What's this?"

She came up with an oil lamp. Little brass thing, glass chimney, finger loop on top. It had been sitting in the piano bench when we loaded it, and Mrs. Farley had told us to keep it, said she'd never used it since her husband passed and the piano should go with its things.

"That's Farley's lamp," I said. "It came with the bench."

"It has oil in it. Half full." Blair turned it over, found the wick wheel, gave it a quarter turn. "Do you have a lighter?"

"Glove box, behind the cassettes."

She found it, and I watched her thumb roll the wheel and the little flame catch, and she touched it to the wick and turned the knob down until the flame sat low and orange behind the glass. And the van changed.

I don't know how else to say it. It was a dented cargo van with a dead engine and a piano in the back, and suddenly it felt like the tent we rented in Acadia two summers ago, the lantern between us, the whole world shrunk down to warm and small. The floodlight out over the lot buzzed and hummed, and inside the van the lamp beat it. The straps and the piano went soft-edged. Blair's face went the color of cider.

"Oh," she said. "Okay. That's nice."

"Yeah."

"Farley, you wonderful weirdo." She set it on the dashboard, wedged against the windshield, and the whole cab glowed. Then she did something she doesn't always do, which was unbuckle and slide across the bench seat until her shoulder was against mine. She's small and warm and she smelled like the vanilla lotion she's bought since before I knew her. "Come here. You've been wound up since Boston."

"That's a two-hour wound."

"I know. Untwist." She pulled my arm around her and settled in under it, and outside the floodlight hummed and somewhere a dog barked twice and quit. "Can I ask you the real question? Not the tow truck question."

"Go ahead."

"Are you scared? About the brewery. Real answer."

I thought about lying, which I don't do to her, mostly because it doesn't work. The lamp flame stood very still in its glass. "Yeah," I said. "Some nights it's all I think about. I did the math a hundred times and the math says we're fine until summer and then it's beer or nothing. And I keep thinking, I had a job. I had a good job with a pension, and I gave it up to smell like grain forever."

"You gave it up because you were killing yourself there and you make better beer than the place you left."

"That's a low bar, Deb's place tastes like pennies."

"Lenny." She turned under my arm so she was facing me, one knee up on the seat, and the lamp put a little shine in her eyes. "You're doing the thing. You've been doing the thing the whole drive. So I'm gonna say this once and you're gonna hear it." She put her palm flat on my chest. "I believe in this. I believed in it when you handed me that lawn-tasting saison at the festival and I believed in it every weekend you've spent in that barn since. You're the most stubborn, careful, annoyingly thorough man I have ever dated, and careful men with good recipes do not fail."

"I'm not careful, I own a van held together with a piano."

"You strapped that piano down like it was going to the moon. I watched you." Her hand slid up my chest, over my collar, and she waited there. "Can I kiss you? You've got doom face and I want to fix it."

"Please!"

She kissed me slow, the way she does when she's not in a hurry, one hand curled behind my jaw, and I felt every mile of the day just drain out through my boots. The lamp made her lips warm. When she pulled back a couple inches she stayed close, her forehead against mine.

"There he is," she whispered. "There's the guy who calms down when I touch him."

"It's a documented effect."

"Documented where?"

"In my heart, officially."

She laughed against my mouth and kissed me again, longer this time, and her hand came down and found the hem of my shirt and just rested there, fingertips on my stomach. "I want to show you something," she said, quiet, against my lips. "How much I believe in you. If you want. The light's nice and the tow guy's gonna be an hour and I've been thinking about it since you carried that piano tail up the ramp without complaining."

"That was just good lifting form."

"Lenny. Yes or no?"

The lamp flame flickered once and steadied. Outside, nothing moved. Her fingers stayed right where they were, waiting, not pulling, and God, three years and she still waits.

"Yeah," I said. "God, yes!"

"Okay." She kissed the corner of my mouth and reached back to hit the button that folded the seat flat. "Then scoot over and let me work."

She got me flat on my back on the folded seat and climbed up over me, knees on either side of my hips, and the lamp threw her shadow huge against the ceiling of the van. Then she sat down on my lap, full weight, and put her hands flat on my chest like she was claiming it.

"Comfortable?" she asked.

"I'm the most comfortable broken-down man in Vermont."

"Good." She reached behind her, over the seatback, into the bag she'd packed for the trip, the one with the granola bars and the extra wipers and whatever else Blair decides a two-day drive might require. She came back up holding a small bottle. Lube. The good kind, the kind we keep at home in the nightstand.

"You packed lube," I said.