Salt and Resin

Roberta Partridge had sold flowers on the same stretch of roadside for twenty years. Forty-four years old, freckled and Irish-pale, never married, one serious relationship that ended at twenty-seven and nothing since worth the name. She was fine with that. Most days she was fine with that.

The problem was the cheese woman.

Maeve Yoshida worked the creamery near the toll plaza. Forty-one, Japanese American, sharp as a wire, and she never smiled. Not once in twelve months of sharing a delivery truck bay. Roberta had counted. Every morning Maeve backed her van into the bay they both used, gave Roberta a nod that could have meant anything, and walked off with her crates of wheels and rinds like she was carrying state secrets.

"You're in my spot," Maeve said the first day they met. That was it. The conversation consisted of nothing else for three weeks.

"It's a shared bay," Roberta had said. "It says so on the sign."

"I know what it says."

And that was a typical Tuesday between them.

The trouble was, Roberta couldn't stop watching her. A year of it now. Twelve months of noticing how Maeve wrapped cheese like other women wrapped gifts. How she pushed her sleeves up to the elbow before she lifted a crate. How her black hair came loose from her bun by mid-afternoon and she never fixed it until the day was done.

"You've got it bad," said Pamela, who ran the coffee cart two stalls down.

"I don't have anything."

"You stare at that woman like she owes you money."

"I stare at her because she's rude. She took my parking spot for a year, Pamela."

Pamela poured herself a coffee and looked unconvinced. "Sure. Keep telling yourself that, honey."

Roberta flipped her a carnation and changed the subject.

The dance marathon was the one big thing this stretch of the coast did all year. They strung fairy lights across the toll plaza parking lot, dragged out a stage, and hired a polka band from Holland that nobody had ever heard of and everybody loved. Couples came from three towns over. Old men in pressed shirts. Women with years of practice in their hips.

Roberta closed the stall early. She wasn't going to dance. She never danced. She went because the lights were pretty and because standing alone at a flower stall all day makes a person hungry for noise.

The band started at seven. Accordions, a tuba, a fiddle player who grinned as if the whole thing was a joke he was in on. The asphalt filled up with spinning couples. Fairy lights turned everything gold. The lake wind came through and carried the smell of brine off the water.

That was when Roberta saw her.

Maeve Yoshida, standing at the edge of the dance floor. Alone. No bun tonight. Her hair hung loose past her shoulders and she wore a dark green dress that Roberta had definitely never seen at the creamery. She held a paper cup of something and looked out at the dancers the way you look at weather.

Well. Well, well.

Roberta was walking before she decided to walk. That happened to her maybe twice in her life. She crossed the lot, dodged a spinning farmer and his wife, and stopped a foot away from the cheese woman.

"You don't dance," Roberta said.

Maeve turned her head. Those dark eyes, always so flat in the truck bay, did something under the fairy lights. "You do?"

"No. That's not the point!"

"What is the point?"

"The point is you've been standing here ten minutes watching other people have fun." Roberta nodded at the floor. "That's a waste of a dress."

Maeve looked down at her own dress like she'd forgotten she was wearing it. "I was passing through. I heard the band."

"You live three miles away. Nobody passes through a dance marathon."

"You sell flowers in a parking lot. Don't talk to me about wasting time."

There she was. Roberta grinned and felt it land somewhere in her chest. "Dance with me."

Maeve's eyebrows went up. "No!"

"Fine."

"I didn't say no!"

"You said no."

"I said..." Maeve stopped. She took a drink from the cup. Whatever was in it, she needed it. "Why?"

Because I've watched you for a year and I'm tired of it. Because you wrap cheese like a gift. Because that dress.

"Because I want to know if you're this rude when you're holding my hand," Roberta said.

Maeve almost smiled. Almost. It was the closest Roberta had seen in twelve months and it was worth the whole year.

"One dance," Maeve said. "And if you step on my feet, I'm going back to the creamery."

"Deal. I'm a good dancer, and I want that noted. Twenty years of hauling buckets around a stall does wonders for your balance."

"That was almost a joke, Partridge."

"I have my days."

Maeve set the cup down on the guardrail and took Roberta's hand.

Her hand was dry and cool and stronger than Roberta expected. Cheese hands, Roberta thought. Hands that lift wheels all day. The band swung into something fast and the floor pulled them in.

Polka is not a subtle dance. There is nowhere to hide in a polka. They spun, they bounced, and Roberta was surprised to find that Maeve could actually move. Light on her feet. Competitive about it, too. Every turn Maeve led, Roberta stole it back. Every step Roberta took, Maeve matched it faster.

"You're showing off," Roberta said.

"You're stepping on my foot."

"That was the heel of the man behind me and you know it."

Maeve laughed. Actually laughed. It was short and rusty, like a hinge that hadn't moved in years, and it did more damage to Roberta than the whole dance combined. She spun Maeve hard, mostly to watch the loose hair fly, and caught her again by the waist.

"Careful," Maeve said, close to her ear now.

"You want me to stop?"

"I want you to keep up."

They kept up. The band ran the song long, the fiddle player grinning at them like he'd noticed two women fighting over who got to lead, and the whole lot noticed too, probably. Roberta didn't care. Maeve's hand had moved from her shoulder to the small of her back somewhere in the third verse and stayed there.

The song ended. They stopped, breathing hard, hands still on each other. Maeve's face was flushed and her hair was everywhere and Roberta thought, oh. Oh, this is a problem.

"Another?" the band shouted, and the crowd shouted back.

Maeve stepped back half a step. Not away. Half a step.

"I should go," she said.

"You just got here."

"I mean it, I have an early turn tomorrow. The caves need turning at five."

Roberta nodded. Fine. Fine. She let go of Maeve's waist and kept the hand a second longer than she needed to. "Same time next year, then."

Maeve looked at her. Under the fairy lights her eyes were not flat at all. They were doing plenty.

"Or," Maeve said, "you could come by the creamery. Saturday. After the market."

Roberta blinked. "Saturday."

"I do a tasting when the new batch is ready. Usually it's just distributors." She paused. "This time it would be you."

"You're inviting me to your cheese cave."

"I'm inviting you to my loft. Above the caves." Maeve picked up her cup and drained it. "Seven o'clock. If you can find it, which you can, since you've apparently spent a year watching my building."

Heat went up Roberta's neck. "Pamela talks."

"Pamela talks." Maeve's mouth twitched. "Saturday, Partridge. Don't bring flowers."

"What do I bring?"

"Nothing. Just you." She said it flat, the way she said everything, and then she walked off across the lot toward the road, dress swaying, hair loose, not looking back once.

Roberta stood there until the band started the next song without her.

Pamela appeared at her elbow with two coffees. "So?"

"So what?"

"So are you going to tell me why you're grinning like an idiot, or am I going to have to guess?"

"She invited me to the creamery."

Pamela made a low whistle. "Saturday?"

"Saturday."

"That's four days away."

"I can count, Pamela."

Pamela handed her a coffee. "You're going to need better shoes than your stall boots."

Roberta looked down at her boots. Scuffed, flower-stained, twenty years of honest work in the leather. She thought about Maeve's hands. Maeve's laugh. The way she'd said just you, flat and plain, like it was trivial, as if it wasn't the first thing anyone had said to Roberta in years that made her chest hurt.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm going to need a lot of things."

The band played on. The fairy lights burned gold over the asphalt. Saturday was four days out and Roberta Partridge already knew she wasn't going to sleep until then.

She stayed for one more dance, alone in a crowd, and then walked home along the lake road with salt wind in her hair, planning.

Roberta got half a mile up the lake road before she turned around.

It was stupid. She was forty-four years old, she had a stall to open at six in the morning, and she was walking back toward a toll plaza full of fairy lights because a woman in a green dress had said just you and walked off.

She went home first anyway. Changed her shirt. Looked at her boots, decided no, kept the boots. Drove the truck back to the lot because the walk had taken too long and the band was still going.

The marathon ran until midnight. The entire purpose of it was some fundraiser for the lighthouse keeper's fund, dancers sponsored by the hour. The parking lot had filled up since she left. Kids she didn't recognize, old couples from the coast houses, Pamela nowhere in sight, which meant Pamela had gone home to bed the way a sensible person would.

Roberta paid the five dollars at the gate and stood at the edge of the dance floor, under the strings of lights, and looked for a green dress.

It took a minute. Then she found it, off to the side, near the cider table. Maeve was sitting on a hay bale with a cup in her hands, watching the floor, not dancing.

Roberta walked over. Maeve looked up and her face did something complicated.

"You came back," she said.

"You left."

"I said I had an early turn."

"You said. You didn't go."

Maeve looked at her cup. "I got as far as the road," she said. "Then the band started playing something slow and I sat down instead."

Roberta sat down on the other hay bale. The band was into a waltz now, something with a accordion in it, slow and dragging. The polka band from Holland, apparently, could do both.

"Stand up," Roberta said.

"Partridge."

"Stand up. One slow one. Then go home and turn your caves and I'll go home and sleep and we'll pretend this was about cheese."

Maeve set the cup down. She stood up.

Here is the thing Roberta had not been ready for. In a polka there is nowhere to hide, but in a waltz there is nowhere to run. Maeve's hand went to her shoulder, proper, correct. Then the song slowed in the middle and the hand slid down and settled low on Roberta's back, at the small of it, fingers spread, and stayed there like it had been invited.

Roberta forgot the step for a full bar of music.

"That's not a dancing hand," she managed.

"No," Maeve said. "It isn't."

They kept dancing. Roberta's heart was doing something she wasn't going to name. Twelve months of curt hellos over a shared truck bay. Twelve months of never a smile, she had counted, she had actually counted, a forty-four-year-old woman keeping a ledger of non-smiles like a bookkeeper. And now a hand at the small of her back and neither of them talking.

"You're staring at me," Maeve said.

"You're holding me like you mean it."

"I am mean about most things."

"That's not what I said."

Maeve pulled her a half inch closer. The crowd turned around them. The fairy lights swung a little in the lake wind.

"I watched you all summer," Maeve said, quiet, like it cost her. "Every market day. You arranging those stupid sunflowers."

"They're not stupid."

"They're absolutely stupid. I watched you anyway."

Roberta laughed. She couldn't help it. "We could have been doing this since June."

"Yes. Well." Maeve's jaw worked. "I'm not good at wanting things. I'm good at cheese. Cheese you can control."

"And this?"

"This I can't." She said it like a diagnosis. "So I'm going to stop trying."

They danced through the waltz. Then the band went into another slow one, and then another, some kind of slow block for the tired marathon dancers, and neither of them suggested stopping. Rounds of it. Roberta lost track. Her cheek ended up near Maeve's temple at some point and stayed there. Maeve smelled like salt and rennet and under that something clean, and Roberta filed all of it away like evidence.

The band stopped at midnight. The lights came up whiter, the crowd thinned, someone with a clipboard started stacking chairs. Maeve stepped back and the air where she'd been felt cold.

"My truck's here," Roberta said. "Let me drive you home."

"It's three miles."

"I know where it is. I've apparently spent a year watching your building."

Maeve snorted. She got her jacket off the hay bale. "Fine. But I'm navigating."

The drive was short and quiet. Maeve gave directions in clipped words, left here, past the stand of pines, and then the creamery rose up out of the dark, a low stone building with one lit window up top. Roberta parked next to the aging caves and cut the engine and neither of them moved.

"I can just drop you," Roberta said, and heard how it sounded, a door left open or a door being closed, she wasn't sure which.