Sanding the Edges

The box sat on my porch for two days before I opened it, because it had my address on it and I wasn't sure whose it was. This was the mistake, right there, and I've thought about it a lot since, how a thing as small as a label printed wrong can shuffle your whole life sideways like a card dealt to the wrong hand. My name is Collette, I was thirty-four that winter, and I'd been in Anvils, Montana for about five weeks, working as a park ranger out at the district office, which mostly meant I drove a lot of snowy miles and talked to hunters who thought the rules applied to other people.

The return label said Broken Bridge Curling Club, and inside the box, under a bunch of crinkled paper, were little bottles of chocolate syrup, the fancy kind you'd buy at a shop where they ask you questions, and a flat box of handmade chocolates that smelled like a bakery had been compressed into wax and cocoa. Nothing about it said curling. I stood in my kitchen with my coat still on and read the packing slip, and it said Carlotta Reines, Broken Bridge Curling Club, and then, because whoever printed it was having a bad day, my street and my number.

I need to explain that I did consider just keeping it. Any reasonable person would have eaten four chocolates and driven over the next day. But I'd been lonely in that particular small-town way where you know nobody and the winter is nine months long, and here was an errand with a person attached to it. So I put on a clean shirt and went out to the rental car, which was a stick shift, a fact the agency had not mentioned and which I discovered in the parking lot of the airport in a state of sweaty disbelief. I had learned to drive stick at twenty-two from a boyfriend who yelled a lot, and I had not touched one since, and now it was my only car until the truck came up from Billings.

I stalled it twice leaving my own driveway. I stalled it again at the stop sign by the gas station, and a man in a coat made of actual wool watched me restart it with the patience of a man who had decided I was the entertainment portion of his morning. The box rode in the passenger seat, sliding around on the curves, and I talked to it a little, out loud, the way you do when you've been alone too long, telling it not to judge me.

The Broken Bridge Curling Club sat on the flat past the last row of houses, a long low building with a sagging porch and a sign that had lost some letters, so it said BOKEN BRIDGE, which I found charming in a way I would not have found charming back when I lived somewhere with more than one restaurant. There was a door marked SHOP around the side, and through its little window I could see lamplight and somebody's shoulders moving.

I knocked. The shoulders stopped.

"It's open," a voice said, so I opened it.

The room was small and warm and smelled like varnish and wood shavings, and a woman was standing at a workbench with a cello belly in a clamp in front of her, and she was maybe thirty-nine, with gray coming in at her temples and hands that looked like they knew exactly what they were doing at all times. She had a knife in one hand and she set it down before she turned all the way around, which I appreciated, being a person who has a professional relationship with knives myself.

"You're not my syrup," she said.

"I'm the opposite of your syrup," I said. "I'm where your syrup went by mistake. Collette. I live up on Ridge Road. Somebody printed your address on my box, or my address on your box, and I've been eating my weight in guilt for two days deciding what to do about it."

She laughed, an actual laugh, not a polite one, and wiped her hands on her apron, and said her name was Carlotta, and held out her hand, and I shook it, and hers was rough in the way of someone who works wood for a living, which she then confirmed by gesturing at everything in the room, which was everything in the room.

"So you're the new ranger," she said. "Word travels. Slowly, but it travels. Come here, look at this, since you're already standing in my shop like you belong here."

The cello belly was maple, pale and rippled, and she told me she'd been fitting the bass bar, which meant nothing to me, so she explained it the way good teachers do, plainly, with her hands, how the inside of an instrument is braced and shaped so that a piece of spruce the size of a shoe sole carries the whole voice of the thing, and how if you get it wrong by a millimeter the cello will sulk at you for the rest of its life. She said she'd been a luthier for fourteen years, that she'd learned in a shop in Minneapolis, and that she'd come out to Anvils because the curling club was dying and she had a stupid idea she could save it by buying it and attaching a violin repair business to the back of it, and the stupid idea had worked, barely.

"Most people around here think it's an odd combination," she said. "Curling and cellos. But they're both about patience and small corrections, if you squint."

"And chocolate syrup?" I asked, holding up a bottle.

"That," she said, taking it from me and looking through it like it contained state secrets, "is for a thing I do. Once a month I cook, badly, and put out good chocolate, and the people who show up eat it and complain about the ice conditions. It started as a fundraiser and turned into a habit. You should come. You've already delivered the supplies, so you're basically staff."

I said I was a terrible cook and she said that was fine, the position had no standards, and then she said the thing that I have gone over a hundred times since, which was, "Stay for a drink. I close the shop at four and the bar upstairs doesn't open till six and there's a bottle up there that's been waiting for somebody with no plans."

I had no plans. I want that understood from the beginning, because everything that came after happened in the daylight, sober-headed, with both of us saying yes out loud at every step, and it started with a woman I'd known for forty minutes asking me to sit in her kitchen above a curling club and drink whiskey while she told me about wood.

The apartment above the club was warm and cluttered and had a window that looked out over the ice sheet, which was empty and glowing under the skylights. She poured two fingers of something Irish into two mismatched glasses and we sat at a table that had clearly been built by someone learning to build tables, and she asked me questions like a person actually interested in the answers. Where I'd rangered before, whether I'd ever thrown a stone, whether I liked being cold. I told her about the rental car and the stick shift and she offered, without any weight on it, to teach me on the club's old truck, any Saturday I wanted, and I said yes before the sensible part of my brain had finished drafting its objections.

Somewhere in the second small drink, the last either of us poured, she noticed the chocolate on my breath, or I admitted I'd eaten two in the car as a toll, and she got up and came back with the box and set it between us and said, "Eat them properly, then, not in a cold car like an animal," and told me which one to try first, and watched me while I did.

"You make a face," she said. "When something's good. Right before you swallow. Has anyone ever told you that?"

"People have mentioned it," I said, my mouth full of ganache.

"It's a good face," she said, and there was a pause there, not a long one, just a beat where the room got quieter, and she looked at me across the box of chocolates and said, plainly, the way she'd talked about bass bars, "I'd like to kiss you. I'm asking, in case that wasn't obvious. We can keep eating chocolate and talk about curling instead, and that would also be a fine afternoon."

I set down the chocolate. I looked at her hands on the table, rough and certain, and then at her face, where nothing was hidden, and I said, "Yes. That. Please!"

She reached across and cupped my jaw like she was checking the fit of something she'd made herself, and kissed me, slow, tasting of whiskey, and I made the face, I'm sure, right before I swallowed.

We pulled apart eventually, the way you do when your leg has fallen asleep or the kettle has boiled, and she laughed, low, and said, "Well. That was worth closing the shop early for." I said something equally eloquent, I believe it was "yeah," and we sat there grinning at each other like two people who had just discovered the other one could hear. She turned the box of chocolates so it faced me and said, "Eat them properly, like I said. Slowly. I'll tell you what's in each one and you tell me if I'm wrong, because I made them and I've stopped trusting my own palate on the cardamom ones."

So that's what we did, for a while, an adult woman of thirty-four and another of thirty-nine sitting at a crooked homemade table eating chocolates one at a time out of a paper box, and I will tell you it was one of the better hours of my winter. She'd hold one up, describe it, watch me take it, and watch the face I made, which she'd now identified and was clearly enjoying the way a person enjoys a favorite song. At some point she took one, the dark one with the smoked salt, and instead of handing it to me she held it up to my mouth herself.

"Open," she said, and I did, and she placed it on my tongue with her fingertips and then left her fingertips there a half second