Sawdust and Sparks

I'm twenty-four years old and I've spent most of the last three years actively avoiding anything that looks like a date. My sister Imani says it's because I got my heart broke once in college, at twenty-one, by a guy named Trevor who turned out to be engaged to somebody in his study group, but honestly I don't think that's it. I just like my own company. I get up at six, I build cabinets and decks and the occasional weird commissioned bench shaped like a heron, I come home covered in sawdust, I eat dinner standing at my kitchen counter, and I go to bed happy. The arrangement is complete, and it works, and I never saw the reason to mess with it.

But Imani has a way of wearing you down, and my friend Kayla has an even better one, which is that she signed me up for a dating app while I was in the shower and then handed me her phone across the bathroom door like it was a hostage negotiation. "Just talk to him," she said. "You don't have to marry him. You don't even have to like him. Just talk to the man."

The man was Sean Sanderson, twenty-eight, a graphic designer who listed his hobbies as woodwork appreciation, which I figured was a lie told to lure in women like me, and cooking. We messaged for two weeks. He was funny in a dry way that I actually liked, and he never once sent me a picture of his gym progress, which apparently puts him in the top ten percent of men on that app. So when he asked if I wanted to get dinner on Friday, I said yes before I could think about it too hard, and then I spent four days thinking about it too hard.

He picked the restaurant, a place called The Greasy Griddle downtown, and I should have known from the name that we were in trouble. I got there ten minutes early on Friday because I'd rather stand around than be the late one, and I stood outside on the sidewalk watching through the window as the place did its best impression of a fish market at dawn. Every table was full. There were people standing in the entryway. The staff, all three of them that I could see, were moving at the speed of tired dogs. The jukebox was playing something with a horn section turned up loud enough to rattle the glass.

I almost texted him that we should just get sandwiches and eat them in a parking lot somewhere. I had my thumb on his name in my phone when I made myself put it away, because I'd already bailed on two first dates this year and Imani had made me promise, out loud, with witnesses, that the third one was happening.

So I went in. The air conditioning was broken or maybe just defeated, and the whole room smelled like fryer grease and spilled beer, which I'll admit was not the worst thing to my particular nose since I spend my days around cut pine and stain. The hostess stand was unmanned, so I did what any sensible person does at a place like that, I stood there looking useful until somebody yelled at me to sit anywhere.

I found him in the back corner. I'd never seen the man in person, only a few photos where he mostly looked like he was being arrested, but I knew him right away because he was the only person in the room who looked comfortable. He was sitting at a two-top with a wobbly leg, a menu already open, and when he saw me scanning the room he just raised one hand a little and smiled. Not one of those big first-date grins, all teeth and panic. A small one, like we already knew each other and he was saving me a seat.

"You found me," he said when I got to the table. "Honestly I was going to give it two more minutes and then assume you saw this place and drove to a better life."

"It crossed my mind," I said, sitting down. The chair creaked. The table had a ring of old syrup on it that somebody had wiped toward the edge and then abandoned. "You picked a real winner, Sanderson."

"I know, right? I've been here twice before and both times it was half empty. Tonight it's like the whole county got a memo."

"Everybody got the memo except the kitchen, I think. There's about six tables' worth of people and one waitress."

He looked over at the single waitress, who was carrying four plates up her arms like a circus performer, and nodded. "She's doing more work tonight than I did all week, and I got paid for it."

He was better looking in person, which I don't say lightly, because usually it goes the other way. Dark hair cut short, a little stubble, forearms that told me he'd probably carried his own groceries at some point in his life. He wore a plain gray button-up with the sleeves rolled once, and I noticed because I own that exact shirt in flannel, four of them, work edition.

The waitress finally made it to us, dropped two laminated menus, said the specials so fast that neither of us caught a single one, and vanished before I could ask what the soup was. Sean and I looked at each other and he started laughing first, this quiet chuckle like he was trying not to disturb the table next to us, and it broke whatever nervous thing had been living in my chest since Wednesday.

"So," he said, opening the menu. "Do we actually read these or do we just point at something when she comes back and hope for the best?"

"I've read this one before. The burger's fine. Everything else is a gamble."

"You've been here?"

"My crew eats lunch here sometimes when the site's close. It's fine food at a fair price served by people who clearly hate it here."

"That's a Yelp review," he said. "The review is complete. One star for atmosphere, four stars for honesty."

I ordered the burger and he ordered the same, plus fries to split, and when the waitress repeated it back wrong he fixed it gently and she said sure, whatever, in a tone I respected deeply. Then he got us two waters out of the pitcher on the back counter himself when she didn't come back for ten minutes, and I decided that was a point in his favor, a man who will get up and solve a small problem instead of complaining about it.

The jukebox cycled over to something even worse than the horn song, some ballad with a lot of echo on the vocals, and he winced and said, "Somebody paid real money for that."

"Twice, by the sound of it. It played twenty minutes ago."

"Maybe the jukebox is haunted."

"Everything's haunted if the building's old enough. This place looks like it used to be a bank."

"It was a pawn shop," he said, and when I looked at him he shrugged. "My dad lived down the street from here in the nineties. He talks about it. He used to come in and look at guitars he couldn't afford."

"So you have family history with a building that currently has syrup on its tables."

"Deep roots," he said, deadpan, and I laughed harder than the joke deserved, because he delivered it exactly flat, no grin, and that's the kind of humor I like, the kind that makes you check whether the person meant it.

The fries came before the burgers, which is a thing this restaurant does, and he pushed the basket to the middle of the table without asking, which is another thing I liked. We ate off the same plate with two sets of hands and talked about nothing, about the waitress's heroic silence, about whether a hot dog is a sandwich (it isn't, he's wrong, I told him so), about the app and how bad the pictures on it are. And somewhere in the middle of the argument about hot dogs I realized my shoulders had come down from where they'd been living since Wednesday, up around my ears, and I was actually having a good time, sitting in a sticky corner of a loud restaurant, splitting fries with a stranger.

Which was the exact moment I remembered that I don't do this. I don't do dates, and I don't do the thing where you look forward to seeing somebody. And I looked at him across the table, at that calm smile, and I thought, oh no, this one might actually be a problem.

Then he did the thing. I was reaching for a fry at the same time he was, and instead of pulling back as anyone would, he let his hand land on mine, just for a second, warm and dry and calloused at the fingertips in a way that surprised me, and he said, "Sorry, go ahead," but he didn't move right away, and neither did I. It was maybe two seconds of a stranger's hand resting on mine on a laminate table with syrup on it, and I felt it go up my arm like a current, a real jolt, the kind of thing I'd always assumed was a thing people made up in movies because nobody actually describes it that way in real life.

I pulled my hand back and ate the fry and said nothing, because what was there to say, sorry, your hand appears to have shorted out my nervous system, pass the ketchup. He went back to the hot dog argument like nothing happened, which was either politeness or the same jolt happening to him, and I couldn't tell which, and I spent a while not being able to tell which, which is a bad use of a Friday night when you're twenty-four and supposedly over all this.

The burgers came, huge and dripping, and we ate, and the crowd started to thin out around eight thirty. The standing crowd in the entryway drained off toward wherever people go on Fridays, some of them to the bar across the street, the noise level dropped from a roar to a rumble, and the waitress made a lap wiping tables with the enthusiasm of a woman counting the minutes. Sean looked around, then at me.

"Want to move to that booth? It's quieter over there and this table wobbles every time the trucks go by."

"Sure," I said, too fast, and gathered my stuff like it was a normal thing I did, moved to booths with men.

The booth was along the wall under a framed photo of the restaurant from the eighties, back when it was apparently neither a pawn shop nor a bank, and the vinyl seat had a tear in it that somebody had fixed with electrical tape. Sean slid in across from me and stretched his legs out, and his boot tapped mine under the table, and he didn't pull it back either, and I decided two could play whatever this was.

"So," he said, leaning back, arms crossed, that easy look on his face. "Tell me the thing you actually do. Not the job. I know you build cabinets and heron benches. The thing you do when nobody's asking."

"That's a weirdly specific question."

"I've got two weeks of messages backing it up. You dodge good questions by answering better ones."

"That's not true," I said, and then thought about it. "OK, it's a little true. I don't know. I get up at six, I work with my hands until my shoulders quit, I go home, I eat standing up at the counter because sitting down felt like too much ceremony for one person, I go to bed. Weekends are the same with more sawdust."

"That sounds like a monk's life with better tools."

"It's a good life," I said, and meant it, mostly, and he looked at me like he was deciding whether to push, and then he pushed anyway, which I would later admit I respected.

"But you signed up for the app. Or your friend did, you said. Monks don't get signed up for apps."

"Kayla did it while I was in the shower. I could have deleted it. I didn't." I took a drink of water. "Why did you stay on it?"

"Same reason, I guess. I've done the casual thing since I was twenty-two and it's fine, it's genuinely fine, but it starts to feel like eating dessert for every meal. At some point you want somebody