Second Service

My neck was the first thing to file a report. Then my knees. Then the parking lot, gray through the windshield, with a dumpster on one side and a bare maple on the other.

I'm Clayton Fox, forty-two years old, used-car salesman, and I had slept in my own car in the back lot of Abiding Grace Community Church.

The engine was still running. Had been all night, apparently, going by the gauge. My jacket was folded under my head on the passenger seat, which was thoughtful of past me. Past me had also taken off one shoe. Just the left. No explanation offered.

So. Let's do the math.

Choir rehearsal ended at nine. I know because Dirk Barlow, our director, retired music teacher, fifty-one and built like a metronome, checks his watch and says "Same time Thursday" like he's dismissing a class. Which he is. We are fifty adults and he treats us like a class of new hires and honestly it works.

I joined the choir in September on a whim. A sales whim, even. A guy at the lot mentioned his church choir needed tenors and I said "sure" the way I say sure to everything, and three weeks later I was standing on a portable riser singing "Lo, How a Rose" badly while a soprano section leader glared at me from across the room.

The soprano was Ellie Sanford. Forty-two. Legal secretary part-time, which I guess pays for the part of her that's a soprano. We had history. Ten years of history, compressed into one night when we were both thirty-two, after a dating site and a late diner and her sedan parked outside my apartment. Then I ghosted her. Blocked the whole memory for a decade. And then she walked into rehearsal in October with sheet music and I nearly swallowed my tongue.

Last night, after Dirk's carpool was still pulling out of the lot, I was in that same sedan. With that same Ellie. In the church lot, this time.

I remembered it in pieces, sitting there at dawn with my one shoe off.

The way she said "well, look who came back." The way I reached over and unbuttoned her blouse while headlights swept past, the tail end of Dirk's carpool, and she didn't pull it closed. That was the first thing I remembered clearly. She watched the light slide across her own bare collarbone and didn't pull it closed.

"Somebody's going to see," I said.

"Somebody might." She took my hand and put it on her thigh, under the skirt. "Do you want to stop?"

I did not want to stop. One window in the fellowship hall was still lit, the custodian stacking chairs, and every time he passed it his shadow crossed the lot and her breath caught, and she pushed my hand higher. The windows fogged, but not enough. Her hand on my belt. Me saying "back seat" as if announcing a fire drill.

In the back seat she climbed onto my lap with her skirt bunched at her waist and her blouse hanging open, facing the lit window over my shoulder. I had a condom in my wallet that I'd been carrying since September like a lottery ticket. She rolled it on me herself and sank down slow, and we both stopped breathing for a second, and then she started to move. She rode me with one hand braced on the roof and her eyes on that window, and when the custodian's shadow went by again she clenched around me so hard I swore.

"Can I take a picture?" she whispered. "Just for me. Nobody else, ever."

"Yes," I said, and she did, one flash of the screen in the dark, and then she put the phone down and rode me harder, and she came with her forehead against mine and her mouth open on a note she'd never hit in rehearsal. I lasted about four more strokes.

God.

A tap on the glass. I jumped hard enough to hit the horn, a little polite toot into the empty lot, and there she was. Ellie. Holding two gas station coffees, already dressed for work, gray blazer, watching me through the steam rising off the cups.

I cranked the window down. Cold air came in with her perfume.

"You slept in your car," she said.

"I did not sleep in my car."

"Clayton. Your windows are fogged from the inside and your exhaust is going. The maple and I have been keeping watch."

I looked at the maple. Bare branches. Judgmental, honestly.

"I was going to drive home," I said. "Around one. Then I thought, it's late, I'll nap first. Then I woke up at two and thought, it's early, I'll nap again."

"That's a system."

"It's a foolproof system."

She opened the passenger door and sat down, coffee in each hand, and handed me one. Gas station house blend. Steam. She watched me over the rim of hers.

"So," she said.

"So."

"Last night."

"Yep."

"That's it? Yep?"

I drank the coffee. It was terrible and hot and I deserved it.

"Ellie, I've been sitting here since five-thirty trying to build a sentence."

"Take your time. I've got twenty minutes before I'm late to file motions for a man who shouts at his printer."

I put the cup in the holder. Took a breath. The windshield had that gray glare and she was half silhouette against it, which made it easier, talking to a silhouette.

"I didn't leave because of you," I said. "Ten years ago. I want that on the table first."

Her face didn't move. "Go on."

"It was me. It was always me. That night, the diner, the drive, all of it, I was thirty-two and I'd never felt anything that loud. And my whole system for handling loud things is to sell them a sedan and leave the lot." I turned the cup in my hands. "So I did. I drove at six in the morning and turned my phone off and told myself it was a mercy. For you, even. What a guy."

She was quiet long enough that the heater fan got loud.

"You panicked," she said finally.

"Full panic. Sirens and everything. Inside, I mean. Outside I just stopped texting, which is worse, I know that now. Coward's exit. No note, no scene, nothing."

"Do you know what I did that week?" She wasn't asking for sympathy, exactly. More like delivering a deposition. "I went back to the diner. Twice. I checked my email like it owed me money. I told Monika I had a stomach thing."

"Monika Hodges knows about me?"

"Monika Hodges knows about everything. She's a florist, it's basically intelligence work." A little steam came off her cup when she talked. "And here's the part I keep snagging on, Clayton. You're back. Same choir, same lot, same sedan, apparently. And I don't know if that's brave or if it's just the same panic wearing a nicer coat."

"Last night wasn't panic."

"Last night was," and she stopped, and I watched her decide to say it anyway, "last night was the best hour I've had in a decade, and then I drove home alone and got a text that said 'great to see you, talk soon.' Talk soon. That's what men send when they're already gone."

Oh.

"Great to see you," I repeated, like the words themselves should be ashamed.

"At 12:14 this morning. From the parking lot I'd just left."

"That was a good text. I workshopped it."

"Clayton." She set her cup in the holder. Turned to face me full on, no silhouette now. "I'm not asking for a ring. I'm forty-two, I like my apartment, I hate weddings. But I've done the ghosted thing with you. I did it once, in my thirties, and it cost me a month and a half and a fair amount of pride. I'm too old for a second round of it. So before anything else happens between us, you tell me plainly. Are you here? Or are you going to sell me a car and vanish?"

The maple stayed quiet. Very tactful, that maple.

I thought about the honest answer, which was that I didn't know. And then I thought about the more honest answer, which was that I did know, I'd known since she tapped the window, I just hadn't said it out loud because saying it out loud is the exact muscle I let die ten years ago.

"I'm here," I said. "I don't have a speech. I rehearsed one, in the car, around four. It had a metaphor about carburetors. But the plain version is, I'm here. I came back to choir on purpose. I saw your name on the roster before I signed up. I'd like that on the record."

"The record," she said.

"The record being you, currently, in this car."

The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile. The preliminary paperwork for a smile.

"Carburetors," she said. "In a romance. You've aged like a gas station."

"I contain multitudes. Most of them are about warranties."

She laughed then, a short surprised one, the kind I remembered from the front seat of this exact car. My chest did something unhelpful.

"But here's mine," she went on, and now the voice was the soprano voice, the one that carries over the whole section without trying. "I don't do this in the dark. Not again. If we do this, it's out where Dirk can disapprove of it and Monika can monetize it. Dinners. Texts that answer back. Thursday rehearsals where you don't stare at my collarbone during the alleluia."

"I stared at your collarbone once."

"You stared at it eleven times, I count things."

"Fine. Dinners. Answered texts. Collarbone discipline."

"And no more sleeping in parking lots. You'll freeze to death and Dirk will have to find a new tenor and he'll blame me, because he blames me for weather."

"Deal," I said.

She picked her coffee back up. We sat there drinking terrible gas station blend while the sky went from gray to slightly better gray, and the lot stayed empty, and for a minute it was almost easy. Almost like no decade had happened.

Then she said, "One more thing," and the easy part ended.

"The other night. In the front seat. Before we moved."

"Yeah."

"Was that a one-off? Be careful, because I've been turning it over since midnight and I can talk myself both directions."

I looked at her. Blazer, coffee, the little crease between her eyebrows that would be in a courtroom by nine.

"It was a revival," I said. "But I'm not sure I'm braver than I was at thirty-two. I'd like to be. I'm going to try to be. That's the best I've got this morning, and it's the truth, which used to be rare currency around here."

She nodded slowly, like a judge taking a plea under advisement.

"Okay," she said. "That's more than I had at five a.m. We'll call it a down payment."

Her phone buzzed in her bag. She glanced, muttered something about the shouting man and his printer, and reached for the door handle. Then stopped.

"Thursday," she said. "Sit in the second row this time. Where I can see you."

"You liked the back row."

"Clayton. I liked the back row fine. But I'd like to watch whether you stay."

And she got out, and her heels clicked across the lot toward the street, and I sat there with my one shoe and my cold coffee and the engine still running, doing the math on