Secondhand Scent

Georgia was thirty-four and one week single, which she figured was about two weeks before anyone was allowed to make jokes about it. Bobbi disagreed.

"You're allowed to be sad for a week," Bobbi said, sliding a folding chair out of the stack with her hip. "After that, you're back on the market and I get to tease you. Those are the rules."

"The rules. Right." Georgia set down the coffee box she'd carried in from her car. The hallway outside the parish office smelled like floor wax and, under that, the basement dampness that never really left St. Cecilia's. "Who wrote these rules?"

"Me. Just now!" Bobbi flipped open the coffee box and peered inside. "Is this decaf? Georgia. This is a volunteer meeting, not a funeral."

"It's what was on sale." Georgia started arranging chairs in the crooked semicircle they always ended up in, nobody ever fixing the crookedness because Geoff said the floor had settled in 1988 and was not going to un-settle for anybody.

The building was a 1970s box attached to the back of the church, all orange brick and fluorescent hum. Wednesday nights it filled up with the seniors' bingo crowd. Tuesdays it was AA. Tonight, a Thursday, it was the six of them who ran the coat drive, which mostly meant Georgia ran the coat drive and the other five showed up.

Bobbi lowered her voice. "Okay, but seriously. How are you doing?"

"I'm fine."

"You're fine."

"I am fine."

"See, when you say it that many times, it means you're not." Bobbi patted her arm. "You'll meet somebody. You're a catch. You organize coat drives. Men love that."

"Men love nothing about coat drives."

"Geoff loves coat drives."

"Geoff is forty-five and married to the boiler."

Which was true, and Georgia was still laughing about it when she turned toward the side entrance and saw the coat rack by the lost-and-found cubbies. It was a wooden rack with a mirror that made everyone look taller and sadder, and hanging off the end hook, alone, was a leather bomber jacket. Worn at the elbows. Brass zipper with one tooth slightly off, the kind that caught halfway up.

She knew that zipper.

She didn't know how she knew it, at first. It had been six years. Then she crossed the room like she was on a wire, and picked it up, and it all came back at once.

Cedar. Metal. That old-fashioned spice smell, like a barbershop from a movie. Under it, something warm and human that she would have known blindfolded.

"Oh no," she said, out loud, to nobody.

"Georgia?" Bobbi called from the coffee table.

"Nothing. I'm just, one sec."

She lifted the jacket to her face. She meant to just check, just confirm, be an adult about it, and instead she breathed in like she'd been underwater for six years. Her whole body did something embarrassing and instant, heat rolling low in her stomach, her knees going briefly stupid against the folding chair. She thought of Zeke's hands. She thought of a hotel room in Columbus at a conference in October, six years ago, both of them twenty-eight and acting about nineteen.

"Everything okay over there?" Bobbi asked again.

Georgia pulled the jacket away from her face. Her cheeks were doing a thing she could feel. "Yeah. Sorry. I was just checking the pockets. You have to check the pockets before anything goes in the bin, remember?"

"Right, right. Find anything?"

"Not yet." Her fingers were in the pocket. There was nothing in it but a receipt, faded, from a gas station she didn't recognize. She shoved the jacket into her tote bag before she could have a single further thought about it.

"Is that staying or going?" Bobbi asked.

"Going. I'll, um. I'll figure out whose it is."

"That's very Christian of you."

"I know," Georgia said, and the meeting started, and she heard maybe forty percent of it.

* * *

Here's what she told herself that night, hanging the jacket on the back of her bedroom door: it was just curiosity. That was all. She'd confirm it was his, she'd ask Bobbi if Zeke still did the church boiler room, she'd return the jacket in an ordinary way and say hello in an ordinary way and that would be that.

Then she took it off the door and put her face in it and stayed there for a long time, sitting on the edge of her bed in her work clothes, breathing through her mouth and then her nose, alternating, like some kind of weirdo. The cedar was fading a little. The rest of it wasn't.

"Well," she said to the empty bedroom. "This is fine."

The next night she told herself she was just moving it somewhere safer, away from the window, and moved it onto her pillow. She pressed her cheek to the leather. It was cold and then it wasn't. She thought about his hands on her hips in a hotel elevator while the doors were still open, and about how he'd asked first, in that low careful voice, "Can I kiss you now, or should I wait until we're inside," and how she'd said "inside, definitely inside," and how the door had barely clicked before.

She fell asleep with her nose in the collar and woke up at two in the morning with her heart thumping and the jacket half off the bed. She pulled it back. She wasn't proud of it. She did it anyway.

* * *

By Sunday she was bringing it to her car. That was the move of a woman with no plan. She kept it on the passenger seat like a date, and then she felt ridiculous, and brought it into her cubicle Monday in her tote, and stashed it in the bottom drawer under the extra sweaters, and when nobody was around she opened the drawer and leaned in and breathed.

"You look flushed," Bobbi said Tuesday, over the radiators in the break room. "Have you been somewhere? You haven't been anywhere. Why do you look flushed?"

"I don't know. Vitamins?"

"Georgia." Bobbi leaned on the counter. "You've been weird for a week. Happy-weird. It's unsettling. Are you seeing someone already? Because the rules say a week of mourning, you can't skip my rules."

"I'm not seeing anyone." Technically true. The only relationship she had was with a jacket in a drawer, and even she couldn't make that sentence happen out loud.

"You're glowing is all I'm saying. It's suspicious." Bobbi squinted at her. "You're not doing one of those exercise things."

"No!"

"Those little face rollers."

"No."

"Fine. Keep your secrets." Bobbi filled her mug. "Oh, hey, did you hear Zeke's back on the building? Geoff finally got him on the books, part-time. He's doing the boiler and the storage room. He was here Thursday, I saw his truck."

Georgia's hand stopped halfway to her mug, and she had to consciously restart it. "Zeke. From the conference?"

"From the conference. You two had that thing, right? Six years ago? I introduced you and then you disappeared for the whole evening and I never got the story."

"There was no story."

"Okay." Bobbi sipped. "Sure."

"There wasn't."

"Uh huh." Bobbi rinsed her mug with the patience of a saint and a gossip. "Well. He's around now. He's got a truck full of tools and he's single as far as I know, and you're glowing, so, you know. Just an observation."

"It's vitamins."

"It's never vitamins." Bobbi headed for the door. "I'm just saying, if a certain jacket turned up in the lost and found, that would be a heck of a coincidence, wouldn't it."

Georgia kept her face still, which took real effort. "What jacket?"

"Some bomber jacket been in there a few days. Geoff's been meaning to post about it. I think Zeke asked him to keep an eye out for it, actually. It's his, I'm pretty sure. He's always losing the thing, leaves it in the storage room, somebody moves it, whole saga." Bobbi waved. "Anyway. Vitamins."

Georgia stood in the break room for a minute after she was gone. The jacket was in her bottom drawer, forty feet away, under her sweaters. Zeke had asked Geoff to keep an eye out for it. Which meant Zeke wanted it back. Which meant at some point, soon, she was going to have to give it back, or keep stealing from a church, and only one of those had a future.

"Okay," she told the radiator. "Okay, fine."

She went back to her desk. She did not open the drawer. Then, at four forty-five, when the office had emptied out, she opened the drawer, and leaned in, and breathed, and pretended for one more day that it was just curiosity.

She took the jacket home that night, which meant it was back on her pillow, which meant she was fully a thief with a bedtime ritual. Fine. She would return it. She just