Seed Potatoes & Stuffed Owls

The rental office in Fairfield Hollow was supposed to be open until six. We pulled in at five forty and the lights were off and the sign on the door said BACK IN AN HOUR in handwriting that had clearly given up on the whole concept of hours.

"That's promising," Kris said, peering through the window at a desk buried under paper.

"We drove four hours," I said. "Four hours and a tank of gas, and the guy wrote back in an hour."

"To be fair, he might be back in an hour. It's a real hour. It exists somewhere on the calendar."

I got my phone out and pulled up the booking. There was a number to call, and I called it, and a young guy answered on the fourth ring like he'd been asleep.

"Hello?"

"Hi, yes, I'm calling about a cabin rental? Janis Ayers. We're standing outside your office and it's closed."

"Oh, man. Okay, hold on!" I heard shuffling, a door, what sounded like a dog objecting to something. "Sorry, yeah, hi. This is Jackson. I handle the online stuff, I'm not actually at the office, I'm at the shop."

"Which shop?"

"The taxidermy shop. Rod's place. Last Look Taxidermy, out on Route 9? He's got your key, probably. I left it with him when I went to feed the, uh. Look, he's got the key. Can you get out there before eight? He closes at eight."

"How far is Route 9 from a closed office with a rude sign on it?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe twelve if you hit the tractors. Rod's grumpy but he's fine. Just tell him Jackson sent you and that the locking cabinet situation is handled."

"The what?"

"He'll know. Sorry about this, really. He'll sort you out." And he hung up before I could ask a single follow-up question, which told me a lot about how this weekend was going to go.

Kris was leaning against the car with his arms crossed, smiling in that way he has when he thinks my planning is funny. Thirty-six years old, arcade technician, man who owns four pairs of identical jeans and considers that a system.

"Stop smiling," I said.

"I'm not smiling."

"Your whole face is smiling. Your eyebrows are smiling."

"We're on an adventure, Janis. A little rural adventure. This is good material."

I want to note here that Kris had spent the entire drive making jokes about my itinerary. I had a printed itinerary. It had the cabin check-in time, dinner reservations in the next town for Saturday, and a hiking trail with a waterfall circled. He called it my librarian agenda and did a voice, and the voice was not flattering, and I told him that a librarian who plans things is called a professional, and he said sure, sure, very predictable librarian ways, very organized, very Janis.

So when I got back in the car I was already, quietly, forming a counterattack. I just didn't know yet what shape it would take.

Last Look Taxidermy turned out to be a low cinderblock building with a wooden deer above the door that I sincerely hope was fake in some way, though I have my doubts. Inside it smelled like cedar and something I decided not to think about too hard. Every wall had glass eyes on it. Deer, foxes, one enormous fish mid-leap, a whole raccoon family arranged on a fake log like they were posing for an album cover.

A big man in a canvas apron stood at a workbench in back, working on something with wings. He was maybe fifty-two, gray buzzcut, forearms like fence posts.

"Help you?" he said, without looking up.

"Hi. Are you Rod? Jackson sent us, there's been a mix-up with a cabin rental, he said you have our key."

Rod put down his tools and turned around and looked at us the way a man looks at paperwork he didn't order.

"Which cabin?"

"The Birch place? Booking under Ayers, two nights, starting tonight."

"Yeah, I figured that was you. Jackson called." He wiped his hands on the apron, slowly, in a way that suggested the wiping was a stalling tactic. "There's a problem."

"Of course there is," I said.

"Jackson mixed up two bookings. He does that. Your cabin is the small one, back past the creek, half mile up the fire road. But the key he gave me this morning is the key to this property. My place. The house behind the shop. He handed me the wrong tag and I didn't look close." He shrugged. "My fault as much as his. I keep the key out here because I'm always in here anyway."

"So can we get the right key?" Kris asked.

"Cabin key's on the hook in the office, and the office is locked and I don't have that key on me and I'm not driving out there tonight. My knees said no already."

"So the key we can actually get," I said slowly, "opens your house."

"Opens my house, yes. Which is empty, because I stay at my brother's when the shop's slow, and it's slow. It's clean. Generator out back, wood stove, well water that tastes like rocks but won't kill you." He said all this in the tone of a man reading a grocery list he resents. "I'd rather you weren't in my house, but Jackson booked you a place and this is a place, and honestly it's my mess as much as his. So. Your call."

I looked at Kris. Kris looked at me. The enormous fish hung there, leaping forever.

"Could we see it?" I asked.

Rod handed over a brass key and a flashlight without ceremony. "It's the door past the shop, walk through the yard. Heat's off but the stove's laid, matches on the mantel. If you stay, write down what you use from the pantry and Jackson will square it up, everything gets settled through the booking, money-wise. I don't do side deals." Then he grunted, which I took as dismissal.

On the way out I stopped at the counter. There was a paper sack there, half full, lumpy.

"Are those seed potatoes?"

Rod glanced over. "Yeah. Blue ones. Friend of mine grows them, gives me more than I can plant. Take the bag."

"I can't take your potatoes."

"You'd be doing me a favor. They'll sprout in the sack and then I got to feel bad about throwing them out. Take them." He went back to his bird. "Blue ones. Good yielders."

So we left a taxidermy shop with a key to a stranger's house and a paper sack of seed potatoes, and I was holding the potatoes against my chest like something rescued, and Kris was watching me do it.

"You're planning a garden," he said. "We don't have a garden."

"I'm planning a garden now!"

"Predictable," he said, and I elbowed him, and I was already turning it over in my head, this idea, this shape of an idea.

The house behind the shop was small and plain and exactly what Rod said: clean, spare, a kitchen table, a couch with a crocheted blanket on it that I would bet money his mother made, a wood stove already stacked with kindling. Kris got the generator going on the second pull, swearing at it in a friendly way, and the lights came up warm and yellow, and outside it got properly dark in that country way where the dark has weight.

I set the potatoes on the counter. I lit the stove. I stood there with my hands out and thought, well.

Here is the shape of the idea.

"We should play a game," I said.

Kris looked up from the stove. "What kind of game?"

"You've spent two years telling everyone I'm predictable. Little librarian Janis, plans everything, follows the rules." I leaned against the counter. "So this weekend, in this house that isn't ours, we're not married."

He straightened up. "What?"

"We're strangers. We just met. You're, I don't know, a guy passing through, I'm a woman passing through. We meet cute in a taxidermy shop. We don't know each other's names, we don't know anything about each other, and we have to win each other over from scratch."

"Janis."

"You don't think I can do it. Flirt like a stranger. Surprise you."

"I never said that."

"You said predictable. Twice. In the car. I have witnesses." I held up the potato sack. "The potatoes are witnesses."

He laughed, and then he stopped laughing, and got that look, the competitive one he gets at pinball machines. "Okay. Okay, I'm in. Tonight only, or the whole weekend?"

"Whole weekend. And a rule: whoever breaks character first loses, and loser does the waterfall hike at dawn."

"That's cruel."

"I know."

He looked at me across the little room, stove light on his face, and I could see him deciding, and I could see the moment it tipped.

"Hi," he said, and put out his hand. "I'm Kris. I just got into town."

And I tell you, my husband of three years shaking my hand like we'd never met, in a taxidermist's spare house with a sack of blue potatoes on the counter, did something to the air in that room. I took his hand.

"Janis," I said. "Nice to meet you."

The coffee situation in Rod's pantry turned out to be one jar of instant, a tin of sugar, and powdered creamer with an expiration date from before our wedding. I made two mugs anyway because the stove was warm and the game had started and a stranger offers a stranger coffee, that's just civilization.

"So," I said, handing him a mug, and I dropped into a chair across the table like I was settling into an audition. "Janis. I'm a librarian, from out east. Visiting for the weekend. I heard about the waterfall."

Kris took his mug and sat back, and I watched him decide to be terrible about it.

"A librarian," he said. "From out east."

"That's what I said."

"Okay. See, here's my problem." He turned the mug in his hands. "Librarians don't say 'out east.' Librarians say the actual state. With the county. Possibly the zip code."

"That is a stereotype and I'm offended."

"Sure you are." He was grinning into his coffee. "Also you cataloged that pantry in your head when you walked in. I watched your eyes do it. Left to right, jar, tin, creamer."

"You can't prove that."

"Janis." He said my name like he was tasting it for a lie. "Nobody from out east says they heard about the waterfall. You circled it on a printed itinerary. In red pen. I saw the pen."

I sipped my coffee to buy a second. He had, in fact, seen the pen. The itinerary was folded in my jacket pocket like contraband.

"Fine," I said. "Maybe I plan things. Planning isn't a crime."

"Never said it was. I think it's great." He leaned forward on his elbows, and there it was, the arcade face, the one he makes when the machine is almost out of tickets. "I think it's charming, actually. A librarian who drives four hours to a town with one road and gets booked into a taxidermist's house by accident."

"How do you know about the four hours?"

"Because you told Rod you'd been driving since two and it was almost six." He spread his hands. "I'm a stranger, Janis. I know nothing about you. Which means everything you've told me in the last ten minutes is fair game."

I had walked right into that. I want it noted that I still think it was a decent opening round.

"Okay," I said. "Your turn to be somebody. Go. Who are you, Kris from the road?"

"I fix pinball machines."

"You made that up just now!"

"I did not. That's my actual job and it's a shame I can't use it without it being true, that's a real waste of a cover." He drank. "Fine. I'm between things. I was in Detroit, now I'm driving around, I fix old machines when I find them, I sleep in the van sometimes. That's a guy. That's a whole guy."

"That's a guy my library would call security about."

"See, and you say things like that, 'my library,' like it's an institution and not a building with a leaky roof and forty copies of one James Patterson." He pointed at me. "You do it every time. You get defensive and the facts fall out of you like change from a pocket."

I laughed before I could stop it, and laughing felt like giving up ground, and giving up ground felt, annoyingly, good.

"Round one to you," I said. "Barely."

"Barely is still a win. I'll take it." He stood and came around the table, slow, like he had all night, and pulled his chair around next to mine instead of across. That was legal, technically. Nothing in the rules said strangers can't share a corner. "So. Janis the librarian. What's a guy got to do to buy you a real dinner in this town?"

"There's no town. There's a gas station."

"Then what's a guy got to do to share a gas station sandwich with you?"

"Ask nicely, I suppose." I looked at him over the rim of my mug. "And answer one question first. Honestly."

"Deal."

"Why are you playing along? Really. You could have called it stupid an hour ago. You almost did."

He thought about it, and I liked that he thought about it, because Kris at a pinball machine never thinks, he just flips.

"Because I married a woman who plans everything," he said, "and it turns out she plans games too, and I keep winning them, and I'd like to see what happens when I don't." He shrugged. "Also you gave me a character. I like characters. That's my whole life, machines that talk in lights."

"That was almost romantic."

"Don't tell anyone. I got a reputation."

"What reputation, you sleep in a van."

"Van guys have reputations. Mostly bad ones."

The stove ticked. Outside, nothing at all, just the dark doing its weighted thing against the windows. I realized I was turned toward him in my chair, knee an inch from his, and had been for a while.

"Last question, stranger," I said. "What do you want out of this weekend?"

He set his mug down. He took his time about it, which was rude, and effective.

"Company," he said. "Good coffee, even if it's instant. Maybe a hike, if somebody drags me to a waterfall at some ungodly hour." His eyes came up to mine. "And I'd like to kiss you, if that's on the itinerary. I'll wait if it's penciled in for Saturday."

That is the trouble with a game like this. You build a stranger out of your own husband and then the stranger asks permission, the same way your husband asked the first time, on a library steps in St. Louis six years ago, plain as a form to fill out. And it lands the same way every time, because the asking is the whole trick and always was.

"It's penciled in," I said. "But I'm a librarian. I can amend the schedule."

"Say the word then."

"Kiss me."