Shucking and Riding

The dog rode in the back seat of Pat's aging station wagon like a man being taken somewhere he didn't want to go. He was a golden retriever, big and sad-eyed, and he had shown up on their porch three days ago wearing a collar with a phone number on it. The number belonged to an oyster farmer near Blenheim. The farmer, a woman named Colleen, had been grateful. The dog, whose name was Chip, seemed to sense he was being returned to someone who would take him away from the free bacon scraps situation he had been enjoying.

Mai sat in the passenger seat, twenty-eight years old, a graphic designer with a napkin on her knee and a pen in her hand. She was drawing the dog. She had been drawing the dog for twenty minutes, which said something about how much conversation was happening.

Pat drove. He was twenty-nine, a cobbler by trade, which meant he had strong opinions about shoes and a patient way about him that Mai had loved once upon a time. Lately the patience looked more like distance. They had been together five years, and somewhere in the last year the sex had gone from something they did to something they scheduled, and then from something they scheduled to something they remembered.

"So," Pat said. "Chip."

"Chip," Mai agreed.

"He's a good traveler."

"He's a better traveler than we are."

Pat laughed a little at that. Not enough. Mai looked down at her napkin and gave the dog a curly tail he didn't have, because why not, artistic license. The hills went by outside, brown and gold the way Marlborough got in late summer. The car smelled like dog and old coffee. She noticed the smell once and then stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing anything after five years.

They stopped at a rest area just past Havelock, mostly for the dog, partly for the coffee. Pat bought two flat whites from a cart and they sat on a bench looking at a grassy strip and a sign about boat ramps. Chip lay under the bench with his chin on Mai's shoe.

"There's a thing I forgot to tell you," Pat said. "Deb wants us to pick up the tandem bike. From Steve's place, on the way. She lent it to him and he's moving to Auckland."

"The tandem. The two-person bike."

"That's the one."

Mai considered this. "A tandem bike," she said, "is a machine where two people pedal at different rhythms and the one in the back can't see where they're going and everyone gets angry."

"That's a very specific read."

"That's our sex life, Pat. That's a drawing of our sex life."

She said it as a joke and then heard it as not a joke, which happened to her sometimes. Pat didn't laugh. He looked at his coffee.

"Yeah," he said. "It kind of is."

And there it was, sitting on the bench between them next to the boat ramp sign. Mai felt something loosen in her chest, which was either relief or dread.

"I didn't mean to say that out loud," she said.

"I'm glad you did."

"Were you?"

"Yeah." He turned to look at her. He had that face on, the one he got when he was fitting a heel counter, patient and paying attention. "I've been trying to figure out how to bring it up for about four months."

"Four months."

"Maybe six."

"So we're both sitting there pedaling at different rhythms and neither of us says anything for six months."

"That's the tandem," Pat said, and this time they both laughed, a real laugh, and Chip lifted his head to check if something good was happening.

They drove the extra twenty minutes out to Steve's place, a half-acre with a workshop and a van and three goats. Steve came out wiping his hands on a rag, and Deb's tandem bike was leaning against the fence looking like a bicycle that had been stretched in a taffy puller.

"That thing is enormous," Mai said.

"It's a beast," Steve agreed. "Deb swears by it. You want it on the roof rack? I've got straps."

The loading of the tandem bike was, in the tradition of all tandem bikes, an argument in slow motion. Pat held one end. Mai held the other. The roof rack had its own perspective. Steve gave directions that were wrong in two directions at once.

"Higher. No, your other higher!"

"It doesn't have another higher, Steve."

"Angle it. Like a spear."

"Nobody's spearing anything onto my roof," Pat said, and Mai snorted so hard she nearly dropped her end.

And then it happened, the chaos moment. Steve's own dog, a terrier with the voice of something four times its size, came around the corner of the workshop and spotted Chip and started barking as if a fire alarm were going off. Chip, who had been quiet for four hours, stood up in the back seat and answered. The terrier ran a lap of the car. One goat came to the fence to watch. The strap slipped and the tandem bike slid six inches and Pat caught it with his hip and swore in a mild, cobbler-ish way.

And Mai started laughing. Not a polite laugh. A bent-over, hand-on-the-roof-rack laugh, the kind she hadn't done in months, and Pat looked at her over the handlebars of the stretched bike and started laughing too, and Steve stood there with his rag going, "It's not that funny," which made it funnier.

They got the bike strapped down eventually. They got the dogs separated. Steve waved them off with instructions about the front brake that neither of them listened to.

In the car again, with Chip silent now and the terrier's distant yapping fading behind them as if by treaty, Pat drove for a while before he said anything.

"Can I ask you something straight?"

"You just did."

"The actual thing, then." He kept his eyes on the road. "The dry spell. Is it me, or is it us, or is it just the year we've had?"

Mai looked at her napkin. The dog with the invented curly tail looked back up at her.

"It's not you," she said. "Or not only you. I think we got polite. Like roommates who are really good at meal planning." She paused. "I miss it. The intensity. I miss when you looked at me like I was something you were going to do something about."

Pat was quiet for a few seconds. The road hummed.

"I can do that again," he said. "If you want it."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean the motel tonight. We've got a room with a door that locks, and Chip can have the back seat with the windows cracked for one night. And I've been thinking about trying something different. Something where I'm in charge and you're not, for a while, and we see how that sits."

Mai felt her face get warm. "You mean like..."

"Like me telling you what to do and you doing it. With a word we can use to stop it any time. And nothing happens you don't actually want." He glanced over. "That's the shape of it. Details negotiable."

"That's very organized."

"I own a workshop."

"Right." Mai looked out the window at the hills, and her heart was doing something she hadn't asked it to do. "Okay. Yes. Tonight. We'll try something different."

"Okay," Pat said, and his voice carried a quality that had been absent for a while, and Mai thought, there's the man I fell for, and she reached over and put her hand on his knee and left it there the rest of the drive.

The motel was the kind of place that called itself a "motor lodge" on the sign and had a plastic fern in the office window. The man at the desk gave them a room at the back, away from the road, and said the wifi was temperamental as if that were a selling point. Mai signed the register while Pat carried in one bag. Just one. Chip stayed in the car with his blanket and the windows cracked, because he was going home in the morning and nobody wanted to explain to Colleen why her golden retriever had learned to open motel doors.

The room smelled like carpet cleaner and old cigarettes that had been apologizing for years. Two beds, because they'd booked two beds, out of habit. Mai put her bag on the far one and turned around and Pat was standing there holding the leash.

"Where did you even," she started.

"It was in the car. Chip's stuff. It's a perfectly good leash." He wound the clip end around his hand, let the strap hang. "I've been thinking about this since Havelock. So let's find out