Snowbound Preview

Karin was twenty-eight years old and she had spent the better part of four months wondering when she and Floyd had turned into two people who mostly discussed groceries. They had been together for a year and a half now. They met at a salsa class, of all places, where Floyd had stepped on her foot twice in the first ten minutes and then apologized so sincerely that she laughed and forgave him on the spot. That was the version of him she missed. The one who did stupid brave things.

Lately he came home from the startup at nine, ate standing up at the counter, and fell asleep during whatever show she put on. She taught dance all day and came home with her body still buzzing and nobody in the house to buzz at. It was sort of a joke between them now, the dry spell, except that jokes like that stop being funny around month four.

So when the auction house invitation came through Floyd's work email, some client perk, a preview night in the Alps, she said yes before he finished reading it out loud.

"You want to drive four hours into the mountains to look at old chairs?" he asked, holding his phone like it had bitten him.

"I want to go somewhere that isn't our kitchen," Karin said. "Also there's vintage stuff. You like vintage stuff."

"I like vintage computers," he admitted. "Fine. But if there's a dot matrix printer I'm bidding on it and we're both carrying it home."

She kissed him on the cheek at that, and he looked surprised, which was kind of sad, and also kind of motivating. She was going to fix this. She had a plan that involved a cabin, wine, and no laptops.

The drive up was beautiful in the way mountains always are when you're not the one driving. Floyd talked about work for the first hour and she let him, mostly, and then somewhere past the last real town he went quiet and she caught him looking at her legs while she worked the gearshift.

"Eyes on the road," she said, grinning.

"You picked a dress for an auction preview?"

"I picked a dress for you. The auction is incidental."

That got her an actual smile, the crooked one, and she counted it as a small victory and kept driving.

The auction house was a converted barn on the edge of a village that seemed to consist of a church, a cheese shop, and a very confident rooster. Inside, the barn had been done up properly, warm lamps on long trestle tables, lots arranged under little cards, a bar in the corner staffed by a woman who looked as if she judged everyone who ordered the cheap red. Actually, Karin corrected herself, opinions about everyone, full stop.

The vintage tech display was tucked in the back corner, and Floyd made a beeline for it as a man returns to his homeland. Karin followed at a distance, browsing a case of brass instruments that were either scientific or decorative, depending on how honest the auction catalog was being.

An appraiser stood by the tech table, a woman around twenty-five, dark hair pinned up with what looked like a pencil, which Karin respected deeply. Her name tag said Claudia. She was explaining provenance to an older couple and doing it with a patience that suggested she had explained provenance to worse people.

Floyd stopped at the far end of the table and made a noise.

"What?" Karin said, coming over.

He was holding a floppy disk in both hands, a genuine three and a half inch floppy in a plastic sleeve, and his face had gone soft and strange.

"This is from Larchmont Labs," he said. "The compiler project. My thesis advisor worked on this. I wrote a paper on their build system when I was, God, twenty-three? I tracked down every piece of documentation that still existed and half of it was rumors."

"Is it valuable?"

"Probably not. Forty euros, maybe sixty if two idiots get into a bidding war." He turned it over carefully. "But it's one of maybe five that survived, because the rest got melted down for the plastic, which is the most depressing sentence I know."

Claudia drifted over, having finished with the older couple. "You're holding that like a baby bird," she said. "I'd get in trouble if you broke it, but also I'd kind of understand."

"It's a piece of history," Floyd said.

"It's a piece of plastic from nineteen ninety-one," Claudia said, and smiled to take the sting out. "But sure. History. I appraise it, I don't judge it."

Karin watched the two of them for a second, Floyd lit up in a way she hadn't seen in months, Claudia quick and easy in return, and felt something twist and then un-twist. She decided, on the spot, not to be weird about it. This was the version of him she wanted back. She just wanted him back for her too.

"It's hers," Karin said, nodding at Claudia. "Whatever you're doing with your face right now, save some of it."

"I'm not doing anything with my face," Floyd said, not looking away from the disk.

"He does this," Karin told Claudia. "When he finds a rare thing he forgets other people exist."

"That's fair," Claudia said. "I do the same with a good Biedermeier clock. My coworker says I go somewhere and leave my body behind."

Outside, the light changed. It was subtle at first, the lamps inside suddenly looking warmer against the windows, and then not subtle at all. Snow came sideways across the courtyard in fat fast clumps. The bar woman said a word in Swiss German that Karin didn't know but understood completely.

Claudia's phone buzzed. She read it and sighed. "Okay. So. The pass road is closed. They're saying it might open in the morning, they're saying it might not."

"Closed closed?" Floyd asked.

"Closed closed. The van can't get up with the crates, the plows can't get through, and the village inn has exactly four rooms and a man named Herr Brunner who will charge us like it's a five star hotel because he can."

A voice came from the door, wind-tousled and cheerful. "Please tell me somebody else heard that. I was outside and I heard the word closed and I did not like the context."

It was Pete, Floyd's coworker, twenty-seven and built like a friendly labrador. He'd come along for the drive, officially as help, unofficially because his weekend plans had been cancelled and Floyd had taken pity on him.

"Road's shut, Pete," Floyd said.

"Cool. Cool cool cool. So we're snowed into a barn with an open bar?" Pete looked around, took in the situation, and visibly recalibrated. "Honestly, could be worse. I've been snowed into worse. There was that cabin in grad school, remember? With the raccoon?"

"The raccoon was in the walls," Floyd said.

"The raccoon was living a better life than either of us and we both know it."

Claudia laughed, an honest laugh, and Karin found herself liking her more for it. The bar woman began setting out cheese without being asked, which Karin took to mean the whole thing was now her jurisdiction.

The four of them ended up at the long table near the window, because watching a blizzard through a barn window while drinking free wine is one of the better uses of an evening that anyone has ever found. Claudia opened the catalog and started telling them which lots were fake, which was apparently most of the good ones, and Pete kept trying to get her to commit to a price on a lamp he had no intention of buying.

Floyd sat next to Karin, and at some point, without looking away from the conversation, he put his hand on her knee. Just his hand, warm through the dress. It wasn't much. She nearly spilled her wine anyway.

"There he is," she said quietly, just for him.

"There who is?"

"You. The one from the salsa class."

He squeezed her knee, once, and kept his hand there, and Karin thought that maybe the mountain had done more in one hour than she'd managed in four months.

Then the lights flickered, held, and flickered again, and Claudia stood up and said, "Right. Before the generator gives up, somebody help me carry the good wine inside, because I am not losing the good wine to a power cut."

"That's the most reasonable thing anyone's said all night," Pete said, already standing.

They carried the good wine inside in two trips, which Claudia supervised like it was a military operation. The bottles went onto a shelf behind the bar, and then Claudia disappeared into a back room and came back with an armload of wool blankets and a lantern.

"Okay, so, logistics," she said, dropping the blankets on the table. "If the generator dies, the heating goes with it. The barn has a loft, up those stairs, where they stack the smaller crates. It's dry, it's out of the draft, and there's an old stove up there from when this was an actual barn. I've slept up there twice during inventory week. It's not the Ritz, but it's warm if you're close together."

"Close together," Pete repeated. "Meaning?"

"Meaning four people and a pile of blankets, yes. Herr Brunner's four rooms are taken by the auction's big spenders, who arrived this afternoon and will not surrender a bed to anyone under seventy." She counted heads with one finger. "So. Loft. I'm offering it because I'm not leaving guests in a cold barn, and because I've done it and survived."

"Works for me," Pete said immediately, already pulling a blanket off the pile. "I once slept in a server room for two days. This has better ambiance."

Karin looked at Floyd, and Floyd looked at Karin, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with sleeping arrangements. "We're in," he said.

The snow got serious while they carried everything upstairs. By the time Karin climbed the wooden stairs with a stack of blankets blocking her view, the windows below had gone white and the wind had picked up enough to make the whole building creak like a ship. The loft was bigger than she'd expected, all dark beams and stacked crates pushed to one wall, with the old iron stove in the corner throwing out actual heat. Somebody had fed it before the storm closed in.

"See? Livable," Claudia said, kicking a crate of wine toward the stove. "There's even a chimney that works, which I learned the hard way."

They made a kind of nest out of the blankets and an old horse blanket Claudia produced from somewhere, and Pete opened the first bottle of the good wine with a corkscrew he carried, apparently, at all times. Claudia heated wine in a dented pot on the stove with orange peel and cinnamon she'd also found in the back room, and the loft started to smell like Christmas.

"So this disk," Floyd said, settling back against a crate with his mug. "Larchmont Labs. You said you know where it came from."

"I know the estate it came from," Claudia said, ladling wine. "Whole lot came from a house outside Bern. An engineer's house. He worked there in the late eighties, early nineties, kept everything. Boxes of manuals, prototypes, a terminal that weighs more than Pete."

"Pete weighs a lot," Floyd said.

"Hey," Pete said.

"The family didn't know what any of it was. They almost threw the boxes out. The disk was in a drawer in a workshop, in a case, labeled in pencil. Five disks, and four of them were blanks or corrupted. This one isn't." She shrugged. "It's probably a build disk from their last year. Boring, historically speaking. Except to exactly one kind of person."

"Which is me," Floyd said.

"Which is you." She handed him a mug. "The estate sale list had him down as a systems engineer. I thought of you the second I saw the label, which is a weird thing to admit to a stranger, but there it is."

"He wrote a paper on their build system," Karin said. "When he was twenty-three. I've heard about the paper."

"You've heard about the paper?" Pete said. "I've heard about the paper. I've heard about the paper at lunch, at meetings, once at a wedding."

"It was a good paper," Floyd said into his mug.

The mulled wine was dangerous. Karin was on her second mug before she noticed, and the loft was warm and the storm hammered the roof and everybody's shoulders came down one by one. Pete told the raccoon story in full this time, which involved a tent, a bag of granola bars, and Pete screaming in a register he claimed was a war cry. Claudia told about the time she'd knocked a chip off a Ming bowl with her elbow and spent a week learning to fill and paint porcelain at speed.

"Did it work?" Karin asked.

"Nobody's ever noticed. I lost sleep for a month and gained a skill, which is basically my twenties so far."

"And you?" Claudia asked, pointing her mug at Karin. "What's your wild story? You two look like you have one."

"We met at a salsa class," Karin said. "That is the entire adventure, really. He stepped on my foot twice in the first ten minutes."

"Twice," Claudia repeated, delighted.

"Both feet, I think," Karin said. "He apologized so much I thought he was going to cry."

"I did not almost cry."

"You told me later you almost cried."

"I said the class was emotionally intense."

Claudia and Pete both laughed, and Floyd grinned and put his arm along the crate behind Karin's shoulders, not quite around her. "She asked me to show her the basic step after class," he said. "Which was a trap, because I was the worst one there and she'd been watching me be the worst one there for an hour."

"It wasn't a trap," Karin said. "Okay, it was a little bit of a trap. You were very earnest about being bad at it. It was charming."