Sound Check at the Lumberyard

Scarlett Lincoln was forty-three years old and she still got lost in towns she'd never been to. Her GPS gave up twenty minutes back. The road narrowed, went to gravel, then went to something worse than gravel. Olive trees on both sides. Hills with vineyards stitched across them. Very pretty. Very easy to die out here and nobody find you till spring.

Her phone buzzed in the cup holder. Voicemail. Simon.

She hit play at the next stretch of flat road. Simon was thirty-eight, a caterer, the guy she'd been seeing for two months. He had a way of talking that never ended. She liked it. Mostly.

"Hey, so, about Saturday. I know we said dinner but the thing with the Landry job ran long and I might not get out of there till eight, maybe later, so maybe we do nine? Or, hey, what if I just bring stuff to your place and we cook, well I cook, you sit there and look... anyway call me. Nine. Or later. Whatever works."

"Whatever works," Scarlett repeated. Classic Simon. Two months in and the man committed to nothing, not even a dinner hour.

She was still composing her reply in her head when the truck rattled over a cattle guard and she nearly missed the turn. The lumberyard sat back off the road like it was hiding. Big corrugated roof over long timber sheds. Sawdust everywhere. The smell hit her through the vents, pine and cut wood, sharp and clean.

Pam Sanchez stood at the open gate in a sundress and work boots, waving both arms like Scarlett was a plane landing.

"There she is! God, you found it. I told you the GPS lies."

"It did lie. It tried to send me into a creek."

Pam was forty-five, a wedding planner, and the owner of this madness now. She'd bought the whole lumberyard two years back and turned one of the covered sheds into a venue. Cream drapes hanging off the beams. A vintage sundial mounted on the far wall. Weird. Worked somehow.

"You're a lifesaver, you know that," Pam said, grabbing Scarlett's bag. "The dress came in this morning and the bride's in a state and my seamstress quit, again, and I need four hands and you said you'd help."

"I said I'd carry things. That was the deal."

"Carrying things is helping. Come on."

Inside the big shed, the fitting area was half set up. A raised platform. Folding chairs in rows. Drapes pinned up. And against the far wall, a wall of black speaker cabinets, big as refrigerators, pointed right at the center of the room.

Scarlett stopped dead.

"Pam. Who put those there."

"Sound guy. He's been here since eight."

"They're pointed at the fitting table. At the dress. At everything. Those speakers are the size of my whole kitchen."

Pam winced. "He knows what he's doing, he said."

"He does not, because no man who knows what he's doing points a subwoofer at a wedding dress."

That was when the man himself came around the corner of the platform. Tall. Forties maybe, rugged, a toolbox in one hand and a wireless mic in the other, clipped to a belt pack. He had the look of a guy who thought he was the smartest person at every event he worked. Scarlett had met a hundred of him.

"Sorry, I couldn't help overhearing," he said. "David Weaver. I'm doing the sound for Saturday."

"Scarlett Lincoln. And you're doing it wrong."

He actually laughed. "Okay. Strong start."

"David," Pam said carefully, "Scarlett's helping with the fitting today. Scarlett, David's a professional."

"He's aiming speakers at a delicate silk fitting. That's not professional, that's loud."

"They're not on," David said. "I'm testing ranges. Signal strength. The mic system drops out at about forty feet past that beam and I need to know before Saturday, not after."

"So test it Saturday."

"Saturday I've got two hundred people and no second chances."

Scarlett put her hands on her hips. "And I've got a bride in a state and a dress that costs more than my car. Nobody needs to hear a mic test through the walls while she's crying about hemlines."

Pam held up both palms. "Okay. Okay. Both of you. Scarlett, the stage end is yours, all right, the platform and the fitting table. David, everything west of the beam is his, Scarlett. You two split the room. Deal?"

"Fine," Scarlett said.

"Fine," David said, but he gave her a look. Not a mean one. Worse. An amused one. Like she was a puzzle he'd already half solved.

She turned her back on him and got to work with Pam. The bride, a nervous twenty-something named Ana, showed up around eleven, and the fitting ate three hours. Pins, tucks, tears, laughter. Scarlett was good with her hands, twenty years of dental work did that, and Ana's dress slowly became a real thing.

The whole time, sound carried over from the west side. Clicks. Beeps. David's voice doing mic checks. "Testing, one two. Testing." Over and over. Once, when it got quiet, she heard him singing, badly, under his breath, and she had to bite her cheek to keep from laughing.

By two o'clock Ana was gone and Pam had gone off to meet the florist, and Scarlett was alone in the big shed, packing pins into a case.

She reached for her purse. To call Simon back.

No purse.

She checked the platform. Under the drapes. Behind the chairs. Her stomach did a slow drop.

"No no no. Come on!"

"Everything all right?" David's voice, from across the room.

"I lost my purse."

"The little green one?"

"You saw it?"

"It was on the chair by the door an hour ago. Not there now." He came over, set down his toolbox. "Okay. When's the last time you definitely had it?"

"I... when I got here. I had it at the gate. Pam can confirm, I set it down when she grabbed my bag."

"Okay. Gate. Then where'd you go?"

"Inside. Straight here. That's it, I haven't left, I've been at this platform for five hours."

"Then it's here somewhere, or it's at the gate, or it fell in your truck."

"It's not in my truck, I'd have seen it."

"Would you have? You drove in on a dirt road, distracted, missing your turn. People miss things."

She glared at him. He had a point and she hated that he had a point.

"Fine. Help me look."

They tore the shed apart for twenty minutes. Nothing. Then David walked her back out to the gate, retracing every step. Nothing. Back through the yard. Nothing.

"Car," he said. "Check it properly this time. Under the seats."

She checked. Under the seats, in the door pockets, under the mats. Nothing.

David leaned against the tailgate and thought. "Okay. Did you stop anywhere in town? Gas station? Coffee?"

She had, actually. One little cafe on the way in, at the edge of town, when she'd pulled over to listen to that voicemail a second time. She'd taken her purse in, bought a water, left it on the counter while she texted Pam.

"I left it at a cafe," she said slowly. "The one on the main road. With the blue awning."

"Senhor Costa's. Ten minutes back."

"Ten minutes back and my wallet's in that purse. My license. My cards. Everything."

"Well." David picked up his toolbox. "It's a strange town and you don't know the roads. I'll drive you."

"You don't have to..."

"Costa closes at five. It's quarter to. So yeah, I kind of do."

She looked at him. That amused look again.

"Fine," she said. "But you're still wrong about the speakers."

"We'll see," David said, and grinned.

They took his van. It was a beat-up white thing with cable spools in the back and a coffee cup rolling around on the floor. Scarlett got in and buckled up and stared out the window at the olive rows sliding past.

"So how long you been doing the sound thing?" she asked.

"Fourteen years," David said. "Weddings, mostly. Some festivals." He took a corner easy. "You?"

"Dentist. Twenty years."

"Teeth and weddings. Both have drunk people crying."

She laughed before she could stop herself. "Fair."

Senhor Costa's sat right where he said, blue awning, three tables outside, a fat man behind the counter wiping his hands on an apron. The purse was sitting on the shelf behind the register like it was a lost dog. The fat man, who turned out to be Costa himself, held it up and made a whole production of checking Scarlett's face against her license.

"Yes, yes, this is you. I knew someone would come. I close in eight minutes anyway."

"See?" David said as they walked out. "Some things you just leave in the right hands."

"It was on a shelf."

"Still."

She checked her wallet inside. Cards, license, cash, all there. She felt lighter and dumber at the same time. "Okay. You rescued my purse. I'll say it once. Once."

"Noted."

She should have driven back to the yard. Instead she stood there on the sidewalk and heard herself say, "There's a coffee place by the station that stays open past five. You said something about teaching me audio if I bought you coffee."

David blinked. "I didn't say that yet."

"You were going to. You have that look."

"What look?"

"The expert look. The one you've had all day."

He laughed. He had a good laugh, which annoyed her. "Alright then. One coffee. But I warn you, I get boring fast once I start talking about signal flow."

"Try me. I drill into teeth for a living. Boring doesn't scare me."

The place by the station was called Cafe Central and it had plastic chairs and a radio playing behind the counter. David ordered two coffees without asking what she wanted. She let it slide, mostly because he was paying, and she'd said she would buy, and they argued about that for a full minute at the register before he waved his card at her like a red flag.

"Fine. You bought the coffee. But that's the last free thing you get out of me."

"Strict terms. I like that in a dentist."

They took the table by the window. David reached into his work bag and pulled out one of the little portable mixers, the kind he'd been fiddling with at the shed all afternoon. He set it on the table between the cups like it was normal, like everyone carried a mixing board to coffee.

"Okay," he said. "Signal flow. Watch. Sound comes in here, hits this preamp, gets gain. Then it goes through here." He turned a knob a quarter turn. "And out to the speakers."

"That's it? That's the whole lesson?"

"That is the entire lesson except for levels. Levels are everything. Watch my hand." He put his fingers on the fader and slid it up slow. "You bring the channel up until the voice sits on top of the music. Not over it. On top of it."

"You have control issues," Scarlett said.

"Everyone says that."

"Because it's true. You turned that knob like it insulted your mother."

He laughed again, that easy laugh she kept deciding to dislike. Then he reached over and took her hand, and put it on the fader, and his fingers settled over hers, warm and dry, and moved the whole thing up a hair.

"Feel that? That's where Ana's mic needs to sit Saturday. Right there."

"Uh huh," Scarlett said, and her voice came out lower than she meant it to. His hand was still on hers. She could feel the callus on his thumb, some old work scar. She was forty-three years old and had been on dates with a caterer for two months and this was ridiculous. "You always teach with your hands?"

"Only the difficult students."

"Careful." She slid her hand out from under his, slow, so it wouldn't look like a flinch. "I bite."

"Yeah," David said, and looked at her