Sourdough Surprise

The ferry from Helsinki to the lakeside town takes four hours, and I spend all of it staring at the water and thinking about nothing. I'm Lorelei Atkins, I'm forty-two years old, and I've been in the army for so long that my whole body still walks like it's expecting orders. Two weeks of leave. Two weeks to remember how to be a person who sleeps past five and drinks coffee slowly.

I text Murray from the dock.

"Houseboat, right? The Mellifluous?"

He texts back a thumbs up and then, a minute later, "WAIT come at 7 NOT NOW"

Which is exactly the kind of message that makes a woman show up at five.

The marina smells like diesel and rain and, weirdly, fresh bread. I follow the bread. It comes from a moored houseboat at the end of the pier, painted blue with a little dance floor on the deck, string lights hanging over it like someone meant to have a party. A hand-lettered sign on the rail says THE MELLIFLUOUS. Underneath, smaller, it says HAPPY BIRTHDAY MURRAY YOU OLD BASTARD.

Oh no.

Oh no no no. The party is tonight. That's why he wants me at seven. I am about to walk in on a surprise party two hours early and ruin four weeks of somebody's planning.

I'm already knocking, because I am apparently a terrible person.

The door swings open and there's Murray Phelps, forty-five years old, holding a wrench, up to his elbows in something wet. He's got gray coming in at his temples and he's wearing a t-shirt that says PLUMBERS DO IT DEEPER, which is a joke shirt his ex bought him, I know for a fact, because I was there when she bought it.

"Lorelei," he says, and his face does this thing, this whole sunrise thing, before he catches it and frowns instead. "No. No. You're early. You're supposed to be late."

"It's nice to see you too," I say. "There's a sign on your boat with your birthday plans on it. You're lucky I can read."

"Bobbi's sign," he groans. "I told her to put it on the inside of the rail."

He steps back to let me in, and I duck under the low doorway into what used to be the living room and is now mostly a recording studio. There's a drum kit jammed against the galley. There's a mixing board where a couch should be. There's a jar on the counter with something beige and bubbly in it, and a dish towel draped over the top like a hat.

"Is that bread I'm smelling?"

"Sourdough starter. Don't touch it, it's alive and it has opinions." He catches himself. "Okay, Bobbi has opinions about it, I just feed it. She says it's the only member of this band with discipline."

"And she would know, being in the band and all." I say it light. I'm not going to poke at the ex thing. They broke up eight years ago, when she was thirty and he was thirty-seven, and she's back in the band and he acts like that's fine, and I have watched him act like it's fine with the expression of a man watching another man park in his spot.

"It's a leaky pipe," he says, changing the subject, gesturing at the wet cabinet under the galley sink. "The whole boat leaks. The whole boat is one long leak with a drum kit in it."

"Need help?"

"You're on leave. Sit down. Tell me about deployments I can't pronounce." But he goes back to the pipe, and I sit on the counter next to the starter jar like a bad houseguest, and we talk, and it's easy, the way it's been easy since I joined the army at twenty-one and found out that Murray Phelps, who I'd known my whole childhood without really knowing, was the one person who wrote back every single week.

Then he says it. He puts the wrench down and wipes his hands and says, "There's something I haven't told you."

Uh oh.

"The band has a music video deal. Small, local, whatever, but there's a video. And the director wants me to dance. In it. On camera. An actual choreographed routine."

I try so hard not to laugh. I fail. A little laugh gets out, one small one, like a hiccup.

"It's not funny."

"Murray. Buddy. I once watched you fall off a porch standing still."

"That was ice."

"That was Tuesday," I say. "That was a dry porch in July. You have two left feet, my friend. You have feet that have never been introduced to each other."

"Thank you, yes, this is established!" He sits down across from me, elbows on his knees. "The song is for the album. It's called 'The Long Way Home.' It's about a soldier coming back."

I stop smiling.

"You wrote a song about me?"

"I wrote a song about the general shape of you coming home, and the label liked it, and now the director wants me doing this dance on the deck of this boat while the rest of us play it, and I have two weeks, and I am going to humiliate myself in front of the entire town."

The town. Which is my town. Which means I will be standing in the crowd watching my best friend dance like he was walking on hot coals.

"You're not going to humiliate yourself," I say, "because I'm going to teach you."

He looks up. "You can dance?"

"I can dance. I taught the drill team for two years. I taught a corporal from Oulu to waltz in a week, and he had no rhythm, Murray. None. He danced like a filing cabinet falling down stairs. If I can fix him, I can fix you."

"That corporal wasn't doing choreography in front of a camera."

"No. He was doing it in front of four hundred soldiers, which is worse." I hop off the counter. "Deck. Now. String lights and everything, how convenient."

"It's five in the afternoon."

"Perfect. We have two hours before your party that I have now spoiled by existing."

"It's not spoiled," he says. "It was never going to be a surprise anyway. Bobbi told six people. Six people told the town."

On the deck the air is cool and the lights are already on because somebody wired them to a timer. Murray sets the starter jar on the rail ("It likes the air, don't ask") and I put my phone in the cupholder and pull up the routine I'm thinking of, something simple, a two-step with a turn, nothing that requires him to leave the ground, because I know his limits.

"Okay. Feet apart. Shoulders down. You look like you're bracing for artillery."

"I am bracing for humiliation. Close enough."

"Stop. Stop it. Loosen up!" I step in and put my hand on his shoulder and physically push it down, and under my palm he's all tension, a whole man made of rope. "Breathe. This is a deck, not a convoy."

"Easy for you to say. You've been shot at less."

"I have absolutely been shot at more," I say, and that gets a laugh out of him, a real one, and his shoulders come down about an inch.

We start. Step, step, turn. He gets the step. He gets the turn, sort of, in the wrong direction, and I catch his arm to steer him, and he steers back, and it's clumsy and we're both laughing, and then it happens.

The turn goes wrong. His elbow goes wrong. The jar.

It's sitting on the rail where he set it when we came outside, the sourdough starter, the living disciplined one, and his elbow catches it clean off the rail and it hits the deck and bursts like a small sad grenade, beige foam everywhere, on his boots, on my boot, on the string lights, on the drum kit.

For a second neither of us says anything. Then I go down.

Not fall down, go down, sitting right in it, laughing, both hands on my knees, howling like this is the funniest thing that has ever happened in the history of lakes. Because it might be. There's sourdough starter on the HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign. There's sourdough starter on his joke shirt.

"You killed Bobbi's baby," I gasp.

"I didn't, it's, there's more inside, it splits, she keeps a backup jar, oh my god, Lorelei, you're sitting in it."

"I know," I wheeze. "I know exactly what I'm sitting in."

He drops down next to me with the dish towel and starts wiping my boot, of all things, my boot, carefully, like it matters, and his hand covers mine on the deck to grab the rag, and neither of us moves our hand. His fingers are warm and wet with starter and they just sit there over mine on the deck boards, and the string lights are on, and I can hear the town getting ready to surprise him in two hours.

"Sorry," he says, not sounding sorry.

"It's fine," I say. "It's sourdough. It's basically a hug."

He laughs, but he doesn't take his hand away.

We clean up the starter together. It takes a while, because I keep laughing every time I find a new spot of it, and because he keeps apologizing to the rag. Bobbi's backup jar comes out of the galley when we go in for more towels, and Murray holds it up like a survivor pulled from rubble.

"She keeps it in the cupboard like a hostage," he says.

"Smart woman. Okay. Wiped down, mostly alive. From the top."

We go again. Step, step, turn. He gets it this time, mostly, and I move behind him to show him the slow part, the part the director wants, and I put my hands on his hips to guide the motion. It's a figure eight, hips leading, everything else following. I've taught this move to rooms full of soldiers. It's nothing. It's mechanics.

"Roll it through," I tell him. "Don't chop it. Slow, like the song."

"Like this?"

"Slower. God. You're a plumber, you know how a wrench feels when it turns right? That."

"I have never once thought about a wrench like that."

"Then think about it now!"

He tries again, and this time he finds it, and I keep my hands on his hips because that's the instruction, that's just teaching, and his body rolls under my palms in one long lazy wave, and my pulse does something I did not authorize. Because he's forty-five and built as someone who crawls under houses for a living, and when he does the move right his whole torso moves, and I am standing close enough to feel the heat off his back through his shirt.

"That's it," I say. My voice comes out lower than I planned. "That's the move."

"Yeah?" He turns his head a little. "It looks right?"

"It looks right."

He does it again, slower, and I realize I've stopped