Stone and Ash

I was thirty-four years old and standing in the basement of a church in Yburg, holding a paper cup of bad coffee, wondering how I had let Arlo talk me into this.

"Teresa! You came!" Arlo spotted me from across the hall and waved like I had crossed an ocean to get there. In a way I had. Three hours in my sensible sedan with the podcast about productivity playing.

"You said there'd be food," I said.

"There is food. There's jam. There's a whole judging thing for jam."

"There's a jam judging."

"It's a tradition! Come on, look at this table, there's like forty jars."

There were, in fact, forty jars, all lined up with little paper tags. The basement hall smelled like church and floor wax and, faintly, strawberries. Around us, vendors had set up tables of gemstones, mostly lapis lazuli, since the festival was entirely about that. Deep blue stones everywhere, in rings and beads and ugly carved elephants that somebody's grandmother was selling with real pride.

"This is nice," I said, in the tone I use for client meetings that are not nice.

"You hate it."

"I don't hate it. I'm just aware I could be home."

Arlo is my boss, which means he gets this tone from me maybe twice a year and then we move on. He wandered off toward the jam table with the other folks from the office, and I stayed put with my coffee, doing what I always do at these things, which is stand near an exit and count the minutes.

Then I heard the grinding.

It was coming from up the stairs, a low rumble that came in waves. Somebody had propped the basement door open, and through it I could see the church itself, all old stone and dusty light, and in the middle of the nave a man on his knees with a machine the size of a suitcase, grinding a stone floor.

I am not the kind of woman who watches men work and gets flustered. I fix software implementations for hospitals. I have seen men sweat over servers in cramped rooms and it does nothing for me. But this guy, he had his sleeves rolled up and his whole body leaned into the machine, and the floor under him was coming up shiny and dark like wet slate, and he was watching it the way I watch a dashboard when the numbers finally move.

He was maybe forty-one, built like someone who carries heavy things for a living, gray coming in at his temples. Stone dust on his forearms. He ran the grinder along a seam, stopped, ran a thumb over the edge of a tile, and frowned at it like it had lied to him.

I stood there longer than I meant to. Long enough that when he finally shut the machine off, the silence was loud, and he looked up and caught me.

"Hey," he said. "You with the jam people?"

"What? No. No, I'm with the gemstone people. Sort of. I'm with nobody, I'm just here."

He laughed. It was a good laugh, unbothered.

"You've been standing in that doorway for ten minutes," he said. "I figured you were either with the jam people or you were casing the place."

"I was not casing the place."

"Could've fooled me. You've got a look."

"I have a coffee."

"That too." He stood up, wincing a little, knees cracking like he was older than he looked. "I'm Jess. I own the company doing the floors. This is my crew's week to ruin everyone's peaceful festival with noise."

"Teresa. I'm here for a work retreat, which is a fancy way of saying my boss wanted an outing."

"Ah. The famous work retreat." He looked at my paper cup. "They give you real coffee at least?"

"This is the real coffee. This is the best they have."

"That's a crime." He wiped his hands on a rag that was mostly stone dust already. "There's a guy outside the north door selling actual espresso out of a trailer. I send everyone there. Best thing about this festival and it's not even part of the festival."

I don't know what came over me. Honestly I don't. I am the person who reads reviews for a week before buying a pillow. And I heard myself say, "You should show me. The espresso. And whatever else. You know the festival, right? You work here."

"I work here, yeah." He looked a little surprised, in a pleased way. "You want the tour?"

"Sure. Why not."

"Give me two minutes to cover the machine and tell Randy to stop waving at every woman who walks past." He yelled down the nave, "RANDY. Watch the grinder, don't grind your hand."

A voice from behind a pillar yelled back something rude and friendly, and Jess grinned and led me toward the north door.

Here's what I will say about that walk. The sun came out. Jess pointed out the espresso trailer like it was a national monument, bought me a double without asking how I take it, and I let him, which for me is basically a marriage proposal. We walked the vendor rows and he told me which stones were real lapis and which were dyed nonsense, and he was funny about it, not preachy.

"That elephant is dyed howlite," he said, nodding at a stall. "That one over there is real, and it costs four times as much, and it's uglier. That's the stone business."

"That's most businesses."

"See, you get it."

By the time we looped back toward the church, I had told him about my job and my apartment and, somehow, about breaking up with a man named Daniel two years ago because he was nice and safe and I felt nothing. I had not told my own sister that. Jess mostly listened, which turns out to be a rare skill.

The jam judging was starting when we got downstairs. Somebody had set up a folding table with numbered cards, and a woman with a clipboard was arranging crackers like they were evidence.

"Sit with me," Arlo called, patting a chair. "Teresa. Who's your friend?"

And before my brain did anything, Jess put his hand lightly on the back of my chair and said, "I'm her partner. Jess. We came together."

I blinked. "He's my partner," I confirmed. "We came together."

Arlo lit up like a Christmas tree. "Partner. Work partner or partner partner?"

"Partner partner," Jess said, calm as anything, and I felt my face go hot.

Well. I had never lied to Arlo in my life, mostly because I'd never had anything worth lying about. But there I was, sitting through a jam judging with a stone floor grinder's arm resting along the back of my chair, calling it a relationship, feeling something I had not felt in years. It felt like skipping school. It felt like trouble, but the good kind.

"How long have you two been together?" asked Denise from accounting, leaning over.

"Um," I said.

"Six months," Jess said smoothly. "Give or take."

"Give or take," I agreed, and Jess hid a smile in his coffee.

The judging itself was a riot. Forty jars. A woman named Mrs. Halloway won with something she called Black Raspberry Midnight, and she cried actual tears, and the whole basement applauded. Jess leaned over during the applause.

"You're good at this," he murmured.

"At what? Eating jam?"

"At pretending you like me."

"I don't have to pretend," I said, and then heard it land, and he heard it too, and neither of us laughed it off.

Afterward, Arlo shook Jess's hand like they were closing a merger. "Great to meet you. Bring her to the holiday party, we do a secret Santa, it's a whole thing."

"He'll be there," I said.

"Will I?"

"He will," I said, and Jess just shrugged like he had already accepted his fate.

We ended up back upstairs when the judging cleared out, in the church proper, where his crew had knocked off for the afternoon. The light came through the old windows and hit the half-finished floor, half matte, half gleaming, and it was honestly beautiful.

"That's the work," Jess said, kicking off his knee pads. "Six hundred years of feet on that stone. You grind it back and it looks like the day they laid it."

"It's gorgeous."

"Most people don't notice it."

"I noticed it."

"Yeah," he said. "I know. You watched me for ten minutes."

"I was resting my eyes."

"Sure you were."

We stood there in the quiet church, and I felt that rebellious thing in my chest again, the same thing that had said yes to the tour. He looked at me and I looked at him and I could tell we were both doing the same math.

"So," he said. "The partner thing. We should probably talk about how long we're keeping that story going."

"Are you asking me something?"

"Maybe I'm asking if you want dinner. Real dinner, not jam and crackers. And we can figure out the rest as it comes."

I am the person who reads reviews for a week before buying a pillow. I said yes before he finished the sentence.

We ended up in a corner near the chimney pots. There was a display of them along the north wall, old cracked clay things somebody had dragged in for the festival, and nobody was browsing them because nobody has ever browsed cracked chimney pots. Which made it the quietest spot in the whole church.

"I like this corner," Jess said. "It's got the worst merchandise and the best light."

"It's very you. Ugly and overlooked but somehow warm."

"Gee, thanks."

"You know what I mean."

He did know what I meant, because he turned to face me, and the joking drained out of his face and left something else there. He looked at my mouth for a second, then back up, and I swear the church got