Tent Mix-Up Romance

The view-master is sitting in the passenger seat of my Corolla and I'm staring at it, trying to decide if this is funny or if I'm just using a joke as an excuse to show up somewhere I wasn't invited.

It's a Saturday afternoon and I'm twenty-eight years old and a widow, which still sounds ridiculous when I say it, even in my own head. Ashley died fourteen months ago. I married her when I was twenty-five and she died when I was twenty-seven, which means I got under two years of being her wife, and I've now spent over a year being her widow, which is almost as long. That math keeps me up sometimes.

Anyway. The view-master. It's an old one, the red plastic kind from the seventies, and I found it at a op shop in Brunswick for three dollars. I bought it because our friend group has a running gag about analog tech, and I figured if I crashed this camping trip, at least I'd show up with a gift. It comes with one reel, Grand Canyon 1958, which honestly might be the funniest part.

The camping trip is Jules's thing. I've known Jules since I started bartending, and she's the one who keeps inviting me to things even though I keep flaking on them. This time she told me the rally point and the time and then said, "Roxanne, if you don't come I'm showing up at your work and drinking everything in the well," which is a real threat when your friend trains bartenders and you work at a club downtown.

The rally point is a salvage yard office outside Melbourne. I know, weird spot for a camping trip, but that's Jules for you. Her cousin runs the yard, and behind it there's this patch of forest where somebody runs a karaoke bar under big tent lights and a food truck parks on weekends. It's the kind of place that shouldn't work but does.

I pull in around four in the afternoon. There's already a small crowd in the gravel lot next to the office, a couple of hatchbacks and a ute with the trays loaded down with gear. Jules spots me from across the lot and waves both arms like she's landing a plane.

"You came!" she says, jogging over. "Oh my god, you actually came!"

"Don't make it a thing."

"It's a thing. It's absolutely a thing." She hugs me, and I hug her back, and for a second I just stand there in it, because hugs have been hard lately and this one doesn't hurt the way I expected. "Who's watching the bar tonight?"

"I called in a favor. Rob is running it." Rob is one of my trainees and he's been begging for a solo shift, so everybody wins.

"And what is that?" Jules nods at the view-master in my hand.

"Joke gift. For whoever wants it."

She looks at it and laughs. "The reel better be something stupid."

"Grand Canyon, 1958."

"Perfect. Zero notes." She grabs my duffel out of the back seat before I can stop her. "Come on, I'll introduce you to everyone. Some of these people you know, some you don't."

There are maybe forty of us total. I recognize about a quarter from various work things and barbecues gone by. Jules walks me around the group doing the introductions fast, a name and a one-liner for each, and I do my best to hold onto any of it. This is where I usually check out at social things, the name part, but I'm trying. Ashley was always better at this stuff than me. She'd have had half their life stories by now.

There's a folding table set up near the office door with clipboards on it, and a woman standing behind it who looks like she's personally holding the entire weekend together with her bare hands. She's got a clipboard in one hand, a pen behind her ear, another pen in her hand, and a lanyard with a laminated sheet on it. She's maybe twenty-nine, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail that's losing the fight, and she has the specific look of someone who has asked a question four times and is about to ask it a fifth.

"That's Megan," Jules says. "She's organizing the trip. Well, she volunteered, and then it turned into this. Be nice to her, she's running on coffee and spite."

"Sounds familiar," I say.

Megan looks up as we come over, and her eyes go straight to me with this hungry, grateful energy, like I'm the answer to a problem she's been chewing on all day.

"Oh thank god," she says. "Are you Deepak?"

"Uh," I say.

"You're not Deepak." She's already looking past me, scanning the lot. "Sorry. Deepak's got the two-burner stove and he was supposed to be here at three and I've called him twice."

"I'm Roxanne. I'm crashing."

"Crashing? You're not on the list." She flips a page on the clipboard, genuinely distressed about this. "Okay, no, that's fine, we planned for plus-ones, we can flex. Jules vouches for you?"

"Vouches hard," Jules says.

"Great. Great." Megan writes something down, then looks at me again. "Sorry, hi, I'm Megan. I promise I'm normally a functional person. It's the gear. There's a lot of gear and one ute and Deepak is somewhere being Deepak."

"You're doing fine," I say, and I mean it. I've worked enough chaotic club nights to recognize someone in the middle of one.

"Here." She grabs a big gray tent bag off a pile next to the table and holds it out to me. "This one's yours. Site six."

I take it. It's heavier than a one-person tent should be, and there's a strip of green tape on the handle with something written on it in marker. "This one's mine?"

"Yep, that's your tent, all packed, poles included. Take it out to the site when we convoy in, okay? I'll come by later and check everyone's set up right." She's already turned back to her clipboard, pen moving. "Jules, can you tell the food truck guy we're pushing dinner to seven?"

"Can do," Jules says, and gets pulled away toward the food truck by someone else, and just like that I'm standing there holding a tent bag that I'm fairly sure weighs too much.

I look at the green tape. It says SIX in block letters, and under it, smaller, someone's written two names. I can't read the second one. The first one isn't Roxanne.

So I knew it right then, standing in the gravel. This is not my tent. This is somebody's tent, some couple's tent, probably Deepak and someone's tent, and all I had to do was say, hey, Megan, I think this one's got someone else's name on it.

And I didn't.

I want to tell you it was some big moment of decision, some grand plan. It wasn't. I was tired. The bag was already in my hand. Megan was already dealing with three new fires somewhere else. And there was this small, ugly, honest part of me that liked the idea of a tent that was already assigned, a spot that was already mine, no decisions required. Fourteen months of decisions. Every meal, every morning, every empty side of the bed. Some anonymous mix-up tent felt like a holiday from all of it.

So I carried it to my car, put it in the boot, and got in the driver's seat, and sat there for a minute with my hands on the wheel.

"This is a bad plan," I said out loud to nobody.

The view-master sat in the passenger seat like it was judging me.

I went back out. By then the convoy was forming up, five cars and the loaded ute, and Megan was standing in the middle of the gravel doing a headcount with her finger in the air, mouthing numbers. She caught me looking and gave me this tired thumbs up, and I gave one back, and nothing more needed to be said. I was in the convoy with a stolen tent and a three-dollar view-master, following a ute down a dirt road toward the trees, feeling lighter than I had any right to feel.

Site six, it turned out, was a nice flat patch of ground near the treeline, close enough to the karaoke tent that we'd get the noise but far enough that you could pretend you didn't hear someone murdering a Celine Dion song. I picked a spot, popped the boot, and hauled the bag out.

It took me twenty minutes to set the thing up, and somewhere around minute twelve I stopped pretending I didn't know. It's a two-room tent. Two rooms. There's a divider and everything. Whoever packed this bag did it with care, poles bundled and labeled, guy lines coiled neat.

I sat on the ground in front of my borrowed palace and had a long drink from my water bottle.

"Roxanne, what are you doing," I said to myself.

The answer, which I already knew, was nothing good.

The camp fills in around me over the next hour. Tents go up in crooked rows, someone's speaker starts playing indie folk, and the karaoke tent flickers on as a bad idea would at sunset. I set up my camp chair and watch people carry firewood around with purpose. Jules waves at me from near the food truck and holds up two fingers, which I take to mean dinner at seven, probably.

I'm on my second seltzer when Megan comes down the row with her clipboard, checking tents off one by one. She's got her ponytail going sideways and one pen behind her ear now, so the other pen situation has apparently been resolved. She gets to site six and stops.

"Oh," she says.

"Oh," I agree.

She looks at the tent. Two rooms. Roomy. She looks at the green tape on the guy line stake, where I've left it visible because I'm not a complete monster. She reads the names.

"That's Deepak and Ravi's tent," she says slowly. "I gave you Deepak and Ravi's tent."

"Looks like it."

"But where did you..." She presses the clipboard flat against her chest. "Where is your actual tent? The one marked with your name?"

"Rohan's got a tent marked Roxanne," I say. "Saw it on a bag near the ute."

"Rohan." She writes it down, or starts to, then stops. "So Deepak took Rohan's tent by mistake, and you took Deepak's tent, and Ravi took..."

"I don't know where Ravi is. He never showed me his setup."

She closes her eyes. She does this thing where she breathes in through her nose for a count, and I can see her doing the count. "Okay. Okay. I'll sort it after dinner. Deepak's here somewhere, he has the stove, he can explain himself."

"Megan, I can swap. It's fine. I don't mind the shuffle."

"No, no!" She waves the pen at me. "You're set up. It took me half an hour to talk Deepak into that tent in the first place because he wanted the one near the bathroom, and honestly? Sleep where you are. Ravi can bunk with Deepak or take your swap later, I'll figure it out. I'm sorry, this whole trip has been like herding cats who all have opinions about parking."

"It's really not a problem. The tent's got two rooms. I'll just pretend I'm fancy."

"That's... actually good to hear, because the fix is going to take a while." She gives me a grateful, exhausted look. "Dinner's at seven. Karaoke starts around eight. You're coming to both, right? You can't drive three hours to sit in a tent."

"I'll come to dinner."

"Karaoke?"

"We'll see."

She points the pen at me like she's won something, then moves on down the row. I watch her go and think that she reminds me a little of Ashley's way of running a service, that same tired competence, everyone's names known, everyone fed. Then I think about something else on purpose, because that's the trick I've learned. Don't let one thought walk you all the way down the hall.

Dinner is a food truck situation, burgers and chips in paper trays, and I end up at a picnic table with Jules and about six strangers. Jules introduces everybody by drink order instead of name, which is a bartender thing I understand completely. There's a woman who only drinks Negronis and a guy who asks for "something cold and green." I don't ask how his night's going. I know how his night's going.

At around seven forty the sky goes the color of a bruise. Nobody says anything about it for a while, the way Australians don't, and then the first drops come down fat and unhurried, and then the sky stops being polite about it.

"Everyone in." Megan is shouting, arms up, clipboard over her head. "Everything under cover. Electronics in cars."

The camp scrambles. I jog to my tent, and just as I'm diving through the flap I hear running footsteps behind me, and Megan appears at my door with rain running off her nose.

"Can I?" she yells over the noise. "The rain sheet over mine tore at the last trip, I never fixed it, it's a lake in there."

"Yeah. Get in."

She dives through and we sit there, breathing, while the rain turns from heavy to absurd. There's a zipper pull dangling between us and we both look at it.

"Sorry," she says, wringing out her ponytail with both hands like it's a dish sponge. "I'm in your tent, in the wrong tent, which is the correct tent, which makes it... I'm going to stop talking."

"It's fine. It's my stolen tent anyway."

"Right." She looks around. "Wow, Deepak packed this nicely. Poles are labeled and everything. There's no way Deepak did this."

"Probably his girlfriend."

"Ravi. They're not together, they're just friends who share gear. Ravi is the neat one." She peels off her soaked shoes and sets them by the door, then pauses. "Is this okay? Me being in here? I can go sit in my car."

"It's raining sideways, Megan. Sit down."

She sits, cross-legged, on Deepak's side of the divider, which is currently just the clean side. The rain hammers the fly and the lantern light from the campfire area turns the ceiling gold. It's