The Accordion Loan

The flight out of the river strip near Livingstone had been cancelled at four in the afternoon, which was the kind of thing that happened out here and nobody made a fuss about. Riley stood in the open-air terminal building, thirty-eight years old and suddenly stuck, watching the little prop plane she was supposed to be on sit there on the strip looking exactly as stubborn as the man on the radio said it was. A storm cell down south had closed the next strip, they told her. Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe.

She had one duffel bag, a massage table she had already shipped ahead, and an accordion.

The accordion was the real problem, or the real blessing, depending on how you looked at it. It belonged to a man named Bwise, a musician who played at a lodge upriver, and he had lent it to her three days ago because she had asked and because he was the sort of person who lent things. She had promised to bring it back in Livingstone. Instead she was standing under a tin roof with it strapped to her back like the world's least romantic backpack, feeling it pull on her shoulders the way it always did, and wondering what a person does with a cancelled evening.

The rafting outfitter's base sat maybe two kilometers from the strip, down a dirt road that turned to soup when it rained and to powder when it didn't. It hadn't rained yet, so the walk was just hot and dusty, and she did it with the accordion bumping against her spine and her shirt sticking to her back. There was a low cinderblock building, a rack of half-deflated rafts, a small bar that opened at whatever time the barman felt like it, and a wide porch with plastic chairs looking out at the river. The river was the color of iced tea and moving the way it always moves out there, like it has somewhere enormous to be.

There was one other stranded passenger. She noticed him on the porch when she came up the road, a tall man in his sixties with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a laptop closed on the table in front of him like he had given up on it. He had a glass of ginger beer and the particular stillness of a person who travels a lot for work and has stopped being surprised when travel goes sideways.

"Same flight?" she asked, dropping into the chair across from him.

He looked up and smiled, and it was a good smile, the kind that starts slow. "The four o'clock. Which is now a tomorrow o'clock, apparently."

"That's what they told me." She shrugged the accordion off her shoulders and set it on the porch boards with a thump. "I'm Riley. I'm stuck."

"Drew." He shook her hand, and his was cool and dry despite the heat. "Stuck as well. Drew, yes. Sorry, that was a strange thing to say. I'm Drew, I'm sixty-three, and I am also stuck."

"Thirty-eight," she said, because it seemed only fair. "And stuck. And carrying an instrument I can't play very well that belongs to somebody else, which is a special kind of guilt."

He looked at the accordion the way some men look at a dog they want but were never allowed to have. "Is that a full-size one?"

"It's Bwise's. He's a musician at a lodge upriver. He taught me maybe eight bars of a song before he lent it to me and I have been terrible at it ever since."

"Terrible at it," he repeated, and his voice held something wistful and a little funny. "I've always wanted to learn. I'm a corporate lawyer out of Chicago and my one confession is that I have wanted to play the accordion since I was twenty-two and heard a street musician in Vienna and felt something I have never managed to feel in a deposition."

Riley laughed, a real one, surprised out of her. She was a massage therapist from Portland by way of a dozen other towns, and she had spent the last two weeks working on river guides with forearms like bridge cables, and the last thing she expected on a stuck evening was a lawyer confessing to an accordion dream. But there it was.

"Eight bars," she said. "That's all I've got to teach. Bwise taught me eight bars and a scale."

"That's eight more bars than I know."

The barman appeared, eventually, the way people do out here, and brought her a Mosi beer without her having to ask twice. The sun went down over the strip and the air turned gold and then purple, and the two of them sat there and talked about nothing much. His work, hers. How he had never married and mostly didn't regret it. How she had traveled for years and loved people in passing and had lately begun to wonder if passing was a way of living or a way of avoiding one. He was easy to talk to. He listened the way a person listens when they have decided the conversation is the most important thing in the room, and Riley had not been listened to like that in a while.

At some point she mentioned the prescription. It was a small thing, a refill she needed before flying home, antimalarials and a pill for her stomach that had been unhappy with travel food all week. She had planned to pick it up in Livingstone the next morning.

"The pharmacy near the market?" he said. "I looked it up while we were waiting. It closes at midnight. Tonight, not tomorrow."

She checked her phone. He was right. The town was a twenty-five minute drive, the base had one truck, and the driver had gone home at five.

"Well," she said, and put her face in her hands for a second. "That's just great. That's perfect. Stuck at a rafting base with an accordion and no pharmacy."

"Truck," Drew said, and held up a finger. "I heard the manager say there's an old Land Cruiser behind the gear shed. I could drive it. I drove in Botswana for a month back when I was forty-five and everything about that license has probably expired, but the roads here don't exactly inspire fear."

"You'd drive me into town at nine at night for a stomach pill?"

"I would drive you into town at nine at night for almost nothing," he said, and then he held up that finger again, slower, like he was drafting a clause, which made her laugh before he even got to the joke. "I will also admit to a wish. It is entirely separate from the truck, so you can say no and I will still drive. An accordion lesson. Tonight. On the porch. Eight bars. And if the truck works at all I'll buy the beer on the way back."

"That's not leverage, that's just asking."

"It's my first time asking for something without a clause. Be gentle."

Riley looked at him. He was gray at the temples and he sat as though his shoulders had been carrying things for thirty years, and he wanted, more than anything he would admit out loud, to squeeze a bellows and make a fool of himself in front of a stranger. She understood that wanting. She had spent two weeks being professional and calm and kneading other people's knots out of them, and what she wanted most in the world right now was to feel spontaneous, to do something just because the evening offered it.

"Yes," she said, and stuck her hand out. "But I'm warning you. Bwise is a patient man and even he got a look on his face."

"I've been deposed by the meanest litigation attorney in the Midwest," Drew said, shaking her hand. "I can survive an accordion."

They went to find the manager about the truck, and the manager, a thin Zambian man named Given who had the unbothered air of someone who had solved a thousand stranded-tourist problems, said the Land Cruiser was there but the key was in the office and the office guy was at his cousin's place and would be back by nine. Nine. The pharmacy closed at midnight. It would be tight but not impossible, Given said, if they left by ten.

So they had two hours.

They sat back on the porch and Riley unbuckled the accordion case and lifted the instrument out into the lamplight, and it gleamed like something alive. Drew leaned forward in his plastic chair with his elbows on his knees and his glasses back down on his nose, and he looked at the buttons and keys the way a man looks at a locked door he has wanted to open his whole life.

"Okay," Riley said, settling it onto her knee, feeling the weight of it settle too, the good familiar weight. "Strap goes over the left shoulder. Bellows like breathing. And the first rule is that you don't stop moving your fingers when you get scared, because everybody gets scared."

"Everybody gets scared," he repeated, and took the weight of it from her, and his hands, which had probably signed a thousand agreements that day, hovered over the buttons like they were waiting for permission.

"Eight bars," she said. "And then we go find that truck."

He grinned at her over the top of the accordion, and the grin was younger than sixty-three, and Riley thought that maybe a cancelled flight was not the worst thing that had ever happened to anybody.

Drew learned the way some men learn anything new, which is badly at first and then all at once. His first push through the eight bars sounded like a grocery cart going down stairs. Riley winced and then laughed and then gave up trying to hide either one.

"Okay," he said, blowing air out through his cheeks. "Okay. That was terrible. I heard that."

"It was pretty bad," she said, kind enough to be honest. "But your fingers are in the right neighborhood. You just rushed the third bar. You rushed it like it owed you money."

"Everything owes me money. I'm a lawyer."

He tried it again, slower this time, and on the second try the tune actually appeared inside the noise, the little folk melody Bwise had taught her three days ago, and when it surfaced Drew stopped breathing altogether until it was done. He sat back and stared at the instrument.

"There it is," Riley said. "There it is! You felt that, right?"

"I felt that." He sounded as though he had just gotten a verdict. "Twenty-two years old. That's when I first heard one, on a street corner in Vienna, some man with a hat on the pavement. I've wanted one ever since and never once done anything about it. Forty-one years."

"That's a very precise number."

"I bill by the hour. I count everything." He handed it back to her and she took it, and when she did his hand brushed across the back of hers, just the tops of the fingers, an accident or maybe not quite one, and neither of them made a thing of it, but neither of them pulled away quickly either.

"One more time," she said, and passed it back, and this time she reached over and adjusted his left hand on the strap without thinking about it, the way she'd guide a client's shoulder during a session, and he looked at her fingers on his and said nothing, and played it through almost clean.

"Eight bars," he announced. "Lesson complete. Now, madam, your carriage."

The office guy came back at nine on the dot, a young man named Chanda who had the key on a lanyard around his neck and no questions at all about two strangers wanting the oldest vehicle on the property. The Land Cruiser turned out to be beige in the way things are beige after ten years of dust, and it started on the third try with a sound like a chest clearing. Drew drove the way he did everything, carefully and with total commitment, both hands on the wheel, and the road into town was washboard and moonlit and completely empty.

"I used to drive like a maniac," Riley said over the engine noise. "When I was twenty-something. Fast everywhere. Then I started working with people's bodies all day and I got calm. You see enough necks wrecked by fender benders and you slow down."

"What made you a massage therapist? If you don't mind my asking."

"Mostly that I was terrible at sitting still at a desk. I tried offices. Two of them. I lasted eleven months at the second one and I cried in the stairwell on my lunch break until one day I just didn't go back in after lunch." She looked out the window at the dark shapes of trees. "I went back to school at thirty, finished at thirty-two, and I've never regretted a single day of it, except tax season, when everybody in Portland needs their shoulders amputated."

"And the traveling? You're coming from upriver?"

"A lodge retreat. I did two weeks of table work for the guests. It's the kind of job where they have to ship my table ahead of me and I follow it around the world." She grinned. "My whole life fits in a duffel and a shipping crate. My sister thinks I'm having a midlife crisis at thirty-eight. I think I'm having the best decade of my life."

The pharmacy was on a side street near the market, shuttered halfway, lit by one fluorescent tube, and open, barely, a man counting pills behind a grate. Drew waited in the truck with the engine running while Riley went in with her phone and her prescription photo, and she came back out two minutes later with a face like weather.

"So this is the situation," she said, climbing in. "He doesn't have the antimalarials in stock. The stomach pills he gave me, thank God, but the antimalarial refill is coming in with the morning delivery. He wrote me a note. A literal note, for the morning." She held it up. "I now have to come back at eight a.m. before the eleven o'clock plane. Assuming the plane, which was cancelled once today, happens at all."

"Ah." Drew turned the engine down to idle. "Well. That's a problem for the morning, and the morning is very far from tonight. Would you like to get that beer I owe you?"

"I would like that beer very much," she said