The Afternoon Shift

The note showed up on a Tuesday, folded twice and stuck under the windshield wiper of my Corolla. I almost threw it out with the parking stub. Somebody had written my name on it in ballpoint, Ethan, with a little arrow under it, and I figured it was a complaint from the restaurant about me taking up two spaces again.

It wasn't a complaint. It said, Meet me on the roof during your break. Wednesday. I'll bring the ashtray. Maya.

Maya was the sous-chef at the place where my studio did all the menu design work. I'd met her maybe half a dozen times over two years before the roof, mostly across a table covered in proof sheets, her pointing at font sizes with a pencil she kept behind her ear. She was twenty-nine, married, funny in a dry way that I liked, and I had told myself I hadn't thought about her outside of work. Or that's what I would have told you on Monday.

Wednesday I went up to the roof anyway. I told myself it was about the ashtray. The restaurant had banned smoking everywhere including the loading dock, and I'd been complaining about it for a month, and apparently she had too. That was the shared interest. Cigarettes. That was all.

She was already up there, sitting on an upturned milk crate by the stairwell door, ashtray made out of a tuna can on the ledge next to her. Hair tied back, still in her whites, a cigarette going.

"You actually came," she said. "I gave it fifty-fifty."

"I gave it sixty-forty the other direction. I figured it was a prank."

"Who would prank you? You're the least prankable person I know." She held out the pack. I took one and sat on the second crate and we lit up off the same match, which felt sort of theatrical, but neither of us said so.

"So," I said. "The ashtray." She tapped ash into the tuna can. "That's the cover story, yeah."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I wanted to talk to you somewhere that isn't a conference table with Greg from the print shop making jokes." She looked out at the parking lot. "I like talking to you. I noticed I like talking to you, and I thought, well, that's either nothing or it's something, and the only way to find out is to be weird about it."

"That's one way to find out."

"It's the only way I know." She shrugged. "So here's the game I'm proposing. We meet up here on breaks. We smoke. We talk. That's it. That is the complete set of rules. Anything else is off the table, and if either of us gets uncomfortable, we say so and it stops and nobody makes it a thing."

I should have said no right there. I want that recorded in my own mind, anyway. Instead I said, "What kind of talk?"

"Any kind. The kind you can't have at a conference table." She flicked ash. "I spend ten hours a day telling people what to do with a sauté pan. You spend ten hours a day explaining kerning to people who think kerning is a sponge. I'd like one conversation a week with someone who isn't either of those things."

"And you picked me."

"You picked the roof too," she said. "Don't act like you got dragged."

Fair point. We finished our cigarettes mostly in silence, which wasn't awkward, which was its own kind of problem. Then her phone timer went off and she stood up and said, "Same time Friday," and went down the stairs, and I sat there a minute longer looking at the tuna can like it had answers in it.

* * *

Friday we talked about her brother's wedding in Sacramento and my divorce and whether the guy who owned the parking lot next door was running some kind of scheme with the spaces, which he definitely was. The next Wednesday we talked longer. The Wednesday after that she brought two chairs up from somewhere and I stopped pretending I was doing anything else on my breaks.

By the fourth meeting I knew things about Maya that I had no business knowing. That she'd wanted to do pastry and got steered into savory because a chef told her sweets were a dead end. That she and Vincent, her husband, had been together since she was twenty-four, five years now, and that he traveled most months for work and she'd stopped counting the nights.

Then, on a hot Thursday in July, she told me the thing that changed the shape of everything.

We were up top with the chairs, and she was halfway through a cigarette, and she said, "Can I tell you something without you doing the face?"

"What face?"

"The face where you go polite and back up an inch."

"I don't have a face."

"You absolutely have a face." She stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one right away, which she only did when she was working up to something. "Vincent and I aren't really together. Not together-together. We've been separated since March. He's in Denver with a woman named Colleen and I've been signing the lease alone and telling the restaurant he's traveling because I didn't want the whole kitchen having opinions about my marriage."

I did the face anyway, probably. "Since March," I said. "But in week one you said married."

"I am married. On paper. We haven't filed anything." She turned to look at me straight on. "I didn't lie to you, Ethan. But I let you think something that isn't true, and that's close enough to lying that I wanted to fix it before it got worse."

"Why fix it now?"

"Because of the other thing I'm about to say." She took a drag and let it out slow. "The game we set up, the smoke-and-talk game. I set it up because I thought I was being careful. Turns out I was being careful the way you're careful walking a ledge. It looks like a rule but it's not doing anything." She paused. "I like you. Not in a friendly way. In the way where I think about Thursday all week."

The timer on her phone went off and she didn't move. Neither did I.

"Okay," I said finally.

"Okay what? Okay you're freaked out, or okay you like me too, or okay you need a minute? Give me something, I'm dying up here."

"I like you too. I've liked you since about week two, and I've been telling myself the same story you were telling yourself, that we were just two people with a tuna can." I put my cigarette out. "So now what?"

"Now we decide if we change the rules or quit the game," she said. "Those are the options. I'm not going to be sneaky around my own life. I've done enough of that."

"And if we change the rules?"

"Then it's real and it's messy and my almost-ex-husband is a whole topic we will definitely have to deal with. And yours, the divorce, Tess, all of it." She said Tess's name lightly, like a name she'd heard me mention once and filed. "I'm not asking you to answer today. I'm asking you to answer honestly, eventually."

I watched a delivery van angle into the lot below, taking up two spaces like an amateur.

"Friday," I said. "I'll answer Friday."

"Friday," she said, and went down the stairs, and I stayed up there long enough that my break became two breaks, and the tuna can sat there on the ledge like a little tin boundary marker between the part of my life that was simple and whatever came next.

Friday came and I went up to the roof with my answer mostly formed, that is to say I'd written it in my head forty times and erased it thirty-eight. Maya was already up there, both chairs set out, ashtray in the middle like a tiny tin judge between us.

"Okay," she said. "Let's hear it."

"I don't want to quit the game. But I want to change it." I sat down. "Slowly. I'm not good at slowly, but I'd like to try."

She looked at me and something in her shoulders came down an inch, like she'd been holding them up all day. "Slowly works. Slowly is actually the only thing that works for me right now, if I'm honest. I've got a lease and a kitchen and a brother calling me about tuxedo rentals."

"So we keep the roof," I said. "And we stop pretending it's about cigarettes."

"We never pretended it was about cigarettes. You smoked like someone who smokes three cigarettes a year."

"That's accurate."

She laughed and lit one and passed it to me without thinking, and our fingers touched on the filter and stayed there a beat longer than a handoff needs. Neither of us pulled back. It was maybe four seconds, five, her fingers warm against mine, and it was the most anything had felt like anything in about two years.

"Well," she said finally, taking the cigarette back. "That was a lot for a Wednesday."

"It's Friday."

"See, you're good at details. That's the problem." She grinned at me and the grin did the thing it always did, which was make me forget what we'd been careful about.

***

The touch on the table happened the following week, and it happened because of a menu meeting. Ethan's studio, my restaurant, my table in the empty dining room at three in the afternoon, the printed drafts spread out between us. Suki, our hostess, twenty-seven and sweet and completely unobservant, was out front doing the reservation book.

Ethan pointed at a font on page two and said something about the spacing being wrong, and he was right, it was wrong, and while he was saying it his hand came to rest on the table next to mine. Not on mine. Next to it, pinky about an inch from my knuckle.

I moved my pinky that inch. He didn't move at all, which I took as permission.

"This spacing," he said, and his voice came out a little rough. "It's making the descriptions run long."

"Uh huh." His fingers slid over mine, properly now, just resting there. My heart was doing work. "The descriptions could be cut by a third."

"Could they."

"Suki couldn't do a tasting menu in that format," I said, and it was the most competent sentence I have ever produced with someone's hand on mine.

He squeezed once, light, and took his hand back, and we finished the meeting like professionals, and when Suki came in with the reservation book he was standing two feet from me discussing paper stock. But in the doorway on his way out he turned around. "The botanical garden has that evening thing in August," he said, to me, to the room, to whoever was listening. "Extended hours. The lights in the conservatory."

"I've heard that," I said.

"If you ever went, you'd probably run into people."

"Probably," I said, and he left, and Suki said, "He seems nice," and I agreed that he seemed nice, and that concluded the matter.

***

The botanical garden does extended hours on Thursday evenings in August. String lights, a bar cart near the rose garden, crowds thinning out after eight. Vincent was calling me every Sunday now about the lease, and my brother had sent me a spreadsheet about Sacramento, and I told myself that an evening walk through a public garden was the most innocent thing a person could do with a Thursday.

Ethan was by the entrance at seven, in an actual collared shirt, holding two tickets.

"You bought tickets."

"I support public gardens." He handed me one. "Also I panicked at the window when I saw you coming."

We walked in and the place was all warm light and long shadows, and the crowd was couples and a few families and one very committed group of orchid people. We talked about the menu and Suki's reservation book and my brother's spreadsheet, and it was nice, it was genuinely nice, and then by the desert room the talking had a different weight to it.

"Can I show you something," he said, "and can you not do the face?"

"I have a face, apparently, so we'll see."

He took my hand. Out here, in the open, where anyone could look. His palm was dry and a little warm and he held it like he'd thought about how to hold it.

"This is the part where I say we're in public," I said.

"This is the part where I say I know, and ask if it's all right anyway."

I looked around. Nobody was looking at us. It's amazing how uninteresting two adults holding hands are to everyone in the world except the two adults. "It's all right," I said. "For now. It's all right for now."

We walked the whole conservatory like that, hands linked, and somewhere around the fern room he started the game, though I don't think either of us named it out loud.

"The palm over there," he said, quietly, "is from Madagascar. It flowers once and dies."

"Is that true?"

"Almost certainly not. But if a docent corrects me, we're strangers who met at the entrance." His thumb moved across the back of my hand in a slow line. "I'm Ethan and you're a woman I'm annoying with facts."

"Ethan. Are you aware your thumb is doing that?"

"My thumb has no supervisor!"

I laughed, too loud for the fern room, and an older woman with a lanyard glanced over, and I turned it into a cough, and Ethan turned the cough into us stopping to read a plaque, both of us ten years old in the worst way and enjoying it completely.

By the orchid people we were braver. He touched the small of my back while we looked at a bed of white blooms, and I leaned into it a half inch, and when we stopped at the bar cart for a lemonade he stood behind me in the line with his hand resting on my hip, and I could feel the heat of it through my dress like a brand the size of a hand, which is what it was.

"Show me yours," he said. "Since we're being idiots." I checked the crowd, and there was a gap between the bar cart and the hedges