The Almost Hour

Okay so, the story starts with me being pathetic on Alba's porch, but give me a minute, it gets better.

I was sixty-two years old, three months out of a twenty-year relationship, and I had forgotten how to walk into a party by myself. That's the truth. Martin always walked in first, always, and I would follow him with the wine and pretend I was late on purpose. Now here I was standing on Alba Nixon's back steps with a bottle of supermarket merlot, feeling like the new kid at a school I had worked at for twenty years.

Alba was sixty-eight and had retired a few years before I did, and she had been after me for weeks. "Come to the parties, Henrietta!" she'd said on the phone. "It's just the old rec center crowd, everybody's old and nobody cares if you show up in sweatpants!" Which was a lie, by the way. Nobody wore sweatpants. Retired people dress like they're auditioning for a catalog.

So I walked in. And the first thing I saw, before the koi pond, before the grape arbor, before Eugene Thorne hogging the snack table like he always did, was Juan Erikson.

Oh, that man. Sixty-four now, silver at the temples, still built like somebody who spent thirty years lifting pool equipment instead of sitting at a desk. Fifteen years since we'd first worked together at the rec center, fifteen years since we'd competed for the same promotion and turned into rivals, and eleven years since that one kiss at a staff party that I had absolutely not been thinking about for a decade. I want to state that plainly, for my own dignity. Absolutely not thinking about it. Constantly.

His eyes found mine across the yard and he did this little startled thing, like I'd popped out of a birthday cake. I gave him a nod. He nodded back. And then we both turned away like two people who had never been introduced, which, fine, we were a sixty-two and a sixty-four year old acting that way, and I was not going to apologize for it in my own head.

"Henrietta!" Alba swept up and took the wine out of my hands before I could even offer it properly. "You came. You look gorgeous, did you do something to your hair?"

"It's the same haircut I've had since 2009," I told her.

"Well it's working," she said, and pushed a glass of something pink into my hand, and that settled it, I was at the party.

I made the rounds. Eugene, sixty-six, retired three years ago, told me the same story about the heat pump disaster of 2014 that he tells every time, and I said "wow" in all the right places. A couple of the lifeguards we used to boss around were there, all grown up now, calling me by my first name like that wasn't weird. And Juan stayed on the far side of the yard the whole evening, talking to Alba's husband about tomatoes or fencing or whatever men talk about when they're pretending not to watch somebody.

We did not speak. One nod. That first party was the whole of it. And I drove home annoyed at myself, because I'd spent three hours circling a man I used to beat out for shift schedules like it was a blood sport.

***

The second party was a week later, a Saturday again, and I went back mostly because Alba texted me a photo of her koi pond at sunset with the caption "he's here again." She's subtle as a fire alarm, that woman.

This time it happened different. I was standing by the koi pond with my drink, watching the big orange one, the one Alba calls Admiral, bully the little ones, and when I turned around Juan was just there. Right there. Holding two plates of Eugene's famous seven-layer dip situation.

"Can I," he started, and stopped, and started again. "Do you want one of these? Eugene made too much. He always makes too much."

"Sure," I said, and took a plate, and we stood there in the weirdest silence of my adult life.

Then he laughed. Just a little huff of a laugh, and he said, "This is ridiculous. Hi, Henrietta. Fifteen years and we're standing at a fish pond holding dip."

"Eleven years since the party," I said, before my brain could stop my mouth.

He went a little red around the ears, I swear. "Yeah," he said. "That party."

"We never talked about that," I said.

"Was there something to talk about?" he asked, and it wasn't smart-alecky, it was a real question, and it sat there between us getting heavier by the second.

I looked at the pond. The Admiral slapped the water. "You know, we fought over that supervisor job for eight months," I said. "Eight months of you getting the pool schedule before I did and me getting the equipment budget before you did, and I don't even remember why it mattered."

"It mattered because we were fifty-ish and proud," he said. "Now I'm retired and I can't remember what I was proud of."

"Are you happy, retired?" I asked him. "Really?"

He thought about it, actually thought, which I'd forgotten he does. "Some days," he said. "I built a shelf. It's crooked. I'm very proud of it. Nine years divorced and the shelf is the best company I've had. How's your Martin situation, I heard, well, Alba heard, and Alba tells everyone."

I should have bristled. Instead I just said it. "Gone. Twenty years and he left in May for a woman who does hot yoga. I'm fine, mostly, except when I'm not."

"Henrietta," he said, and he said it soft, and he took half a step closer, and the pond was doing its little burble, and I could feel the whole evening tilting toward something, and that is exactly when Eugene bellowed from the patio.

"Juan. They're playing that dominoes thing and nobody remembers the rules except you."

Juan closed his eyes for a second like a man being called back to school. "I have to go be the rules," he said.

"You have to go be the rules," I agreed.

And he went. He got maybe four steps and turned around. "There's a third one of these parties, right? Alba said three weekends."

"There's a third one," I said.

"Okay," he said, like that settled something, and went off to lose at dominoes.

I stood at that pond for a good ten more minutes holding a plate of dip I didn't eat. So yeah. Week two, still nothing, except everything.

***

The third party, though. The third party is where I stopped pretending to myself, and I'll tell you how that went.

Alba's garden has this grape arbor along the back fence, and the grapevines had gone absolutely feral by late August, so the little stone bench under it was basically a private room. I found myself on the patio at sunset, third glass of Alba's pink stuff, watching the light go gold, and I was not looking for Juan. I was definitely not looking for Juan. I was looking in the general direction of the side garden where Juan happened to be kneeling in the dirt with Eugene, both of them bent over a garden light like it was a bomb.

"Is that thing even fixable?" Eugene was saying, loud enough to carry. "It's older than my grandson."

"Everything's fixable, Gene, hand me the screwdriver," Juan said. He had his sleeves rolled up. He was on his knees in Alba's flower bed with dirt on his forearms, arguing about a landscape light, and I felt this pull in my chest like a hook set, the same one from when I was forty-seven watching him across the staff room. Sixty-two years old, grandchildren-adjacent, freshly dumped, and there I was getting fluttery over a man fixing a light fixture.

The thing is, he was good with his hands, and he was patient with Eugene, who does not deserve patience, and he laughed at Eugene's terrible joke, a real laugh, and I thought, oh no. Oh no, this isn't an old crush you can file away. This is a live wire.

And then he caught me.

That's the part I keep replaying. He looked up from the light, right across the patio, straight at me, and instead of doing the polite thing, the nod-and-return-to-work thing, he just held it. Three seconds. Four. The sunset was doing its thing and the party noise went soft in my ears and neither of us looked away, and I could feel my own face doing something honest, because I'm a terrible liar and always have been.

Eugene, bless him, noticed nothing. "You gonna hold that screwdriver or paint it?" he said.

Juan looked down at the light. Then back up at me, one more second, and there was a question in it. A plain, open question, the kind you ask with your eyebrows.

I picked up my glass. I tipped it toward him, just slightly, the smallest possible toast.

He grinned. Not a smirk, a grin, the old one, the one from before the promotion ruined everything, and turned back to Eugene and said, "I'm diagnosing, Gene, it's a delicate procedure."

I stayed on that patio until it got dark, pretending to chat with Alba's sister about her cruise, and the whole time I was doing arithmetic. The arbor is on the way to the bathroom. The light is by the arbor. He will eventually walk that light back to the shed. And the shed is past the arbor. And I have two good knees and no self-respect.

The Admiral in the pond got his evening feeding. Somewhere in the house, Alba was laughing at her own joke. And I stood up, straightened my shirt, and started walking toward the back of the garden, telling myself that if he happened to be under that arbor, well, it would be rude not to say goodnight.

The arbor delivered, sort of. He did come walking through it twenty minutes later with the landscape light in one hand like a trophy, and we did stand there for a minute in the green half-dark, and it was lovely and it was agonizing, because there were people ten feet away on the patio and Alba's sister had followed me over to finish her cruise story.

"Got her working again," he said, holding up the light. It glowed a warm little yellow between us.

"You're hired," I said. "Alba will never let you leave."

"Gene broke it in the first place, so really I'm just undoing Eugene."

"He takes credit for the seven-layer dip too, you know."

"Gene would take credit for the sunset," Juan said, and we both laughed, and for a second it was easy, the way it used to be before the job interview from hell. Then his eyes did that thing again, the held thing, and my mouth went dry, and Alba's sister said "and then the ship docked in Cozumel." at maximum volume, and the moment just... closed. Like a door with one of those soft-close hinges. He said he should say goodnight to Alba, I said me too, and we walked back to the party from opposite ends of the arbor like two people in a bad play.

But this is what I did on the drive home, though. I did the math on that kiss. Eleven years ago, the staff party, at the rec center where we both worked. I