The Attic at the Gilded Pear

I got to the Gilded Pear Inn on a Thursday evening in October, fifteen minutes early, which for me counts as heroic effort. The conference had run all day, and I'd spent the afternoon sweating over a welding demo while a guy named Viktor Holt asked questions designed to make me look like a fool in front of forty people. So when Lesley Peterson, who runs the place, told me at the front desk that she'd set me up on a blind date for the evening, eight o'clock, attic lounge, I almost said no.

I'm forty-two years old, a welder by trade, and I've been dating around since my early thirties without finding anybody who could keep up with my sense of humor. Lesley has owned that inn for twenty years and has a habit of pairing up her guests like she's dealing cards. Half the time it works. I figured I owed her one for the good breakfasts.

The attic lounge is at the top of a narrow staircase, an old converted space with low beams and two squished couches and a table that looks older than the country. I climbed up there expecting an empty room and ten quiet minutes to psych myself up.

Rita Gentry was already there.

She was sitting on the window couch with a glass of wine, and when she saw me her face did this thing, this quick fall from polite to annoyed, like she'd bitten into something sour. I knew her from that afternoon. She'd given a talk on translation work that afternoon, right after my demo, and we'd gotten into it during questions, her claiming that welders who couldn't explain their own trade deserved the bad contracts they got, me pointing out that translators charged by the word and hid behind every one of them. It had gotten a little loud. A moderator had cleared his throat at us.

"You," she said.

"Me," I said. "Well. This is a waste of a good shirt."

She was thirty-eight, sharp-faced, hair pulled back like she couldn't be bothered with it, and she had the look of a woman who'd spent too many years in airport lounges and had run out of patience for small talk somewhere around 2019. She set her wine down.

"Lesley set you up too."

"Eight o'clock, attic lounge, a lovely guest I think you'll really hit it off with. Her exact words, more or less."

"She said charming," Rita said. "She said, I quote, charming and handy. I was promised handy."

I sat down on the couch across from her, because standing in the doorway like a salesman felt worse than sitting. "Depends what you need done."

"Nothing. I need nothing done. That's the entire point of a vacation, even a fake vacation wrapped around a regional trade conference for people who weld things and people who translate things about welding."

"It's a narrow conference," I agreed.

"It's a humiliating conference. I flew eleven hours to give a twenty-minute talk about translating technical manuals to a room where half the audience was checking whether the ceiling needed repainting." She picked her wine back up. "And you. That demo. You welded a bead in front of everyone like it was a magic trick and then acted wounded when Viktor Holt asked you a hard question."

"He didn't ask a hard question. He asked a question built to make me look stupid, which is different, and he's been trying it for five years. We bid on the same contracts back home. He's a leech."

"You two have history."

"We have competition. There's a difference."

She laughed at that, short and dry, and it annoyed me that the laugh was a good one. "You know what I noticed during your demo, Jed? You've got the hands of an office manager. I expected a welder to have burn scars, crooked fingers, something. Your hands are clean."

"TIG welders keep clean. It's precision work. You want scars, find a pipe fitter."

"Excuses."

"Facts." I held my hands up, palms out, across the little gap between the couches. She actually leaned forward and looked, like she was inspecting a used car. "Forty-two years old and never once come to harm in a line of work people assume will kill me. Disappointing, I know."

"Very. I had a whole speech prepared about gruff tradesmen and you've ruined it."

There was a knock on the low door frame then, and Lesley came up the stairs carrying a pie.

I want to describe this properly, because it matters. She came through the door like a woman delivering a verdict, this pie held out in front of her on a plate with a doily on it, steam still coming off the crust. The whole attic smelled like apples and something tart underneath.

"The prize winner," Lesley announced. "Apple cranberry, from this year's contest. I judged it myself and I don't say this lightly, but it's the best thing baked in this county since before the last flood. And it is going to sit between the two of you until you've eaten some, because I did not spend my afternoon baking for nothing."

Rita and I looked at each other, and there was a moment there, a genuine moment, where we both realized at the same time that we'd been played. Lesley hadn't set up two strangers. She'd sat through that panel argument this afternoon with her arms crossed and a little smile, and then she'd gone home and planned this.

"Lesley," Rita started.

"Not a word. You were both rude in my establishment this afternoon, rude to each other, in front of guests, over a subject nobody in that room cared about. This is your penance. Pie and civility." She set the plate down on the table between the couches, dead center, like a border marker. "There's cream in the kitchen. I'm not bringing it. If you want cream you'll have to negotiate."

And she left. She actually left, took the stairs down with a little hum, leaving the two of us there with a pie and fifteen minutes to kill before we could even claim the date had started.

Rita looked at the pie. Then at me.

"She planned this," Rita said.

"Since about two this afternoon, I'd guess."

"She watched us argue and went home and baked."

"Or she had it baked and just judged us worthy. Either way, we're outnumbered."

She reached over and cut into the pie with the fork they'd left up there, took a bite straight off the fork, and made a sound she probably didn't intend to make in company. "Oh, that's not fair. That's genuinely not fair. I was ready to be mad all evening."

"Mad at me or at her?"

"At the situation. At the whole setup. At eleven hours of flying followed by eight o'clock blind dates in attics." She cut a second bite and held the fork out toward me without looking up, an offering, almost grudging about it. "You might as well. She'll come back up and check the plate."

I took the fork. The pie was good. It was better than good, it was the kind of good that makes you quiet, and for a minute or two the two of us just sat there in that cramped attic eating off the same fork like a couple of pirates splitting loot, the conference and Viktor Holt and the whole long day sitting somewhere behind us.

"So," she said eventually. "Welding. Explain it to me properly this time, since apparently we're stuck with each other until this pie is gone."

"That'll take a while. This pie is big."

"Then start talking, handy."

The truth is I hate small talk. Always have. Weather, traffic, what do you do, how about this economy, all of it. It's the conversational version of holding a wet towel. Most dates I'd been on since my early thirties, the whole evening was wet towel after wet towel, and then the check came and I drove home feeling like I'd spent three hours in a waiting room.

So when Rita said start talking, I surprised myself by actually doing it.

"The thing about welding is this," I said, and then stopped, because nobody says that, nobody says the thing about something is this, so I started over. "Welding is the only trade where you can ruin everything in half a second and nobody knows until it breaks three years later. There's no undo. Every bead is a decision you signed in metal."

"That's not terrible," she said. "Say something else."

"Small talk is the same way. Empty filler that looks fine and holds nothing."

She pointed the fork at me. "Careful. That was almost a personality."

We kept going back and forth like that, and somewhere in the middle of it she asked why I'd said yes to a blind date at a trade conference, because a man like me didn't seem the type.

"I'm not. Lesley ambushed me. She asked if I liked pie and I said yes and suddenly I had a reservation. I figured it was easier than arguing with an innkeeper." I took another bite. "Why did you say yes? You flew eleven hours for a twenty-minute talk. You could be asleep."

She was quiet for a second, looking at the pie instead of me.

"My sister's getting married," she said. "Back in Singapore. Saturday. My mother has been planning it for a year and planning, for my mother, means interrogating every unmarried relative about why they're still unmarried. There would have been a week of aunts asking me when it was my turn. So I said I had a conference that ran all week. Then it turned out a real one existed, so I had to attend it, and then Lesley trapped me in an attic with a man whose hands are too clean."

"You dodged a week of wedding prep to judge a welding demo?"

"I dodged forty aunts for six days. The demo was collateral damage." She shrugged, but there was something under the shrug, something a bit rawer than she wanted on display. "Thirty-eight years old and I flew across an ocean to hide from my own family. Make of that what you will."

"Forty-two and I let an innkeeper order me around. We're both cowards. It's fine."

That got the real laugh, not the dry short one. The full one, the kind that bounces off low attic beams and comes back at you. I decided right then I'd be chasing that sound for a while, and I didn't like how honest that decision felt.

Lesley had left a second fork after all, tucked under the napkin, so we stopped fighting over the one. Rita cut proper slices and we ate like civilized people, which was somehow worse than the pirates bit.

"Can I say something about this crust?" I said.

"You're going to say something rude. I can tell. Your face does a thing."

"The crust is a betrayal. Look at it. All that effort, the latticework, and it's the least interesting part of the pie. The filling did all the work and the crust gets the applause. It's Viktor Holt in dessert form."

She laughed so hard she had to put her fork down. She pressed the back of her hand against her