The Birthday Camper

I turned twenty-nine on a Tuesday, which is the worst day to have a birthday at a campground café. Slow traffic, nobody in for lunch except a retired couple from Boise who split a chicken sandwich and tipped me in exact change. By four I had wiped every counter twice and restocked the cooler for no reason. Frank walked past the window around four-thirty, headed toward the maintenance shed, and lifted a hand at me through the glass. I lifted one back.

At five I decided to close early. It was my birthday and the only person who would care was me. I flipped the sign, cashed out the drawer, and locked the register box in the back like I'm supposed to. Then I walked out to my car, a 2011 Corolla with a cracked windshield and about ninety thousand miles on it, and stopped.

There was a pine cone on my hood. A small one, tied with red string, and under the string a folded note. I picked it up and read it standing there with my keys in my hand.

Come find me at the maintenance shed.

I knew the handwriting. Frank does all the supply lists on the clipboard by the coffee machine, blocky letters, no nonsense. I stood there a while longer than I needed to. The lot was empty. The pines were doing their pine noise. I got in the car and drove the short loop to the shed instead of walking, which was silly, but it gave me thirty seconds to decide.

I decided.

The maintenance shed sits behind the woodpile, a metal building with one big door and a workbench inside. The big door was half open and there was a lantern on the workbench, one of the battery ones we use for the night hikes. Frank was standing by the bench with his sleeves rolled up. He is forty-two, broad without being showy about it, gray coming in at his temples. He looked at me and I looked at him.

"You got my note," he said.

"I got your note." I held up the pine cone. "This is a little strange, Frank."

"It's your birthday. I know. Kayla at the front desk told me weeks ago, she keeps track of everybody's." He wiped his hands on a rag and set it down. "I want to give you something. Something you haven't tried."

"What, like a gift card?"

"No." He said it flat, not joking, and that got my attention more than anything else could have. "A night of following instructions. Mine. If you want it. If you don't, you say no right now and we never talk about it again, and you still get the coffee cake I bought from the bakery in Ollie. I'm not your boss, Reba, I don't sign your schedule or your pay, and this has nothing to do with the job. Nothing here is a trade. Yes or no, the café stays exactly the same."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "There's coffee cake?"

"There's coffee cake." He waited. He's good at waiting. Former park ranger, he told me once, twelve years of it, and it shows in how he doesn't fill silences. "Reba. You don't have to say yes to be interesting. I'm asking because I think you want to and you'd never ask."

That was closer to the truth than I liked. I'm twenty-nine and I've dated a handful of guys, nothing that stuck, nothing where I ever let go of the wheel. My whole life I've been the one keeping the register locked and the cooler stocked. I looked at the lantern and the pine cone in my hand and my own stupid cracked windshield back in the lot.

"What happens if I say yes?"

"Tonight, very little. You kneel on a blanket. I put a blindfold on you. I tell you what I'm going to do before I do it, and mostly what I'm going to do is use a flogger on your back, soft one, suede. Light strokes. That's it. That's the whole evening." He held up a hand. "And we pick a word. You say it, everything stops, no questions, no hard feelings. It holds all night and any night after."

"Eclipse," I said. It was the first word in my head. There was going to be one over the Sawtooths in October and I had already marked the calendar.

"Eclipse," he repeated. "Good word." He nodded toward the back of the shed, where he'd laid out a thick blanket over the concrete. Pine needles had drifted in under the door and one corner of the blanket had a few on it, and for some reason that detail settled me more than anything. A real place. A real floor. "Last chance. Yes or no?"

"Yes," I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised me.

"Then come here and kneel, facing the wall."

I took my boots off at the edge of the blanket because it felt like the thing to do. The floor through the wool was harder than my kitchen at home but warmer than concrete. I knelt and put my hands on my thighs and looked at the corrugated wall, which had a rust streak down it shaped a little like Idaho.

I heard Frank move. Then his voice, close behind me.

"I'm going to touch your hair first. Just that."

His fingers went through my hair, gathered it, moved it over one shoulder. He did it slow, like he had all night, and I guess he did. His breath was even. Mine wasn't.

"I'm going to put the blindfold on now. It's a sleep mask, soft, nothing scary. Nod if that's all right."

I nodded. The mask went over my eyes and the shed went dark. It's a strange feeling, losing sight in a room you know. The lantern hummed faintly. A truck went by on the forest road far off and I tracked it until it was gone.

"Tell me what you feel," he said.

"The floor. The blanket. Pine needles under my left knee."

"Good. Don't reach for anything else. When your mind scrambles, come back to the floor. That constitutes the entire trick. You receive what's given and you let the rest go."

"I can do that," I said. I wasn't sure I could.

"Here's what happens next. I'm going to stand to your left. I have a flogger, suede, a dozen falls, light as a dish towel. I'm going to lay it across your back, shoulders first, slow. It will feel like warm rain. It will not hurt tonight. Later, if there is a later, we can talk about later. Say eclipse and I stop before the second stroke lands. Do you understand?"

"Yes!"

"Yes, what?"

I thought about it. I genuinely didn't know what he wanted, and then I did. "Yes, Frank!"

"That's my girl."

The first stroke came down across my shoulders and I flinched, then made myself stop flinching. He was right, it was like warm rain, a soft weight of falls landing together and sliding off. The second one came lower, between my shoulder blades. The third. He kept a slow rhythm, maybe one every four or five seconds, and he talked the whole time in that level voice, telling me where the next one would land before it landed. My back. My shoulder. The curve where my neck meets my back, and I shivered there and he paused and asked if I was all right, and I said I was, and I meant it.

Somewhere around the twentieth stroke I noticed my breathing. It had gone deep and slow without my permission, the way it does when you finally stop bracing. My hands had unclenched on my thighs. The rust streak on the wall didn't exist anymore because the wall didn't exist, there was just dark and warmth falling on my back and the pine needles under my knee and Frank's voice saying, low, next one, left shoulder, now.

I don't know how long it went. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Time does something funny when you give it away on purpose. He stopped, and I felt the absence like a draft.

"How do you feel," he said. Not a question with a question mark, more like a reading on a gauge.

"Quiet," I said. It was the truest word I had. "Really quiet up here."

"That's what I wanted to give you." I heard him set the flogger on the bench. He lifted the mask off and the lantern light made me blink. "Birthday's not over. Neither is tonight, if you want more. If you don't, coffee cake and good night, and I mean that."

I knelt there in the dark with my breath going slow and thought about the road home, the little trailer I rent, the cake in a box on somebody's counter.

"More," I said.

He put the lantern on the floor near me and sat down on the bench, and for a while we just ate coffee cake and drank coffee and talked about nothing. He told me about a moose he'd seen that morning by the creek, and I told him about the retired couple from Boise who split a chicken sandwich and tipped in exact change, and he laughed. It was ordinary. That was the strangest part, that it was ordinary. At some point I got cold and he put a second blanket over my shoulders without making a thing of it.

"Go home and sleep," he said finally. "Tomorrow night, if you want, come to my place. The A-frame behind the registration cabin. Eight o'clock."

"What would we do?"

"Talk. That's all the first time is, talk. Wear a skirt."

"A skirt," I said. Of all the things he could have asked, that one didn't scare me. I own three skirts and I never wear them to work because the café floor is always wet. "Okay."

I drove home with the windows down even though it was cold, and I slept nine hours, which I don't do.

---

Wednesday I burned two orders of hash browns because my head wasn't at the café. Kayla watched me scrape a plate and didn't say anything until the lunch rush died down.

"You've got a look," she said.

"What look?"

"The look of a woman whose birthday went better than expected." She wiped the counter in slow circles. "Frank's a good man. Weird, but good. Just so you know, half the seasonal girls get crushes on him and he never bites."

I didn't tell her I wasn't the one doing the biting. Or being bitten. I honestly didn't know which yet, and I wasn't going to figure it out before