The Brass Telescope

The bridge had been a joke for years, and then it wasn't. The county posted the notice in March, and by the time Babs read it on her phone outside the ferry terminal, the whole thing had gotten personal in a way she never planned for. The old coastal bridge was closing for demolition the next morning, and after that, anybody who wanted to get into Stacy from the north had to drive forty minutes around the bay, over a two-lane road that washed out every winter and probably would again this year. So the last day was a deadline, and Babs hated deadlines she hadn't set herself.

She was thirty-four, an HR consultant, and she had taken the noodle shop job for reasons that made sense at the time. The money was fine, the client seemed nice, and she wanted one clean small-business payroll project to round out her fresh start in the new town before the bridge shut everything down. What she had not planned on, because nobody could have planned on it, was the email she got at six in the morning from Trevor Nakamura, the owner, saying he was sorry, he knew it was short notice, but there had been a mix-up with the scheduling and another consultant was already booked for the same day.

Babs had read the other consultant's name twice. Mitch Yates. She had known Mitch since she was twenty-four, back when they were both junior staff on the same hospital restructuring project, back when they had dated for about four months before it collapsed under the weight of two people who could not stand to lose an argument. Ten years later they were still professionally entangled, still showing up at the same conferences, still taking opposite sides in panel discussions about benefits administration. Rivals was the polite word. Petty was the word her sister used.

And now they were both booked at the same noodle shop, on the same day, for the same payroll mess, with the bridge closing for good that night.

She drove in anyway.

* * *

The shop sat on the corner of Pelican and Second, a low brick building with a hand-painted sign and a smell of broth that reached the sidewalk. Babs came in at one in the afternoon, laptop bag over her shoulder, and stopped dead two steps past the door.

Mitch was already there. He sat at a corner table with the payroll folder open in front of him, and he was smirking. That was the part that got her, the smirk, already in place, like he had rehearsed it.

"Babs," he said, and he did not get up. "They didn't tell you either."

"Trevor told me there'd been a scheduling conflict." She set her bag down on the opposite chair and pulled it out. "He did not tell me the conflict had a face."

"Funny." Mitch closed the folder halfway, which was a move, and she knew it was a move, because she had watched him do the folder trick in a dozen conference rooms. "You drove the long way already?"

"Bridge is open today, Mitch. I timed it."

"Of course you did."

The manager came out from behind the counter then, a woman of thirty with a pencil through her bun and flour on one forearm. She stuck out her hand. "Petra. You must be Babs. Trevor's in back, he's freaking out a little, come on through."

The back office was small and hot, with a filing cabinet against one wall and, on top of the cabinet, a brass telescope on a wooden tripod stand, the kind you'd see in a nautical antique shop. It was aimed at the window, out toward the water. Babs noticed it right away because it was the only thing in the room that was not paper or office equipment.

Trevor was twenty-eight and looked as if he had opened a restaurant because he liked cooking and had then discovered everything else. He was standing over a desk buried in paper. "Okay, so, I'm so sorry about this," he said, shaking her hand with both of his. "The booking site, it was my fault, I submitted the request twice by accident once months ago, and then I forgot, and then both of you confirmed this week, and Petra said cancel one of you, and I couldn't figure out which one, so."

"So you didn't," Babs said.

"So I didn't." He rubbed his eyes. "Look, payroll has to be filed by Friday. The bridge closes tonight. My accountant is across the bay, and after tomorrow I can't just pop over there anymore, and the shop can't afford penalties, and Petra and I already booked surf lessons for this afternoon months ago, before all of this, and the instructor doesn't do refunds."

"You're going to leave us here," Babs said, "alone, together, with your payroll."

Mitch, from the doorway with his own laptop bag, said, "To be fair, I was promised I'd be alone with the payroll."

"See, this is what I mean," Trevor said, gesturing at both of them, at the general atmosphere. "You two know each other."

"We've met," Babs said.

"At conferences," Mitch said.

"On panels," Babs said.

"Where she lost."

"I did not lose, I was cut off by the moderator."

Petra put her hands up. "Okay. So here's the thing. We'll be back by half past seven, the boards are already in the van, and there's cold brew in the mini fridge and the bathroom is through that door. Everything else you need is on the desk or in the cabinet. Please don't kill each other in my shop, we just repainted."

"We won't kill each other," Mitch said.

Babs said nothing, which got a laugh out of Petra, and then the two of them were gone, and there was the sound of the van starting, and then there was silence and a stack of timecards and two rival consultants and one brass telescope.

* * *

The first hour was almost civil. They divided the paper between them without discussion, which surprised her, mostly because neither of them wanted to be the one to bring up dividing it. Mitch took the hourly staff, she took the salaried, and they built separate spreadsheets with the stated plan of merging them at the end. The stated plan was already a problem, because she knew his spreadsheets, and his spreadsheets were a crime.

"Is that a nested IF," she said, looking sideways at his screen.

"It's a functioning nested IF."

"It's got six layers. Mitch. Nobody can audit that. Nobody can audit that including you."

"I can audit it fine."

"You built it an hour ago. Give it a week and you'll be guessing like the rest of us." She turned her screen toward him. "XLOOKUP. One line. Readable."

"That's cute," he said. "Very textbook."

"It's called being correct."

"It's called being slow, and we have until the van gets back, and also," he said, standing up, "I've been meaning to show you something." He walked to the filing cabinet and picked up the telescope off its stand like it was a prop that had been waiting for him all afternoon.

"What are you doing."

He swung the brass barrel around and aimed it at her across the desk, squinting into the eyepiece with one eye closed. "Hold still. I'm adjusting