The Button Tin

I run the puppet workshop in a town of about eight hundred people, which means I run the anniversary show, the decorating committee, the volunteer schedule, and the collective emotional wellbeing of anyone who walks through my door. I am thirty-two years old and I have lived here my whole life, and in all that time I have never once lost the button tin.

The button tin is a dented old biscuit tin from maybe the 1940s, full of antique glass and bone buttons that came with the workshop's founding puppets. They are not replaceable. They are the kind of thing a small town holds a grudge about for decades. And on the night of our one hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration, with the main street packed and a brass band playing somewhere down by the mine office, the tin was gone.

I had looked under every table twice. I had looked in the supply closet, behind the paint shelf, inside the prop crate marked DO NOT USE. I had sent two volunteers to check the storage room at the hall. Nothing. I was standing in the middle of the workshop holding a nearly finished marionette of the town's first mayor, staring at a blank spot on the shelf, when the door banged open and Evan Tuchson walked in carrying a coffee.

Evan is thirty-four, works the quarry up past the ridge, blasts rock for a living, and moved here three years ago. He volunteers at the workshop because apparently carrying eighty pound charges up a rock face all day leaves him with too much unused energy. He is broad, loud, and constitutionally incapable of putting something back where he found it. I have told him this about nine hundred times.

"Where is the button tin," I said. It was not a question. My voice came out flat and sharp, the kind of voice that makes volunteers suddenly very interested in their glue guns.

"The what now?" He took a sip of coffee and looked around at the workshop, which was in a state. Fifty puppets half strung. Bunting everywhere. Two women hot gluing sequins at the long table. A twenty-something named Reid painting clouds on a backdrop.

"The tin. The antique buttons. They were on this shelf at four o'clock. It is now seven fifteen and they are not."

"Huh," Evan said, and he had the absolute gall to smile. "Didn't the Fergusons borrow those for the float?"

"The Fergusons returned them just before four o'clock. I checked them in myself. I counted them. There are forty-one buttons and I counted them." I could hear myself getting louder. Outside, the band swung into something with a tuba line you could feel through the floor. "Evan, if you moved them and didn't tell me, I swear I will string you up instead of the mayor."

He laughed. That was the part that got me. He laughed, this big easy laugh like I had told a joke at a barbecue, and he leaned against my workbench like he owned it, and he said, "You really are something when you're stressed, you know that? Your ears go red."

"They are not red."

"They're red." He pointed with his coffee cup. "Both of them."

I turned back to the shelf to hide my face, which was probably the same color as the bunting, and did a slow count of everything on it. Saw. Thread. Three spools of wire. A jar of eyes. No tin. Behind me I could hear him moving around the workshop, and I heard Reid laugh at something he said, and I heard the sequin women laugh, because of course they did. Evan Tuchson has never met a room he didn't want to be the center of. Three years I have watched him do it. Dated him once, briefly, the summer I was twenty-nine, after the town picnic, before we both decided it was a bad idea. Or he decided it was a bad idea. The details of who decided what are still up for dispute, in my head, where the dispute lives.

Anyway. We are better as rivals. That has been the official position for two and a half years and I see no reason to revisit it.

"You checked the hall storage?" he asked, coming back.

"Twice."

"You checked inside the crate marked do not use?"

"Yes!"

"Under the tables?"

"Evan."

"Okay, okay." He held up both hands, coffee balanced somehow on top of it, and then, the bastard, he reached under the long workbench by the window, the one where he had been gluing cloud cotton all afternoon, and he came up with the tin. Just like that. Held it over his head.

I stared at him. "You put it under there."

"I put it under there," he agreed. "When I cleared the table for the glue station. I was gonna tell you."

"You were gonna tell me."

"At some point, yeah."

There is a specific kind of fury that only comes from knowing a person is right, that nothing was lost, that you are holding a marionette of a dead mayor at seven fifteen on the biggest night of the decade with red ears because of your own bad mood. I held out my hand for the tin. He did not give it to me.

"You're so serious," he said. "It's a party. There's cake out there. There's a band. You've been in here since noon, I heard."

"Somebody has to finish the show. The show is Saturday."

"The show is two days away and it's done. Look at it." He gestured with the arm that was not holding the tin hostage. Puppets everywhere, strung and dressed and finished, the backdrop nearly done, the stage in the hall already rigged. "It's done, Dottie. You finished it Tuesday. You've just been in here polishing things that were already polished."

"I count buttons," I said. "Forty-one of them."

"See, that's what I mean." He walked a slow circle around the workbench, keeping the tin out of my reach, and I followed it with my eyes like an idiot, like a dog watching a ball. "You plan everything. You count everything. When's the last time you did something you didn't plan?"

"The picnic in year one. It was a mistake, so I stopped."

He grinned at that, and I realized I had said more than I meant to say, and he knew it, and he was going to hold onto it the way he holds onto the tin, over his head, out of reach, until I asked nicely or tackled him. He has that way about him. He is patient in a way that drives me up the wall. He baits, and he waits, and he watches, and I have spent three years pretending I don't notice him watching.

I held out my hand again. "The tin, Evan."

"Say please!"

"I will bite you."

"See, that's not a please." But he lowered the tin, and he set it on the workbench, and he slid it across to me with two fingers, and his fingers stayed on it a half second longer than necessary, right under mine when I took it. Then he took his coffee and went off to bother Reid about the clouds, and I counted all forty-one buttons, twice, and put the tin in the locked drawer, which is where it will stay from now on, permanently, with a label.

* * *

By ten the volunteers had filtered out the way they always do, two at a time, then in ones, until it was just me and the glue gun cooling on the table and the last of the sequins swept into a paper cup. The workshop went quiet in that particular way it does when a crowd leaves, all at once, as if a held breath had been released.

The party had gotten louder outside, which sounds backwards but isn't. With the workshop full of people you don't notice the band. With it empty, the tuba came right through the old windows, and the crowd noise, and adults shrieking at the cake table, it all came through, and the room felt small and warm and strangely private, like the whole street was a party happening in the next room over from us.

Evan was still there. He had stopped bothering anyone an hour ago and was sitting on the prop crate, working on his second coffee, watching me wash brushes at the sink.

"Show's done," he said.

"It's done."

"So come see the lanterns. They hung the lanterns on the telephone poles at six and you missed it."

"I saw the lanterns."

"You saw them through this window while gluing. That's not seeing them." He stood up, and he didn't do the thing where he crowded me, he just stood there by the crate with his hands in his pockets, easy as anything, waiting. "Come on, Dottie. Cake's still out. Band's still playing. Nothing in this room is going anywhere."

I looked at the locked drawer. I looked at the brushes drying. I thought about how I have not done a single unplanned thing in two and a half years.

"Fine," I said, and got my coat.

We got as far as the door before I turned around.

The tin was in the drawer, locked, labeled, fine. But the ledger with the button inventory was still open on the workbench, and if I didn't close it now I would think about it through the whole cake thing, and then I would come back early, and then he would win whatever game he was playing. So I said I needed one minute, and I went back in, and he followed me in, which I should have counted as the first move.

"You said one minute," he said. "I'm timing you."

"You can't time me and follow me."

"Sure I can. Both."

The ledger was where I left it. I closed it. I squared it against the table edge, because a ledger half-squared is a loose end, and then I heard the drawer rattle and my head came up so fast my neck clicked.

He had the key. I keep a spare on the hook by the sink for fire reasons, and he had taken it off the hook while I was squaring paper, and he had the drawer open, and he had the tin.

That is theft, is what I said, or something like it, and I crossed the room and grabbed for it, and that was the mistake, because he was ready. He caught my wrist and pressed my hand down flat on the workbench, next to the tin, and he didn't squeeze, he just held it there, and something went through me so hard and so fast that I actually stopped moving altogether.

I want to be accurate about this, because it surprised me and I don't surprise easily about myself. It wasn't anger.