The Crank of Her Affection

Gino came back from the chinking job with mortar dust in his hair and a bad mood in his chest. Four hours of caulking log seams in the cold. His knees hated him. His shoulders hated him.

The base made it better. It always did.

The base was a fallen oak off the old road above Hervás, twenty-some years down, trunk hollowed by rot and weather. Jayne owned the land and the tree, and somewhere along the way the group had turned the hollow into a proper little clubhouse. Dried branches lashed over the opening made a porch. Inside there was a hutch, a worktable, a couple of stools, and one truly absurd detail: an electric hinge on the door, wired to a doorbell that played a street musician's chord progression. Four notes, slightly out of tune. Jayne had recorded it herself at a market in Plasencia.

Gino heard those four notes as he pushed through the door.

"Thirty-four years old," he announced to the room, "and I am too old to be kneeling in mud all day."

"You're not too old," Yara said from the worktable. "You're just dramatic."

Yara was thirty-one, a flight attendant, and currently knee-deep in a shoebox of geocaching trinkets. Plastic dinosaurs. A ceramic frog. Six identical keychains that said MY OTHER RIDE IS A LOG. She was sorting them into piles that only made sense to her, and she was grumbling while she did it.

"What's wrong now?" Gino asked. He set his pack down and shook dust off his jacket, outside first, because Jayne would kill him.

"Flight delay. Again. Bilbao to Frankfurt, four hours sitting on the tarmac because of weather we could all see coming." She flicked a keychain into the junk pile. "And then they wanted me to turn right around and do the return leg. No. No thank you. I said trade me or lose me."

"Did they trade you?"

"They traded me." She looked up. Her face did the thing it did when she was pleased with herself and trying not to show it. "Four days off. First ones in a month."

"Four days." Gino sat down on a stool, careful, because his knees were still filing grievances. "That's a lot of days."

"That's the point."

Eighteen months they'd been dating. Two years since they'd met, at a geocaching event in Hervás, when she'd found a cache he'd hidden badly and yelled at him about it in front of eleven strangers. He'd asked her out six months later. She'd said yes like it was obvious. He still wasn't sure, some days, that it was obvious. That was the itch he couldn't scratch. She loved him, he was pretty sure. But had she picked him? First choice, deliberate, out loud? Some people just said things. Yara was not some people.

"You've got a look," she said. "That thinking look. Stop it!"

"No look!"

"You're doing the look right now!"

"Chinking dust," he said. "Gets in your eyes. Makes you look thoughtful."

She laughed at him and went back to the frog.

* * *

The weekly meetup was Thursday, same as always. Jayne hosted, because it was her tree. Zack showed up late, same as always, because Zack was twenty-eight and worked shifts at the depot and treated punctuality like a rumor.

Jayne bought the land twenty years ago, when she was thirty-six. She'd been an archivist, retired early, bought the hillside, adopted the tree. She was old enough to be everyone's opinionated aunt and she liked it that way.

The antique trader came through on Thursdays too. That was new, this month. A guy named Fermin with a van and a folding table, selling junk at the edge of the clearing. Old padlocks, which Zack loved, because Zack was an amateur locksmith and held views about padlocks nobody asked for.

Gino was browsing Fermin's table, half listening to Zack explain warded locks to a woman who had clearly stopped listening, when he saw it.

A wooden apple peeler. The old kind, the clamp kind, with a crank and a blade arm and a little spike to hold the apple. Hand-carved, somebody's grandfather's project, worn smooth with use. And the crank was rusted. Rusty orange, flaking, stubborn looking.

He picked it up and turned the crank. It fought him. Then it gave, with a creak, half a rotation.

Yara was going to love this. Not the peeler. The crank. She was the kind of person who turned every crank and dial she found, every door latch, every old machine. In museums he had to physically hold her sleeve. She'd once spent twenty minutes at a watermill outside town working a rope-operated sluice while a docent watched with growing concern.

"How much?" Gino asked Fermin.

"Six euros. It's broken."

"It's rusty. Different thing."

"Five, because it's broken."

"Deal."

He hid it in his pack before she could see. He wanted it to be a moment. He'd give it to her Thursday after the meetup, at the base, just the two of them, and she'd turn the crank and light up and maybe, maybe, the moment would be right for her to say the thing he'd been waiting eighteen months to hear. Or something like it. He wasn't sure exactly what he was waiting for. He'd know it when it happened.

* * *

Thursday came. He got to the base an hour early, before the meetup. The peeler rode in his pack wrapped in a dish towel. He had a speech. It was a bad speech but he had it.

Then the doorbell played its four notes and Zack came in carrying a milk crate.

"Trivia challenge," Zack said. "Tonight. It's my month and I prepared."

"It's not your month," Gino said. "It's Jayne's month."

"Jayne delegated. She said, and I quote, 'you do it, I'm shelling walnuts.'"

Jayne, at the hutch, did not look up from her walnuts. "I did say that."

"Everyone sits," Zack announced, setting the crate down. "Round one is locks, which I will win in a landslide, and round two is Spanish geography, which I will also win, because I've been studying."

"You've been studying locks," Yara said, coming in behind him. "The geography thing is new."

"I contain multitudes."

So there went the hour. Gino sat through forty minutes of trivia with a rusted crank two feet from his knee in his pack, while Yara, across the table, destroyed everyone in the geography round because she'd flown half of it. She won. Zack demanded a recount. Jayne counted. The count was correct. Zack sulked with dignity, which took him a while.

Afterward, Yara caught Gino by the worktable. She had that face again. The serious one, this time.

"Hey," she said. "I've been meaning to talk to you about something. Something important. Not... bad. Or I don't think bad. Just, I want to do it right, so I keep waiting for the right time and the right time keeps not happening."

Gino's heart did a whole thing. "Okay," he said, very casually, as a man whose heart was not doing a whole thing. "I'm free literally any time."

"Right, well..." Her phone buzzed. She looked at it. Her face fell. "Oh no. No no no."

"What?"

"Emergency reschedule. Magda called out sick and they need me on the Vienna turn tonight." She was already stuffing the phone in her pocket, grabbing her jacket. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Tonight. We'll talk tonight, or tomorrow, I'll call you from the hotel, I promise."

She went. The doorbell played its four sad notes behind her.

Gino stood there with a wrapped apple peeler and a bad speech and no audience.

* * *

He should have waited. He knew that even as he did it. But the peeler sat in his pack like a weight, and the worktable sat there being useful, and he rationalized it this way: she'd come back, she'd find it, it would still be a moment, just a smaller one. He left it on the worktable with a note. The note said: "For the base. Try the crank. It fights back. Love, G."

Then he went home and waited for a call.

The call came at eleven.

"Hi," Yara said, sounding airy and exhausted and happy, in that Vienna hotel voice people get. "So, you'll never guess, I got to the