The Exhaust Hanger Waltz

The minibus hit the last pothole before the cobbled lane and I grabbed the seat in front of me, said a small thank-you to nobody in particular that we'd arrived in one piece, and stepped down into the late afternoon light of Artvin. I was sixty-three years into being Harriet Tupa, all of those being me, and it had taken me that long to book a trip on a whim, which is a thing I'd never done before and probably won't do again for another decade. The tour group I'd joined was small, eleven people and a guide named Kaan who talked about tea plantations the way some men talk about football, and the moment my feet touched the ground I heard a sound I can only describe as a small metallic moan coming from up ahead.

And there he was. Edward Hammond, down on his haunches at the edge of the salvage slipway, a wrench in one hand and his other hand shoved into the guts of a dusty red scooter, fiddling with something that was clearly the source of the moan. His hair had gone mostly white and he'd thickened through the middle the way men do, but I knew that profile anywhere, because I'd spent a whole autumn of night school at twenty-two drawing it in the margins of my notebook instead of learning shorthand. He hadn't seen me yet, and I got to stand there for a second like a fool, deciding whether to say hello or to just walk past and let forty-one years stay forty-one years.

"Harriet?" he said, looking up, and the wrench clinked against the pavement. "Harriet Tupa? Is that actually you?"

"Edward," I said, and my voice came out higher than I meant it to. "Well. Of all the bus depots in all the towns in all the world."

He laughed, and that was the same too, that big easy laugh that used to make the instructor in our typing class look over her glasses. He stood up, wiped his hand on a rag that only spread the grease around, and then thought better of the handshake and offered the clean side of the rag instead. "I'd hug you but I'm filthy," he said. "I'm so glad it's you. I thought for a second my eyes were going."

"My eyes are fine and I'm still shaking hands with a rag," I told him, and we both laughed like that was the funniest thing anyone had ever said, which tells you something about two people who are sixty-three and sixty-four and a little nervous.

He explained, while I pretended not to watch his hands, that he was in Artvin for a short work assignment, some kind of specialist posting with a state agency, victim notification work, which he described as mostly paperwork and phone calls and being the person who tells people things nobody wants to hear. "Six weeks," he said. "I'm three weeks in and I spend every weekend walking this river pretending I'm a tourist." He gestured behind him at the slipway, the steep metal-ribbed ramp where boats get hauled up out of the Çoruh for repair, the stacks of rusting anchors on one side and coils of frayed rope on the other, all of it orange and brown and quietly beautiful in a way I hadn't expected.

"I booked this trip two days before it left," I admitted, and then felt silly, but he didn't laugh at me. "I've been a dental receptionist for thirty years, Edward. Thirty years of asking people about their flossing. I looked at a brochure in the waiting room and I thought, if not now, when."

"If not now, when," he repeated, like he was tasting it. "You always did come out with things like that. Remember Mrs. Kessler asking you what your plans were after graduation and you said, and I quote, I plan to be surprised."

"Oh my lord, you remember that."

"Harriet, I remember everything about that class. I even remember asking you to get coffee once." He said it easily, but I saw his ears go a little pink, and something in my chest went warm and rusted-over at the same time. "You said yes. And then the agency transferred me to the coast before the date ever happened, and I always figured you'd forgotten the whole thing by Tuesday."

"I didn't forget by Tuesday," I said. "I forgot by roughly the following spring, but not by Tuesday." That made him laugh again, and I stood there thinking, well, here is a thing I did not expect from my whim.

While we were talking, one of the other tourists, a retired accountant from Gonzalez named Wesley, came wandering down toward the slipway with his hands on his hips like he was inspecting it. He'd stopped walking, though, and his head was tilted, listening. From the open window of a repair shop up on the cobbled lane, a tinny little melody was drifting down across the water, something strings-and-saxophone and syrupy, the kind of thing you hear in a dentist's waiting room, and I would know, I hear it forty hours a week.

"Is that a busker?" Wesley called over to us. "There's someone playing down here somewhere, I heard it yesterday too. Where's he set up?"

Edward looked at me first, and I looked at him, and I could see the joke land in him before he said it, the same way it always used to.

"That's the world's most dedicated elevator music cover artist," he said, absolutely deadpan. "He's been at it for weeks. Very committed. Rarely leaves the building."

Wesley nodded along, entirely satisfied, and wandered off to find the source, and Edward and I stood there by the edge of the ramp trying not to cackle like the two immature adults we apparently still were. "That's going to be our problem now," I said. "Kaan is going to put it in the itinerary. Day four, the mysterious busker of the Çoruh."

"He'll charge extra," Edward said. "There'll be a tip jar."

The light was going gold on the water, and the scooter gave another small pathetic moan behind us, and Edward winced and looked over at it like someone who'd promised himself a weekend free of obligations. "That's the guesthouse owner's scooter," he explained. "He lent it to me and the exhaust hanger snapped, and I said I'd sort it, and now I'm the fool who's been fighting it for two days. There's a mechanic up the lane who's supposed to have the part, but he keeps closing early."

"Broken scooter, a mechanic who closes early, and a busker who doesn't exist," I said. "Edward, this town has everything."

"It does have a kebab stand," he offered, nodding down the lane to where a tiny place with three stools and a smoke-blackened grill was doing steady business. "And it has, apparently, you. Which is frankly the best inventory of any town I've been posted to."

I don't know what you say to a thing like that at sixty-three, when the last man who said anything sweet to you was a optometrist in nineteen ninety-eight who mostly meant it about your insurance coverage. I said, "That's a terrible line," and he said, "It's been in storage for forty-one years, it's a bit rusty," and we stood there grinning at each other while the elevator music drifted down and the boats creaked on the ramp, and I thought, well, Harriet, you planned to be surprised, and here we are.

"Are you eating?" he asked, gesturing toward the kebab stand. "I mean, obviously you're eating, everyone eats, I mean, would you like to eat. With me. Now."

"I would like that very much," I said, and off we went, past the anchors and the rope and the repair shop window with its phantom musician, and I remember thinking that whim travel was going to ruin me for ordinary life.

The next evening Edward was waiting for me at the bottom of the lane, and I spotted him from way up the hill, this tall white-haired man leaning on the rail above the slipway like he owned it, and I confess I hurried a little, which my knees objected to but let slide. He'd brought the scooter down to the foot of the ramp, parked it on its kickstand in the middle of all that rusting iron, and when I came up beside him he spread his arms out at the whole operation with the grand gesture of a game show host.

"So this is where the magic happens," he said. "You want the tour?"

"I want the tour," I said, and off we went.

And here is the thing about Edward Hammond at sixty-four, which is the exact same thing about Edward Hammond at twenty-three: the man cannot explain anything in fewer than four paragraphs. He walked me down the metal-ribbed ramp and told me how the winch cable ran, and then how the cradle worked, and then how the boats came up out of the water, and then, I am not exaggerating, how the pulley had been rebuilt at some point in probably the seventies and you could tell because of the bolts, Harriet, look at the bolts.

"You're doing it again," I said finally, and he stopped mid-sentence with his hand still pointing at a bolt.

"Doing what?"

"Over-explaining. You used to do this in typing class, you know. Mrs. Kessler would ask you a question about carbons and you'd give her the entire history of the paper industry." I was laughing by then, and so was he, that big helpless laugh I'd forgotten I remembered. "I used to watch you go and think, my lord, that man is going to explain the world to death someday."

"That's fair," he admitted, shoving his hands in his pockets. "But in my defense, you were the most stubborn person in that class. You would not accept that the electric typewriter was just better. You fought it for weeks."

"Because it was eating my margins and nobody could tell me why, and everyone just kept saying it's better, Harriet, trust it, like it was a religion." I pointed at him. "And I was right, by the way. It was the platen. Took me two years to find a man who knew about platens."

"You found the platen problem," he said, and he said it the way other men say I always believed in you, and I had to look away at the river for a second because it was doing that warm rusted-over thing again.

We walked the length of the ramp while the light went gold and then grey, and he explained the winch properly this time, shorter, and I explained the frayed rope situation to him, which was that somebody ought to be fired, and he agreed, and it was so easy, is the thing. Forty-one years fell away and it was just two people on a slipway arguing about rope, and I kept thinking, this is what I skipped, this is the part everyone else got and I went home to a cat instead. No offense to the cat.

"Same time tomorrow?" he asked, when we got back up to the lane.

"I'll check my calendar," I said. "It's pretty full. Kaan has me looking at tea plantations Thursday."

"God, the tea plantations," he groaned, and we laughed, and I went back to the guesthouse floating about a foot off the cobbles.

* * *

Except the scooter had other plans, because the next evening, third evening, we were barely down the ramp when Edward went over to it, gave the exhaust a little experimental wiggle, and the whole back end of the pipe dropped off with a clang that echoed off the water like a church bell.

We both just stood there looking at it.

"Well," Edward said. "That's, hm."

"That's a new sound," I said. "That's the scooter surrendering."

He picked the pipe up and held it, and the broken hanger was snapped clean through, not even a repairable snap, a finished snap, and he looked at me with this terrible honesty and said, "The mechanic up the lane can weld it, but he closes at six and it is now," he checked his watch, "quarter to seven."

"So we're stranded," I said.

"We're not stranded, we're," he waved the pipe vaguely, "temporally inconvenienced."

"Edward. The guesthouse is a ten minute walk."

"Yes, but the scooter can't walk, and I promised the man I'd sort it, so the decent thing is to take it to the mechanic now, leave it, and come back for it in the morning when he opens." He said all