The False Siren

Reba was fifty-two years old and she had been in Con Dao for exactly one week when she started noticing the man behind the dried fish store. Her job at the school started at six in the morning, mopping the long hallway before the kids came in, and by ten she was done with the worst of it and free to walk home along the same street every day. The street was narrow and smelled like salt and diesel, and about halfway down it there was a storefront with strings of silver fish hanging in the window, dozens of them, swaying a little when the fan inside turned. The sign said Dried Fish Nam Hai and the owner was a heavy man named Miguel who sat out front in a plastic chair and nodded at her every single day without ever saying a word.

It was not Miguel she noticed. It was the sound coming from behind the building, a slow steady rasp, like someone dragging a saw through wood and then stopping and then starting again. On the seventh day she slowed down to listen. On the eighth day she looked. There was an open back door off a little alley behind the store, and through it she could see a workbench, a pile of long boards, and a man standing at a sawhorse with a pencil behind his ear. He was maybe forty, she figured, forty-two or so, with dark hair tied back and forearms that moved in a way she had not thought about in a long time. (Six years, if she was counting, and she was not counting, or she told herself she was not.) She walked on. The next day she walked on again. By the tenth day she was standing in the alley with her hands in her pockets, watching.

The man was cutting stair stringers, which she only knew because a school custodian ends up fixing a lot of stairs and once watched a contractor do the whole job in a day and charge like he had built the whole school. He had a piece of cardboard leaned against the bench with a faint pencil grid on it, and he would measure a board, mark it with the square, check the mark twice, and then set the handsaw in the cut and pull, long even strokes, his shoulders rolling with each one. He did not rush. He did not look up. The saw went zip, zip, zip, and then silence while he measured again, and Reba stood in the alley in the heat and found that her ten-minute break had turned into forty minutes.

On the twelfth day it happened. She was in the doorway, not hiding it anymore, just standing there watching him mark a line, when he looked up at her over the top of the square. She expected him to look away, the way men usually did when a woman caught them or when they got caught looking themselves. He did not look away. He held her eyes for a second, and then, slow and deliberate, he reached back, grabbed the collar of his t-shirt, and pulled it off over his head. He tossed it on the bench, wiped his palms on his jeans, and went back to the board like nothing at all had happened.

Reba stood there with her mouth a little open. The shop was hot, that was true, it was a hundred degrees in the shade and the woodshop had no fan worth the name, so there was a reason, and the reason was thin as paper and they both knew it. He knew she was watching. She knew he knew. And neither of them walked away, and neither of them said a word, and that was the start of whatever this was, a game with no rules written down anywhere.

* * *

After that she started timing her breaks. The school let her go at ten and again at two, and she found reasons to take the ten o'clock break on the street that ran behind Dried Fish Nam Hai instead of the front street, and most mornings the back door was open and most mornings he was working and most mornings he was not wearing a shirt. She never spoke. He never spoke. She stood in the doorway and he measured and sawed and sometimes he stretched, arms up, back cracking, casual as anything, and once he bent over the water bucket and poured a cup over his head and let it run down his chest, and Reba had to walk home early that day and sit on her bed for a while with the fan pointed at her face.

She had dated casually for years back in Ho Chi Minh City, a string of dinners that went nowhere, one affair with a coworker six years ago that had been fun and had also, in the end, been nothing, and she had told herself she was fine with that. She was fifty-two and single and fine. And now she was standing in an alley sweating over a man she had never heard say a word, and fine was not the word for how it felt.

There was one day it rained and the door was shut and she felt genuinely stupid standing in the wet alley as a lost dog would, and she went home and laughed at herself over instant noodles, and the next day the door was open again and he was there, and the little lift in her chest embarrassed her and pleased her at the same time.

The rhythm of it settled in. Ten o'clock break, forty minutes in the doorway, watching his hands. He had started leaving a wooden stool by the door, which he had never mentioned and she had never mentioned, and she sat on it now instead of standing, close enough to see the pencil lines, close enough to smell sawdust over the fish smell that drifted around the corner from the front of the store. He talked to the wood sometimes, or to himself, little muttered things in Vietnamese that she did not understand, and she liked the sound of it anyway. Once a chunk of offcut rolled off the bench and stopped against her sandal and she picked it up and set it on the bench without a word and he nodded without looking up, and the conversation consisted of nothing more, and it felt like plenty.

Miguel noticed her coming around the back, or maybe he had always noticed everything, and one morning he gave her a nod that was slightly longer than his usual nod and a small smile, and she gave him a nod back and nothing was said about it then either. The whole thing ran