The Frequency Board Incident

You know those days where one small thing goes wrong and then everything else piles on top of it? That was my Tuesday. I'm Whitney Farnsworth, I'm sixty-three, and I do landscaping up in the mountains around Shaxi when I can get the work. I'd come out here alone for a week of hiking, mostly because my kids moved out last spring and the house got so quiet I couldn't stand it.

So Tuesday morning I walked down into town to sort out my hiking permit. Simple errand! The clerk's office is this little room full of ledgers and filing boxes, and there's a big steel cabinet against the back wall, the vital records cabinet, with drawers you could crawl into if you were a fool. I was a fool. I'd opened the bottom drawer to look for the permit folder, and I was half inside it on my knees when the whole building shook.

A crash, glass everywhere, and something orange skittering across the floor. A model airplane, actual real model airplane, had come through the high window and landed in a shelf of land deeds. I scrambled out of the drawer to go look, and that's when the door swung shut behind me. Not the office door. The cabinet door. It has a latch that catches, and it caught.

I pounded on it for a while. I yelled. I did everything you'd expect a sensible woman to do and none of it worked. Then, after about twenty minutes, I heard a man's voice outside the cabinet saying hello and asking if anyone was hurt, and I yelled back that I was fine but trapped, and next thing I know there's a second thunk and a muffled curse and now there were two of us in there. That's Carlo. He's sixty-five, he's the idiot who was flying the plane, and he'd come in to apologize and the latch got him too.

No phones. No tools. Nobody on the street, or if there were they couldn't hear us over the sound of our own stupidity. So we sat on the floor between drawers of birth certificates and waited for morning, and somewhere in that dark Carlo says, well, we should at least leave the clerk a note so she doesn't think we broke in.

I had a pen in my jacket. Carlo had a piece of paper torn off a trail map. I wrote first.

*Dear Madam Clerk,* I wrote. *We are not burglars. We are two adults, sixty-three and sixty-five years old, locked in your vital records cabinet. I was in town for a hiking permit and went looking in the wrong drawer. I am so sorry about the window, though that was not my fault, see below. Please open the cabinet in the morning. We will pay for everything, including my dignity.*

Carlo took the pen and added his own paragraph underneath, and I heard him chuckling in the dark while he wrote it.

*Madam Clerk,* he wrote. *I am the idiot responsible for the window. My remote control went haywire on the frequency board and my plane turned left when it should have turned right, which is a thing a man my age should outgrow. I map deep ocean thermoclines for a living, which means I am professionally acquainted with things going wrong in layers. I should know better than to fly near a town. I will fix your window myself. Carlo Barrington.*

A thermocline mapper! I didn't even know that was a job, and I said so, and he said most people say so. He explained it's mapping where warm water and cold water meet in the deep ocean, and he builds his own sensors by hand, and he was on leave visiting the model aircraft club because he likes making things that fly after a career of making things that sink. I liked him immediately, and I don't say that lightly. I've dated on and off for two years since I turned sixty-one, and most of those men talked about their boats.

Here's the part I keep thinking about. When I finished my paragraph I needed something to mark my place, and I reached in my pocket and found the little lure my father made before he passed. It's carved from a sardine tin, hammered flat and cut into the shape of a small fish, with a hook he soldered on and a painted eye no bigger than a pinhead. I use it as a bookmark. I've used it as a bookmark for eleven years.

I told Carlo about it, since there wasn't much else to do in the dark, and I told him how my father taught me to tie flies at his workbench, how he'd rap my knuckles with a feather holder if I got sloppy, how I tied my last fly the week before he died and have barely touched the vise since. Writing that down made my throat do something. In the dark it's easier.

Carlo went quiet when I described the lure. Then he asked could he hold it, and I passed it over, and I could hear him turning it in his fingers for a long while.

Then he said he was going to write a separate letter, because the first one was for the clerk but this one was for me, and I said fine, and he found another scrap of map paper. In the morning I got to read it, and here is what it said, as close as I remember.

*Whitney,* he wrote. *Your father's lure is a better piece of engineering than half the equipment I've bought with grant money. The tin is shaped with a curve that makes it wobble at exactly the frequency a wounded baitfish would, and whoever cut it understood that by eye, which is remarkable. The solder joint is clean. The paint on the eye is enamel, not lacquer, someone who cared. I build thermocline sensors and I sweat over tolerances finer than this, but none of my work would survive eleven years in a pocket. I would be honored if you would show me how to carve one. I have hands and time and I promise to be a serious student. I am also, if it is not too forward, glad the frequency board failed today. Carlo.*

I read that three times. Then I wrote him back on the back of his own letter, because we were short on paper, and I figured if we were going to write we might as well trade letters like field notes. That's what I called it in the note. Field notes. Scientists leave them, gardeners leave them, so why not two people stuck in a filing cabinet?

*Carlo,* I wrote. *Yes to the carving lesson, and yes to the field notes idea. Here is my first entry. Ten years ago I replanted a garden for a client named Mrs. Alder, a widow who'd let the whole yard go. The only thing she asked me to save was one peony that had never bloomed, not once, in the ten years she'd lived there. I moved it to a spot with morning sun and better drainage and I told her to be patient. She was patient for four years and then she called me at seven in the morning crying, and I drove over thinking something was wrong, and it was one flower. She stood over it and cried and I stood next to her and cried a little too, if I'm honest, and we drank coffee until it closed. That's the kind of work I do. That's why I do it.*

He read it twice and then he said, "You know, I think we're gonna get along fine," and I said I was sorta thinking the same thing, and then we heard rain start on the broken window and settled in to wait for morning with two letters and one sardine-tin fish between us.

The rain kept up most of the night, a steady drumming on the glass that had broken out of the high window, and somewhere around what I guessed was midnight Carlo started writing again.