The Grinder at Dusk

Harold Vance stood in the doorway of the sassafras oil shed with a coffee grinder in one hand and a cup of cold coffee in the other, feeling pretty good about his retirement project for the first time in months. He was sixty-three years old, recently and unfairly fired, in his opinion, from a part-time claims desk in Karachi, and this shed was going to be his big middle finger to the whole working world.

Then a woman came marching up the path like she owned the place.

She was thirty-one maybe, sun hat pushed back, clipboard under one arm, and she did not slow down until she was right in front of him.

"You," she said, poking a folded paper at his chest. "You're the guy who thinks he's got squatter's rights on this shed?"

"Squatter's rights?" Harold said. "I bought this shed! Legally! There's papers!"

"Papers. Great. Let's see them." She snapped her fingers like he was a waiter.

"Who even are you?"

"Tina Cobb. Water quality analyst for the leech farm up the hill. And this shed is the only viable storage space within a kilometer of my sampling stations, and I have been asking Jared for it for eight months, and then some retired insurance man strolls in with a rusty coffee grinder like he owns the Arabian Sea."

"I do own this shed though," Harold said. "That's the whole point of the papers."

He was starting to like annoying her, which surprised him. Usually he just felt tired.

She snatched the grinder out of his hand and turned it over. "This thing's handle is missing. The wheel is frozen. What exactly were you planning to grind with this?"

"Coffee. Eventually. It's a restoration project."

"You bought a shed for a broken coffee grinder."

"I bought a shed for many reasons," Harold said, snatching it back, "and none of them are your business. And nobody calls anybody squatter's rights when there's a deed involved. Do you even know what squatter's rights means?"

"Do you know what a sassafras tree looks like? Because there's resin stains on every board in here and if you sand them without a mask you'll give yourself a headache that lasts a week."

"Oh, so now you're the shed safety inspector too?"

"I'm the person who actually needs this building, which is more than you can say. You need a hobby. I need cold storage for two hundred water samples a month. Guess which of us the island needs more?"

Harold opened his mouth, and honestly nothing good was queued up, so he just said, "Well, the deed says otherwise, Miss Water Quality."

"Tina. And the deed says you own a shed you can't even lock, because the hasp is rusted through, which I noticed yesterday when I tested the door. You're welcome for the free inspection."

She shoved a document at him one more time, like the first three shoves hadn't taken. It was a printed proposal, all highlighted lines, titled Expansion of On-Island Sample Storage Capacity. He read maybe one line of it.

"Highlighted," he said. "You highlighted your own proposal."

"I highlight the parts Jared won't read."

And that was so ridiculous that Harold laughed, actually laughed, first time since the firing, and he saw her almost smile before she killed it on purpose.

"I'm not giving you the shed," she said.

"And I'm not selling it. So where does that leave us?"

"It leaves us at the canteen, because Jared wants to mediate, and he makes good chai, and I would rather drink his chai than stand here breathing resin fumes with you."

* * *

The leech farm canteen was a wide porch with plastic chairs and a kettle that had seen better decades. Jared Ste was forty-four years old, built like a wardrobe, and he greeted Harold with a handshake and Tina with a look that said please, please, both of you, I am begging.

"Okay. Chai first, fighting second," Jared said, pouring three glasses. "Harold, thanks for coming up. Tina, thanks for not shoving him."

"She shoved papers at me," Harold said. "Repeatedly."

"Documents," Tina said. "There's a difference."

"So here's the thing," Jared said, settling into the chair that clearly was his chair, the one with the cushion. "Tina needs storage. Harold needs... Harold, what do you need exactly?"

"Purpose," Harold said, before he could stop himself. Then he took a long sip of chai to cover it up.

Tina looked at him differently after that. Just for a second.

"Okay, purpose," Jared said gently. "And the shed gives you that?"

"Fixing it up gives me that. Selling it gives me money. Both good things. And I did buy it fair and square, which Tina keeps skipping over."

"Because the fair and square part isn't the problem. The problem is that a shed full of old man coffee dreams is a waste of the only weatherproof building on the south shore."

"Old man coffee dreams." Harold stood up, and even he could hear how cranky he sounded. "You know what your operation is called around the harbor? The slug farm. The slug farm. I heard two fishermen say it last week and I laughed, because it's accurate."

The porch went quiet. Jared put his glass down very carefully.

"Harold," Jared said. "Buddy. That was maybe not the move."

"Well it's true. Leeches. You're farming medicinal leeches and acting like it's normal, and it's not normal, it's the slug farm."

"You buy coffee grinders that don't work," Tina said, standing up too, "and you call THAT normal? At least my weird thing pays salaries. Including Jared's. Which is maybe why he'd rather side with the slug farm than with some guy who's been fired from three jobs in five years!"

"Okay. Wow," Jared said, hands up. "Both of you sit down. Harold, that slug farm joke was hurtful and also kind of funny but mostly hurtful. Tina, the jobs thing was below the belt and you know it."

Tina sat. Harold sat, more slowly. The chai was still warm and the sun was starting to drop, and through the canteen window Harold could see the sky over the water turning a strange pearly silver.

"What is that?" he asked, pointing. "The clouds? They look lit up from inside."

"Noctilucent," Tina said, still stiff, but softer. "Ice crystals way up high. They only show at dusk in summer. Best view on the island is from the south shore, actually."

"From the south shore," Harold said. "Near the shed."

"Near MY shed," Tina said.

"Near the shed whose deed I hold."

"Oh my god," Jared said into his chai.

Tina turned her glass around on the table a few times. Then she said, "Okay. Here's an actual thought, since Jared clearly wants us to have one. What if the shed gets split? Front third for your restoration hobby, back two-thirds sealed and insulated for my samples. I'd pay for the insulation myself. Out of budget I don't have, but still."

Harold chewed on that. A front third. His grinder could live in a front third. Probably.

"Why should I split with a woman who called my purchase a waste?"

"Why should I split with a man who called my workplace the slug farm?"

"Because," Jared said, "if you two keep this up, one of you is going to do something to the other's property, and then there's lawyers, and lawyers cost more than insulation. So. Split shed. Both sides happy. Deal?"

"Deal," Tina said, "if he apologizes for the slug farm."

Harold looked out the window at the glowing clouds. "I apologize for the slug farm. It's a good farm. The leeches looked, from a distance, almost nice."

"That's the worst apology I've ever heard and I accept it," Tina said. "Deal."

They shook on it, and her grip was stronger than he expected, and Harold had the odd thought that this was the most interesting conversation he'd had since Brittney left him for that hotel manager, what was it now, seventeen years ago.

He did not say that out loud. But he was thinking it as he walked back down the hill in the silver dusk, wondering why the sky looked better from her side of the argument.

Tina found the handle on a Tuesday.

She wasn't even looking for it. She was looking for a box of pipette tips that Jared swore he'd ordered, and instead she opened the third drawer of the old lab cabinet, the one nobody had touched since before she started, and there it was. An iron handle, curved, with a square fitting at the end, sitting on top of a dead flashlight and somebody's ancient sandwich wrapper.

"Well, hello," she said out loud, to nobody.

She knew exactly what it fit. She'd spent eight months wanting that shed, which meant she'd spent eight months cataloguing everything in it, including the ridiculous manually operated coffee grinder on the shelf with its wheel frozen mid-turn and its handle hole staring out at the world like an empty socket. Harold Vance's sad little orphan grinder.

She turned it over in her hands. Heavy. Probably original. Probably worth something to a certain kind of sixty-something man with a restoration hobby and too much time.

"Oh, this is leverage," she said, and she grinned the whole way up the hill.

* * *

Harold was on his porch with a mug of instant coffee, which he drank the way other men drink punishments, when Tina came marching down his path with something held up in her fist like a trophy.

"Vance," she called. "Vance. You're going to want to see this."

He squinted at her over the mug. "It's eight in the morning."

"It is, and I found something, and you're going to want to sit down. Actually stand up. Actually, come here."

He came down the steps. He was sixty-three years old and retired twice over, once voluntarily and once via email from a Karachi claims desk, and he'd learned that when a thirty-one-year-old woman marches at you waving an object, the smart move is to look at the object.

"That's..." He stopped. "Where did you get that?"

"Third drawer, old lab cabinet. It was sitting on a sandwich wrapper. A sandwich wrapper, Vance, from what I estimate was sometime in the previous century." She held it out. "Recognize it?"

He took it. His hands did a thing he didn't ask them to do, a small closing motion, careful, like it was a bird. "It's the handle. It's my grinder's handle." He looked up at her. "Why do you have my grinder's handle?"

"It was in my lab's drawer. On my farm's property. So technically it's farm property, and technically I could keep it."

"You wouldn't."

"I might. I'm a negotiator, Harold. I negotiate for a living. Water quality is ninety percent negotiation, mostly with Jared about budgets." She put her hands on her hips. "Here's my offer. I give you the handle. In exchange, we firm up the shed split in writing. Front third, back two-thirds, I pay for insulation, and you sign a thing that says if my cold storage unit arrives by boat, you help carry it up from the harbor."

"That's it? That's the whole deal?"

"That's it."

"Then yes, obviously, yes, give me the handle." He was already turning toward the shed.

"Whoa whoa whoa." She didn't move. "In writing, I said. Do you know how many promises men on this island have made me about that shed in eight months? Eleven. Eleven promises, Harold. You're number twelve and you're going to be the first one on paper."

"You counted the promises?"

"I counted everything about that shed. I know how many boards are missing from the west wall. Four." She pulled a folded paper out of her back pocket and held it up. "I wrote terms last night. I was optimistic. Sign here."

"You carry contract paper on your person?"

"I carry everything on my person. It's a character flaw. Sign."

He signed. Then she handed over the handle like it was a ceremonial sword, and honestly, the way Harold took it, it might as well have been.

* * *

They walked to the shed together, because Tina claimed she wanted to watch the wheel turn, and Harold claimed he wanted her to witness that the rest of the machine was sound, and neither of them said the actual reason, which was that it was nice to walk with somebody.

Inside, the light came through the one window facing the sea, all silvery because of the hour. Harold set the grinder on the workbench he'd built two days after buying the place, and he fitted the handle into the socket, and it went in with a click so satisfying he actually said "oh" out loud.

"Does it fit?" Tina asked, from the doorway.

"It fits. It fits like it never left." He gave the wheel an experimental turn. It resisted. He put his shoulder into it. It groaned, shed a little rust, and then turned, one full revolution, and stopped being frozen forever.

"Ha," Tina shouted, making him jump. "Look at it go."

"It goes." He turned it again, faster. The wheel spun, the mechanism caught, the whole machine woke up with a grinding clatter that filled the little shed and sounded, to Harold's ears, like applause. "Forty years on a shelf and it still works. They don't make them like this anymore, that's the problem with everything, they don't make them like this."

"Calm down, you'll throw your back out."

"Let me throw my back out, I'm celebrating." But he slowed down, and he took the little bag of beans he'd been hoarding out of his jacket, out of a drawer where he'd hidden them from himself, and he measured some into the hopper like a man performing a sacrament.

Tina watched him for a minute. Then she