The Indigo Wait

I hadn't been back to Lembeke in twenty-six years. When my department offered me a week of training in Ghent, I said yes before I even checked my calendar. Then I remembered the dye works, and I got a funny feeling about it.

Cooper still ran the place. I'd emailed him about a custom order, a jacket dyed that deep indigo he was known for, and he told me to come pick it up Thursday afternoon. I took a rental car out there on the narrow roads, past the fields, and my hands were sweaty on the wheel. Fifty-four years old and a police officer, and my hands were sweaty over a jacket.

The building looked the same from outside. Brick, low windows, a sign that had faded to almost nothing. Inside, the vats lined the wall the way they used to, big and blue-black, the air thick with wet wool and pigment. I stood in the doorway longer than a grown man should.

"You can come in, you know," a woman said from somewhere behind the racks.

I came in. Cooper was at the far table with a length of cloth in his hands, and he grinned at me like we'd seen each other last week instead of decades ago.

"Finn. You still drive like an old man?"

"I drive like someone who doesn't want to die," I said. "Good to see you, Coop."

He came over and shook my hand, both of his hands around mine. He was sixty-two now, thinner than I remembered, hair gone white all over. "You look good," he said. "Gray at the temples. Distinguished."

"Old," I said.

"Distinguished," he said. "The jacket's ready. Give me a minute, I have to pull it from the back."

He disappeared through the door in the rear, and that's when I heard it. A woman's voice, back there, saying something about astringency and percentages. Nothing special about the voice. But something in my stomach dropped anyway, the way it does before you know why.

I walked over toward the back door, slow, and I looked through it, and there she was.

Dee.

She was standing at a table with a row of persimmons laid out on brown paper, cutting little wedges and doing something to them with a testing kit. Her hair was silver now, cut short, and she wore a lab apron over a plain blouse. She was fifty-two and she was still Dee.

I didn't say anything for a second. I just stood there like an idiot.

Then she looked up, and her knife stopped.

"Finn," she said.

"Hey, Dee."

"Finn Draper. In Lembeke." She set the knife down. "You're here."

"I'm here," I said. "I'm picking up a jacket, actually. From Cooper."

"A jacket." She laughed, and it cracked a little in the middle. "You came twenty-six years for a jacket."

"Custom order. Takes time." I shrugged. "You know how dye works are."

"I do know how dye works are. I work in one." She wiped her hands on a rag and came around the table, and she stopped about two feet from me, like she wasn't sure about the distance. "Can I hug you, or are we doing the handshake thing?"

"The hug thing," I said. "Definitely the hug thing."

She hugged me. She was smaller than I remembered, or maybe I'd gotten wider. She smelled like the fruit and something faintly chemical. I held on maybe a second too long and then let go.

"You look good," she said, and pulled back to look at me. "Really. The gray suits you."

"Cooper said distinguished. You can be honest, Dee."

"I am being honest. You want me to say you look old? Fine, you look old. So do I. So does everybody."

"You don't look old," I said. "You look like you."

"Well, I am me, so that tracks." She went back to the table and gestured at the persimmons. "This is my job, by the way. Astringency tester. I tell the co-op whether a persimmon is ready to eat or still going to turn your mouth inside out. Twenty-two years. Before that I did textile QC in Antwerp, which is how I ended up here."

"You always liked fruit more than cloth," I said.

"I always liked knowing things. The fruit was an accident." She cut another wedge and dropped it in a solution, watched it turn. "So. Twenty-six years. Last I heard you made sergeant."

"Lieutenant, then. A while ago."

"Married?"

"No. Never." I said it plain, the way I'd said it my whole life, and watched her face for something. I don't know what. "You?"

"Married once, at thirty-one. Over by forty. No kids. It's a very boring biography."

"It's not boring," I said. "It's just short."

She laughed at that, a real one. "Okay, that was actually funny. You got funnier, Finn."

"You got blunter."

"I was always blunt. You just weren't listening."

Cooper came back through with the jacket folded in tissue. He looked between the two of us with a face that knew the whole story, because he probably did. I used to talk about her enough, back then.

"You two know each other," he said.

"From a hundred years ago," Dee said. "From before this building had a roof, it feels like."

"She was my best friend," I said. "In my twenties."

Cooper nodded slow, and I wanted to kick him. "Well. The jacket's done. Finest indigo I've done all spring. Finn, you want coffee? There's a machine in the office that works about half the time."

"Sure," I said.

"Dee, your last batch is setting for an hour anyway. Come drink bad coffee with us."

She looked at her persimmons, looked at me, and shrugged. "One cup. Then I have work."

* * *

The office is a cramped room with two desks and a heater that rattles. We crowded around it with mugs. Cooper talked about the business, orders down, wool prices up, the usual. I nodded along and mostly watched Dee. She had a way of holding the mug with both hands that I remembered. Same hands. Fewer lines, more lines, hard to say.

"Ghent, you said?" she asked me. "You're here for work?"

"Training. A week. I fly back Monday."

"A week." She said it flat, no read on it at all. "And you came out to Lembeke on a Thursday for a jacket."

"The jacket was an excuse. I'll say that now, since we're being blunt."

"I appreciate the honesty." She looked at her coffee. "I thought about you maybe more than I should have, over the years. For the record. Not constantly. Just more than I should have."

Cooper stood up fast, mug in hand. "I have cloth to check. Back in twenty."

He left. Neither of us said anything for a moment. The heater rattled.

"I thought about you too," I said. "I should have said something back then. Before you took the job over here. I had a whole speech."

"Did you."

"I did. Practiced it in my car. Never delivered."

She set her mug down. "Finn, I'm fifty-two. I have a small apartment, a job I like, and a very specific way my life runs. I'm not looking to have it knocked over."

"I'm not here to knock anything over."

"Good. Because we're old, and it's Thursday, and one of us should say the sensible thing." She paused. "And yet here I am, not saying it."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's told me all year," I said.

She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. "Finish your coffee. And then I need to get back to my persimmons, because unlike some people, I actually do my job."

"I do my job. I'm doing it in Ghent."

"Doing what, standing around?"

"Supervising standing around. It's a whole skill."

She laughed again and I felt twenty-six for about three seconds, which was dangerous, and I knew it was dangerous, and I didn't stop feeling it anyway.

Cooper came back before the twenty minutes were up, which surprised me. He had a phone in his hand and a frown on his face.

"Small problem," he said. "The dye delivery. The truck was supposed to come at three. Now it's coming at five."

"So?"

"So the driver needs me to sign and check the manifest, and I have a kiln of wool in the second stage that I cannot walk away from. Not for an hour. Not for ten minutes."

Dee sighed. "Cooper."

"You two could wait," he said. "Sit outside, it's not raining anymore. I would be in your debt, which is worth nothing, but I will say it anyway."

"We're not waiting for your delivery," Dee said.

"I'm not asking you to unload it. I'm asking you to sit on a bench and drink coffee while an old man checks his wool. It's a charity case."

"He's good," I said.

"He's terrible," Dee said. "Fine. One hour. But if that truck shows up at four instead of five, that's on you."

"It will show up at five," Cooper said. "Drivers are never early. Go on, out. You're making my office feel crowded."

He herded us to the door like we were schoolkids, and I mean that literally, he put a hand on each of our shoulders and steered. Dee shrugged him off halfway.

"I can walk through a door, Cooper."

"Not with the way you two were staring at each other in there, you can't."

I heard Dee say something under her breath that I chose not to ask about.

* * *

Outside, the light had gone that flat grey that Belgium does so well. There was a bench against the brick wall, under the faded sign, and two folding chairs that looked older than both of us. Dee took a folding chair. I took the bench.

"You get the bench?" she said.

"It's the better seat."

"It's the worse seat. It's got a wobbly leg."

I tested it. It had a wobbly leg. I stayed on it anyway, out of pride.

We sat there for a while without talking. The street was quiet. A man walked a dog on the far side. Somewhere behind the building, water was running, probably the rinse line. The air smelled like wet wool and pigment even out here, like the building had soaked it in permanently.

"You really flew over for a week of training," Dee said finally.

"I really did."

"And the jacket."

"And the jacket."

"Cooper's indigo is good. I'll give him that. I've watched him work the vats for six years and I still don't fully follow it."

"Six years? You've been here six years?"

"Four, at the co-op. Two before that at a place in Ghent that closed. The math works, Finn. I do it for a living."

"I wasn't checking your math."

"No," she said. "You were checking on me."

She was right, and I didn't pretend otherwise. She looked out at the street. Her hair was silver, cut short, and it suited her, and I thought about telling her so and decided it would sound like something a man says in a speech he practices in his car.

"How did you end up here of all places?" I asked. "A fruit tester at a dye works. That's a strange sentence."

"The co-op needed someone who understood both. Ripeness and processing. There are maybe four people in the country who do what I do, and two of them are retired. I got asked. I said yes. That's the whole story."

"That's not the whole story."

"It's ninety percent of it."

"What's the other ten?"

She looked at me then. "You know what the other ten is."

I didn't, actually. But I let it sit.

A van went past, too fast for the street, and we both watched it go. Then she stood up and walked over and sat on the bench next to me, on the wobbly side, and the bench rocked a little and we both grabbed the edge at the same time.

Her hand landed on mine.

It wasn't a grab. It wasn't anything, really. It lasted maybe four seconds while the bench settled, and then she moved her hand, and I felt those four seconds in my whole arm for the next ten minutes.

"Sorry," she said. "Bench's fault."

"Sure."

"Finn."

"Yes."

"Don't make it a thing."

"It's already a thing."

"It was already a thing in 1996. I'm asking you not to make it a bigger thing."

"Okay," I said. "Bigger thing avoided."

She laughed, and it turned into something that wasn't quite a laugh, and she covered it by rubbing her hands on her knees. I had the sense she was deciding something. I know I was. I was fifty-four years old, sitting on a broken bench in the town I'd left at twenty-eight, and I was nervous. It was ridiculous. I've talked people out of cars at crash scenes. This woman made my palms sweat.

"You've got gray in your beard," she said.

"Mostly gray."

"You got old."

"So did you."

"I know. I like it, actually. Took me till about forty-five to stop apologizing for my face. Now I don't bother."

"You shouldn't have ever apologized for it."

"Easy to say. You weren't there."

"No. I wasn't," I looked at my hands. "That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the speech. Just that I wasn't there."

She was quiet for a while. The dog across the street got told to sit by its owner and sat.

"You know what I did, the week after I moved here?" she said. "I wrote you a letter. Long one. Told you about the apartment, the job, all of it. And at the end I wrote one more line and then I crossed it out so hard I tore the paper."

"What was the line?"

"Never you mind."

"Dee."

"Never. You. Mind." She said it slow, each word its own sentence.