The inspection list

My aunt Dot left me the shop in her will, and I still don't know if that was a gift or a test. Sweeney Bridal, right on the corner of Halyard Street in Port Argent, three doors down from the chowder place that smells like butter every morning at ten. She ran it for sixty years. I'm fifty-four now and I keep doing the math and it keeps coming out the same. She was sewing hems in that back room before I was born.

Anyway. The buyer wants an inspection passed before the sale goes through, and the inspector left me a list longer than my arm. Old wiring in the loft. A leak over the fitting rooms that comes and goes with the wind. A window frame in the workshop that's gone soft as bread. And I sat at the counter with that list and thought, well, I can't do any of this alone, and then I thought of exactly one person.

So I wrote Benjamin a letter. Yes, a letter, on actual paper, because that's how we started and it stuck. We met at a craft fair three years ago, he was selling little carved boxes, and we've been dating two years now. He works as a set carpenter and he's on the base schedule, which means leave comes in chunks and I never know when.

Here's part of what I sent him.

Dear Benjamin,

The inspector came Tuesday and I have his list pinned to the corkboard like it's a wanted poster. Item one is the wiring in the storage loft, which he called "grandfathered," which I think is a polite word for "will burn your shop down." Item two is the roof leak over fitting room two. It only drips when the wind blows from the northeast, so of course it dripped all day Wednesday. Item three is a window frame in the workshop that I can push my thumb into like it's a peach.

I want this sale done by spring. I want to stop lying awake doing arithmetic about shingles. I am not handy, Benjamin. My whole skill set is hemming and hawing, and I mean that literally and as a joke.

Do you think any of this is fixable, or should I just sell the place for parts?

Roxy

He wrote back nine days later, and the envelope was fat, which made me nervous before I even opened it. Inside was two pages and a pencil sketch of a workbench. Not any workbench. A rebuilt one, drawn in his square little hand, with a pegboard and a vice and a shelf underneath labeled "roxy's stuff (keep off)."

Roxy,

Everything on that list is fixable. Nothing on it is scary to me, and I include the wiring because I know a guy at the base shop who is scarier than any wiring.

Here is my proposal, and I use that word on purpose. My leave comes up in three weeks, ten days, and I would like to spend it with a hammer in one hand and you in the other, in whatever order you prefer. The workbench sketch is what I'd build you for the workshop so you stop setting coffee cups on your good shears. Say yes and I'll bring tools. Say yes and I'll bring my own coffee too, since I've seen your kitchen.

Say yes, Roxy.

Benjamin

I wrote yes on the back of his sketch and mailed it, which is maybe the least romantic yes ever sent through the postal system, and also the truest one.

Three weeks went by the way they do, slow then all at once. In between we texted, because we're not total relics. On a Thursday I took a photo of the rotted window frame with my thumb sunk in it up to the knuckle and sent it to him with the caption, so, this is fine, right?

He texted back inside a minute. I need more coffee for this conversation. Also a sawzall and possibly a priest.

I laughed right there in the workshop like a fool. Then: how bad, one to ten?

He wrote: eleven. But eleven is my favorite number. I'll bring lumber.

That man. I put my phone in my apron pocket and patted it like it was a cat.

The next letter he sent was long, and it was mostly about a piece of oak, which sounds boring until you read it.

Roxy,

Found a board at the salvage yard on Route 9, oak, came off a church pew or a bar rail, the guy wasn't sure and neither am I. It's got a warm color to it, like honey that's been sitting in the window. I'm telling you this because I planed it down and cut it into a little shelf, four feet, and it's going to be a spice rack.

A practice run, I mean. For the shop. If I can't make a spice rack sit level, I've got no business touching your roof. So the roof waits on the spice rack, and the spice rack sits on my kitchen wall right now, and I look at it every morning while the coffee drips and I think, that's level. That's good. I can do this.

The rack holds nine jars. I only own four spices, which tells you how often I cook. You can fill the other five when you come visit. Bring paprika. I hear you're the paprika one.

Benjamin

The paprika one. I'd mentioned one time, one single time, that Dot's chili had too much paprika, and this man filed it away like a purchase order. I brought him a whole tin the next visit and he put it in slot five like it belonged there.

Then came the thing with the mirror, and I have to tell it in order or it won't make sense.

I was clearing out the storage loft, which is where shops like mine put everything they can't bear to throw away, and behind a rack of tulle and two broken dress forms I found Dot's old fitting-room mirror. Full length, gold frame, the glass gone a little smoky at the corners like breath on a window. There was a sticker on the bottom corner, faded, from some sale in 1988. I dragged it down the stairs and stood it against the wall in fitting room one and just looked at myself for a while. Fifty-four years old, dusty, sweaty, holding a rag. The mirror didn't care. It flattered everybody, that was Dot's whole point. She used to say a bride should meet herself beautiful before she meets herself married.

I wrote Benjamin about it that night.

Dear Benjamin,

Found the fitting-room mirror today. The gold one. Dot lent it to the bridal booth at that craft fair, remember? I put it in fitting room one and I swear it makes me look like I've slept eight hours, which I have not. Do you remember it? You must. Also I keep finding receipts from 1994 in this loft. Send help or a dumpster or both.

Roxy

His reply came four days later and I read it standing at the mailbox like some nitwit in a movie.

Roxy,

Do I remember the mirror. Roxy. Come on.

The craft fair three years back, before any of this, when we were just two people arguing over whether a carved box counts as a craft or a hobby. You needed the bathroom at that church hall and I pointed you