The Job at Bishop House

Dottie took the turn off the coast road at nine in the morning and saw the house rise up out of the fog like it had been waiting for her. Bishop House. Edwardian, Gerald had said. Big porch, peeling paint, scaffolding on the east wing. A money pit with good bones.

She pulled the flatbed in through the gates and parked by the carriage house. The Mustang was already there. Cath's father's car, Gerald said. 1967, fastback, sat in a barn for thirty years. Full restore, eight weeks, cash on completion. Bradley had set the whole thing up before he retired, and Dottie had said yes without asking enough questions.

That was the first mistake. The second was looking at the porch.

A woman stood there with a coffee mug in both hands. Gray coming in at the temples. Tall, still standing the way she used to stand, weight on one hip. Dottie's stomach did something complicated and dropped through the floor of her.

Cath.

Twenty-two years since Dottie had seen her. Twenty-two since a bar in town, a night she had never once managed to file away properly, and one kiss that lasted maybe four seconds and rearranged her whole interior. Dottie had been thirty-two. Cath had been thirty. Then Cath moved away, and Dottie told herself it was a thing that happened once, to people, sometimes, and got on with fixing transmissions.

She got out of the truck. Her legs worked, which was a small mercy.

"Morning," Cath said. Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not doing steady, they were doing arithmetic. "You must be Dottie."

"That's me." Dottie wiped her hand on her jeans before offering it. Cath took it. Her grip was warm and brief and it still landed somewhere under Dottie's ribs.

"I'm Cath Bishop."

"I know." Dottie should have stopped there. She did not. "We've met. A while back."

"I remember you," Cath said, quiet, and just like that the heat was back, flaring up Dottie's neck before she could get a boot on it.

"Well." Dottie looked at the Mustang instead of at her. "Car's not gonna fix itself."

"No," Cath said. "I suppose it isn't."

They left it there. Professional. Two grown women, fifty-four and fifty-two respectively, standing in a driveway being adults about it. Dottie got her toolbox out of the truck and did not look back at the porch, mostly.

The first week went fine, in the way that a splinter goes fine. The carriage house had been cleaned out and a lift installed, and the Mustang turned out to be better than advertised. Solid frame. Original engine, seized but salvageable. Dottie worked with the radio on and the doors open and tried very hard to think about valve clearances and nothing else.

Cath made that difficult by existing.

Tuesday she came by with coffee. "Gerald said you take it black."

"Gerald talks too much." Dottie took the mug anyway. Their fingers did not touch, which Dottie noted with relief, because she had not trusted them.

"Suit yourself," Cath said, and wandered around the car, hands clasped behind her back like a man at a car show. "My father bought this the year I was born. He kept saying he'd restore it. He kept saying it for forty years."

"And then it sat in a barn."

"And then it sat in a barn." Cath smiled at the fender. "You'd think a family of planners would plan better."

She left after ten minutes. Wednesday she came back with a question about the paint code and stayed twenty. Thursday she brought a sandwich from the place on the harbor and ate it on an upturned bucket, talking about the roofers and the plumbing inspector and everything except the one thing. Dottie answered in short sentences. It was safer. Gerald was around most days, running his crews, and he gave Dottie a look once, brief and neutral, that said he'd worked with Cath before and knew how to stay out of things. Good for him. Dottie wished she had the same talent.

Friday it rained, and Cath stayed an hour, sitting on the bucket with her coat still on, watching Dottie free a rusted bolt that did not want to be free.

"You're good at that," Cath said.

"You're watching me swear at a bolt."

"Still good at it."

Dottie snorted despite herself. The bolt gave with a crack and her knuckles cracked against the frame and she said a word she normally saved for church. Cath laughed. It was the same laugh. The whole problem was that, Dottie thought. Everything was the same. The laugh, the way she sat, the way she looked at you like she had all afternoon.

"How's Bradley?" Cath asked.

"Retired. Fishes. Calls me to tell me about fish." Dottie flexed her hand. "He sent you my way on purpose, you know. He knew whose house this was."

"I figured." Cath turned her mug around in her hands. "I'm glad he did."

Dottie did not answer that. She went back to the engine. Cath stayed and watched, and the rain kept coming down on the carriage house roof, and neither of them said anything else for a while, and it was not a bad silence, which was somehow worse.

The following Tuesday Cath came in at the end of the day. The crews were gone. Gerald's trucks had rumbled out an hour before. The light was going orange through the big doors and Dottie was underneath the car on the creeper, working the fuel lines, when she heard the heels stop by the front fender.

"You're here late," Dottie said, by way of hello. She could tell it was Cath by the shoes. Twenty-two years and she could still tell by the shoes, which was frankly humiliating.

"I've been standing out there for ten minutes trying to decide whether to come in."

"Come in or don't," Dottie said. "I'm about done either way."

Cath came in. Dottie slid out from under the car and sat up on the creeper and looked at her. Cath's face was doing something careful. Practiced. The kind of face you build for delivering news.

"I ended it," Cath said. "With Marius. Three weeks ago. Before you got here, actually, but it was mostly finished by then."

"I'm sorry," Dottie said, because that was what you said.

"Don't be. It ran its course." Cath set her jaw. "And I'll tell you the part that isn't fair to spring on you, and you can do what you like with it. I broke it off because I could not stop thinking about you. Twenty-two years, Dottie. One kiss, in a bar, and I have thought about it roughly every month since. That's the truth and I'm not asking it to mean anything."

The shop was very quiet. Somewhere outside a gull was making its case about something.

"Every month," Dottie said.

"Give or take."

Dottie wiped her hands on a rag, slowly, buying herself time she didn't need. "I never forgot it either," she said. "Not once. I told myself it was a thing that happened once. I got very good at telling myself that." She stood. Fifty-four-year-old knees, but they stood. "It didn't take."

Cath let out a breath like she'd been holding it since the porch. "Oh," she said. "Well. That's."

"Yeah."

They stood about six feet apart in the middle of the carriage house with a half-restored Mustang between them and twenty-two years of nothing said, and Dottie felt the old heat banked down in her chest start doing what it always did, which was refuse to stay banked.

"I'm not looking to be anyone's transitional situation," Dottie said. "If that's what this is."

"It's not." Cath said it fast. Then slower. "I don't know what it is. But it's not that."

"Okay." Dottie nodded at the car. "Then come by tomorrow. I'm pulling the engine Saturday. You can watch me swear at things. It's apparently good television."

Cath smiled. The real one, the one from the bar. "I'll be here," she said, and left, and Dottie sat back down on the creeper and put a hand over her face and laughed at herself, once, alone in the shop.

Eight weeks, the contract said. She was starting to suspect it would not be enough.

The next two weeks went like that. Cath came by. Dottie worked. The Mustang's engine came out on Saturday with a scrape and a grunt and it sat on the stand looking like a heart on a table. Cath watched from her chair and swore she wasn't keeping score of the swear words, and Dottie called her a liar, and that was how it went.

Then Thursday came, and Cath didn't leave when the crews left.

She stood by the workbench with her arms crossed, which Dottie had learned meant she was thinking hard about something. "Can I ask you a question?" Cath said. "And you can tell me to get out."

"Ask."

"What do you want? From this. From me. I keep waiting for you to make a move and you don't, and I can't tell if it's because you don't want to or because you're waiting for something."

Dottie set down the wrench. Wiped her hands. Took her time, because the answer was a big one and she'd been carrying it around for twenty-two years.

"I want to be told what to do," she said.

Cath blinked. "In general?"

"In bed. Specifically there. Look, I've had a few women over the years. Good ones. But it never worked, because I don't want to be asked about every little thing. I want to be led. I want somebody who takes the wheel and doesn't hand it back every five minutes to check if I'm still comfortable. Comfortable isn't the point." She folded the rag. "I know how that sounds."

"It doesn't sound like anything I've heard before," Cath said. Her voice had gone quiet. "It sounds like something I've wanted to try my whole life and never admitted."

Dottie looked at her. "Say that again."

"I want to try it. Being the one in charge." Cath laughed, short and surprised at herself. "I run a renovation with forty contractors. I order men twice your size around all day. And in bed I have spent thirty years being polite." She uncrossed her arms. "I would like to not be polite. With you. If you'd let me."

"Well," Dottie said. Her heart was doing something unsuitable for a woman her age. "Then I guess we should talk about it like adults."

They did. Right there in the carriage house, sitting on two upturned