The Jukebox Prize

I wake up on a futon in my underwear and a borrowed T-shirt, in a room that smells like sawdust and somebody's cheap fabric softener, and for about four seconds I have no idea what state I'm in. Then I see the jukebox arm on the floor next to my left shoe and it all comes back. I'm twenty-eight years old, I'm a land agent, and last night I won a broken jukebox at a church harvest supper by arm-wrestling a carpenter.

The sunlight comes through the cottage curtains in a hot yellow stripe that lands right across my hip. I don't move yet. I just lie there and reconstruct the whole evening, because it deserves reconstructing.

The harvest supper was in the tithe barn next to the convent garden, the garden I manage the lease for, which is why I was there at all. String lights strung between the old oaks, folding tables, a pie table that got more traffic than the candidates' table at any election I've ever worked. Austin was co-running the thing. He's twenty-nine, moved to town two years ago for a carpentry apprenticeship, and he's the kind of broad-shouldered that makes you assume he's dumb until he opens his mouth and starts talking about load ratings on barn beams. He wasn't dumb.

The jukebox had been sitting in the corner of the barn all evening like a hostage. Broken, heavy, ugly, donated by somebody who clearly wanted it gone more than they wanted it fixed. Nobody would take it. Austin got on the microphone and said, and I quote, "Free to anyone who hauls it away tonight, and I mean tonight, I'm not living with this thing."

I'd had two glasses of the convent's homemade elderflower wine, which is clear-headed territory for me, I know my limits. I walked over and said, "I'll take it if you help me carry it."

He laughed. "You can't lift half a jukebox."

"Says the man afraid of a hundred thirty pound woman."

"You're a hundred thirty pounds?"

"Give or take a pie."

So we arm-wrestled for it, right there on a folding table with half the supper crowd circled up around us. He won the first round because I jumped the count. I won the second round clean. Third round went long enough that a woman near the pie table started narrating it like a horse race. I won. He laughed again, this big surprised bark, and shook my hand like I'd beaten him fair and square, which I had, and then he bought me a slice of the strawberry-rhubarb pie as a prize, which was his own pie, which made it funnier.

That's when the jukebox problem got real. It was mine now. It did not work. It weighed roughly as much as a mature hog. Neither of us wanted it, and we stood there in the barn doorway looking at it, both of us adult enough to admit we'd made a mistake.

"That thing is not leaving this barn," he said.

"It's legally my property," I said. "I won it."

"You want to put it in your car?"

"I drive a Civic."

"Right."

So we hauled it to his cottage next door, because his cottage had a porch and mine had a third floor walk-up, and by the time we got it up his two steps I had sweated through my shirt and he was laughing so hard he had to sit on the arm of it. We sat on that porch drinking the rest of a six pack from his fridge, and I'll be honest with you, whoever you are reading this, the talking was good. The kind of good where you keep finding reasons to stay on the topic.

And then he said, "Bet you can't go a whole minute without arguing with me. Loser buys nothing, it's just a bet on your pride."

"I can go a whole night without arguing if the alternative is interesting."

We drank water after that and agreed the rest could wait. If we were going to play any game, it would be a morning game, sober, or not at all. That's the dare he's about to ask me if I remember.

He stirs on the futon behind me, rolls over, and squints at the ceiling. "You remember the dare?" His voice is all gravel.

"Which dare. I won several things last night."

"The morning one." He props up on one elbow. He's twenty-nine years old and his hair is flattened on one side, as if he slept on it wrong. "The self-control one."

"I remember you losing the pie."

"Before that." He sits up. The sheet slides off him, he sleeps in boxers, and I make no effort to look away, and he makes no effort to cover up, which is one of the reasons last night went as comfortably as it did. "The silver vibrator dare. I bought that thing at the truck stop outside Millbrook three months ago on a whim and it's been in my travel bag ever since and you said, direct quote, no toy of yours is going to beat me at anything. This morning, if you still want to, and only if you still want to."

"Oh," I say. "That bet."

"Two minutes each, no hands off the toy, whoever cracks first is insufferable for an hour. No other stakes."

"Cracks how?"

"You know how."

"I know how," I agree. "I just like hearing you say it."

He gets up in his boxers, unbothered, crosses the little cottage room, and digs through the canvas travel bag by the door. He comes back with a slim silver vibrator, maybe seven inches, ribbed along the lower half of the shaft. He hands it to me like he's handing me a tool, which, fair, that's his frame of reference.

I run my finger down the ribs. "Barely a