The Kumite Letter

I want to start by saying I'm fifty-four years old and I've been an electrician for thirty-one years, and I have never once done anything as crazy as what I did last night. Okay? That's the frame for this whole story. Hold onto it.

The Maaloula County kumite tournament runs every October at the fairgrounds, same weekend as the harvest fair, and every year I run the electrical booth because somebody has to keep the scoreboard and the ring lights from dying mid-match. It's not glamorous. It's me, a folding table, a coffee urn, and about nine hundred feet of extension cord that I've been meaning to replace since 2019.

So there I was, Saturday night, maybe ten o'clock, watching the finals. You need to know this about me and Sunny Wang, because otherwise none of this makes sense.

Sunny is fifty-three. She runs the capon fattening operation out at Hollis Farm, which is a real job, by the way, ask anybody, it's not just feeding chickens. She is broad-shouldered and gray at the temples and she fights the way a woman who has spent thirty years lifting feed sacks fights, because she has. And I have been half in love with her since I was twenty-two years old.

Twenty-two! I was twenty-two! Which means this thing has been sitting in my chest for thirty-two years, unpaid and unopened, like a bill from a company that went out of business.

How did it start? Adult education class. Typography, of all things, Tuesday nights at the vocational center, fall of 1991 if you make me do the math. I was there because my boss said I needed to learn to lay out invoice forms. Sunny was there because, and I quote, "my handwriting is a crime and somebody should arrest me." She sat one row ahead and one seat to the left of me. For eleven weeks. And I looked at the back of her neck for eleven weeks like it was a church.

Is that creepy? It might be creepy. I've gone back and forth on it for three decades. But she had this little curl of hair at her nape that the fluorescent lights used to catch, and when she got a letterform right she'd do this tiny bounce in her seat, this little yes! bounce, like the whole alphabet belonged to her. I memorized the curve of that neck the way other people memorize scripture. I never said ten words to her the entire course. Not ten.

Then the course ended and she went back to the farm and I went back to wiring panel boxes, and that was the end of it. Except it wasn't, obviously, because here I am at midnight writing about it.

***

So Saturday night. Sunny wins the finals, clean, two falls in the second round, and the whole fairgrounds comes apart. She accepts that ugly little trophy, the one with the golden fist on it, and she holds it up and grins, and I'm standing behind my folding table with a clipboard thinking, well, Marguerite, you're moving to Verona Falls in six days. New city. New shop. New crew. If you're ever going to say anything, this is literally the last weekend of your life where it's possible.

I'd been sitting on that fact all week. My transfer papers came through Monday. Foreman's rate, which I earned, thank you very much, and which I would be a fool to turn down at my age. But it means leaving the county I've wired half of, and it means this is it. Last chance. Use it or lose it, as my mother used to say about leftovers.

So I grabbed a napkin off the coffee urn table. A napkin! Fifty-four years old and I confess my feelings on a cocktail napkin like a drunk at a wedding. I wrote my address on it first, because my hand knew what it wanted before my brain did. Marguerite Ford, 14 Cordage Road, apartment over the garage, you know the one, everybody in Maaloula knows it because the mailbox leans.

Then I just kept writing. I don't even remember half of what I put down. Something about the class. Something about her neck, God help me. Something about the talisman, which I'll get to in a minute because it deserves its own paragraph, it's the most embarrassing part.

The changing tent was behind the ring, this big white thing with a generator cable running into it, my cable, my work, which felt like a sign or maybe just felt like my job. I waited until the crowd moved off toward the funnel cake stand, then I lifted the corner of her duffel and slid the napkin under it and walked away fast, the way a woman who had just shoplifted a ham would walk.

Did I invite her somewhere? I did. That's the crazy part. There's a place at the fairgrounds, you've seen it if you've ever been to the harvest fair, the giant farinha roasting pan, this enormous iron disc set into a brick fire pit over by the vendor tents. They roast cassava in it every year, big community affair, half the county stirring with boat oars. Right now it sits empty and cold ten months out of the year, this huge flat iron table under the open sky, and I've always thought it was the best seat in Maaloula. So I wrote, meet me there at midnight? Midnight! Like a couple of people half our age, no wait, scratch that, like two grown women with bad knees arranging a clandestine meeting at a cassava pan. What is wrong with me?

The talisman. Okay. Back in 1992, the adult ed program did a field trip, one trip, to the maritime museum over in Corbett's Landing. There was a piece of ship's mast there, salvaged off some schooner, mounted on a stand, and they let people touch it. Sunny touched it. I watched her put her whole palm flat on that old wood and say, "So this is what a hundred years of weather feels like," and I swear to you something turned over in my chest.

Then, because I am who I am, the museum gift shop sold these little splinter tokens, tiny slivers of the same mast set in resin, two dollars each. I bought one. I have carried it in my left tool belt pocket for thirty-one years. Through three shops, two apprentices, one lightning strike on a job site, and a decade of Tuesday poker nights. It rides next to my needle-nose pliers. Every journeyman I've ever trained has asked me what the little shiny square is, and I have told every single one of them it's a good luck piece, which is true, and none of them ever asked good luck for what, which was lucky for me.

I put it in the envelope with the napkin. That's right, I gave it away. Thirty-one