The Last Lavender Train

The gallery thing had seemed sound when Andy mentioned it that morning, mostly because it got me out of hauling irrigation hose around in the heat, and partly because free wine is free wine even when you are twenty-nine and technically supposed to be helping my boss schmooze. I'm Miles, by the way, assistant at a gallery in town and part-time farm hand out at Andy's lavender place, and I want to get one thing out early since it matters later: for as long as I can remember being an adult, I've had this quiet little urge to wear dresses, and in all that time I had never once done anything about it. Not once. It just lived in the back of my head like a song you can't stop humming.

So there I was at the gallery event, standing near the cheese table in my least wrinkled shirt, surrounded by people who used words like liminal and embodied without any irony, and I felt about as at home as a scarecrow at a fashion week. A woman with silver hoop earrings told me my lavender-scented handshake was very grounding, whatever that meant, and a man explained his installation was about the violence of postal services, and I nodded so much my neck hurt. Andy, who is thirty-four and built as if he choreographs fights for movies for a living, seemed to know everybody and drifted through the room like it was easy. I watched him from across the room and felt lonely in a way I couldn't quite name.

When I slipped out to check the time on my phone, my stomach did a slow, cold flip. The last train back to the city was the 10:12, and it was 10:26. I stood on the curb outside the gallery doing the math again like the numbers would change if I stared hard enough, and they did not.

"Looking grim out here," Andy said, coming up behind me with his jacket over one shoulder. "Train?"

"I missed it. By fourteen minutes. I was looking at a painting of a fish the whole time, apparently."

Andy laughed, that easy rumble of his, and jerked his head toward the parking lot. "Come on then. I'm driving back to the farm anyway, you can ride with me and take the spare room. It's got a real bed and everything, and the lavender keeps the sheets smelling fresh, that's not a sales pitch, that's just chemistry."

"I can't impose on you like that."

"Miles. It's forty minutes to the city and you'd be paying for a hotel room you hate. Come on." He said it so plainly, no weight on it at all, just an open hand, and I felt relief and nerves mix into something fizzy in my chest. So I said okay, and we drove out of town with the windows down and the whole valley smelling sweet and heavy, purple rows running up the hillsides in the dark, and the little station sign sliding past us going the other way like it was waving goodbye.

The farm house was an old stone barn Andy had converted, all warm lamps and thick walls, and he showed me to the spare room down the hall from his own. It was simple and clean, a bed with a white quilt, a rug, and on the nightstand an old oil lamp with a brass burner and a glass chimney gone slightly amber with age.

"That belonged to my grandmother," Andy said, leaning in the doorway. "She used it on the table by this very window, back when this room was for hay. If it bothers you, don't light it, but I like it there."

"It's beautiful," I said, and I meant it, and then he said goodnight in that easy way of his and I was alone with a lamp and my own loud head.

I couldn't sleep. That's the honest beginning of everything that happened. I lay there for an hour listening to frogs and thinking about the fish painting, and about how Andy had looked at me across the gallery more than once, or maybe he hadn't, maybe I made that up, and eventually I got up just to move around because lying still felt like being buried. The wardrobe in the corner was an old wooden one, bigger than the room needed, and I opened it just to see if there were extra blankets.

There were no extra blankets. There were dresses.

I'm not sure what I expected to feel. They hung in a neat row, vintage things, silk and cotton, colors gone soft with age, and I stood there in my underwear in the dark with the lamp turned low, my heart going hard against my ribs. I told myself I was just curious. I told myself a lot of things in about four seconds flat. My hand was already reaching, that's the truth of it, reaching past a gray cotton thing and a green thing with covered buttons, all the way to a pale blue slip dress near the back, silk so fine it whispered when I lifted it off the hanger.

I held it up against me first, which is the coward's way, and then I thought, well, nobody will ever know, and stepped into it. The straps settled on my shoulders and the silk ran down my body cool and then warm, warming everywhere it touched, and I turned to the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door and looked at myself.

I looked like me. That was the part that undid me, that it didn't look like a costume or a joke, it looked like me on a night I had finally stopped lying. My hair was a mess and my shoulders were too wide for the cut of it and I did not care even a little bit. I turned side on, and back, and touched the hem, and my breath was coming shallow and fast, and I thought, twenty-nine years old and this is the first time, you absolute fool.

That's when the knock came. Two knocks, polite, and then the door opened before my hands could even move, because my hands were busy being frozen at my sides like a couple of useless props.

Andy stood in the doorway in a t-shirt and bare feet, hair damp from a shower, and his eyes went from my face down the length of the blue silk and back up to my face. The room got very quiet. I could hear the frogs. I could hear my own pulse in my ears. I opened my mouth to say something, to explain, to laugh it off, to say it was a laundry accident, which would have been the stupidest sentence ever spoken in Provence, and nothing came out.

He didn't laugh. I want that understood, because in the half second before he spoke I ran through every bad ending and none of