The Last Record

I got to the common room at nine in the morning. The place was empty. The tables were gone, the chairs were gone, and the shelves along the far wall still held the last of the vinyl. One box sat open on the floor, half packed. The sea did its usual thing outside the big windows, gray and patient.

Freya was standing at the shelves when I came in. She's sixty-two, a few years younger than me, and she had on her work jacket with the sleeves pushed up. Fifteen years I've known her. Fifteen years of weekends sorting records and arguing about whether Fleetwood Mac peaked too early.

"You found the last box," she said.

"It found me. It was sitting in the middle of the floor."

"That's where I left it." She didn't turn around. "I kept avoiding it."

I set my thermos down on the windowsill. Everything else was already in the van outside. The sale to the hotel chain went through last week. Their people measured the windows last week and talked about a spa.

"So this is it," I said.

"This is it."

I went over and stood next to her at the shelves. Dust everywhere. The whole room smelled like dust and old paper and, faintly, the sea through the gaps in the window seals. Her hand was resting on the shelf edge and I put mine next to it, not touching. Not yet.

We started pulling records. It went slow because we kept stopping. Every other sleeve had a story. The Tiffany Simone we played the night the boiler died and everybody huddled in here in coats. The country record a guest left behind in 2011 that turned out to be worth real money, which Freya never sold, because he never came back for it and she liked it.

Then I pulled out the one. The Van Morrison. Astral Weeks. He held it up and we both laughed at the same time, the way you do when a joke lands fifteen years late.

"Oh no," she said. "Not that one."

"You danced to it with the plumber's wife at the Christmas thing."

"I danced at that woman. There's a difference. She stood there holding her wine and I did all the work."

"You were good at it though."

"I was fifteen years younger and it was the third glass of wine." She took the record from me and looked at the sleeve. "Harry, we played this to death. It skips on track three."

"It still skips. I checked last month."

"Of course you checked."

We put it in the keep pile, which had gotten bigger than the sell pile, which was a problem for another day.

The light moved across the floor while we worked. That room always got good light in the afternoon, and I used to find her in there alone at four, sorting, with the radio off because she said the records were better company. I looked at her now, kneeling on the floor in her work jacket with dust on her knees, and I thought about how many afternoons I'd watched her exactly like this and called it friendship and left it alone.

Somewhere near noon she sat back on her heels and looked around the room. Empty shelves. Bare walls with pale rectangles where things used to hang.

"I'll miss this place," she said. "I want you to know that. I'll miss it a lot."

"I know."

"But I won't miss the loneliness. That I could do without, and I did do without it, for eleven years, and I'm tired." She said it plainly, the way she says everything. "Running a place full of people by yourself is a strange kind of alone. You're never by yourself and you're always by yourself."

"I remember visiting and thinking you had it made."

"You thought wrong." She smiled though. "It was good for a long time. Then it was just work."

I reached over and took her hand. Just that. Her fingers were cold from the floor and she looked at our hands and then at me.

"Well," she said.

"I'll miss the place," I said. "But not most of all." "The place is a building. You I'll actually miss."

She didn't pull her hand away. She turned her hand over instead so our palms were together, and she held on.

"Harry. We're sixty-two and sixty-five. What exactly are you doing."

"Something I should have done around year three."

"That long?"

"Longer, if I'm honest about it."

She laughed, a short one, and squeezed my hand. "God. All those weekends. All those arguments about the Beatles."

"You started those."

"I did. I liked the arguing." Then she got quiet and looked at our hands again. "Ask me properly. I'm not doing this on a maybe."

So I asked. I said, Freya, can I kiss you. Plain as that, and my voice cracked a little on her name, which she will bring up at every opportunity for the rest of my life.

"Yes," she said. "Finally. Yes."

I leaned in and kissed her and it was slow. Neither of us was in a hurry. Her mouth was soft and she made a small sound against me and her hand came up to the side of my face. We stayed like that a long while, standing in the dust in an empty room with a box of records at our feet, and it didn't feel at all how a first kiss is supposed to feel. It felt like a hello we'd been putting off for fifteen years.

When we broke apart she kept her hand on my cheek.

"Well," she said again. "That was worth the wait, you old fool."

"There's more where that came from."

"I certainly hope so." She looked toward the window, then back at me. "The keys don't get handed over for three weeks. The sale's settled, money's in the account, lawyers are done with me. Nothing left to sign."

"So we have the place to ourselves."

"We have the place to ourselves." She was smiling in a way I hadn't seen from her before, or maybe I'd just never