The Last Wave

The last guest left around eleven. I heard the car doors slam out on the gravel lot, and then it was quiet except for the water slapping the pilings under the pier.

My name is Adrian. I'm thirty-four, I work at a bank in Newmarket, and three months ago Emily walked out after four years together. She was thirty-two and she'd decided she wanted a life I couldn't give her. Since then I'd been doing what recently single men do, which is volunteer for things they don't care about so they don't have to sit in a quiet apartment.

That's how I ended up at the yacht club's end-of-summer fair, folding chairs in the dark and washing paint out of brushes I hadn't touched since grade school.

Russ was supposed to be helping me. He's thirty-three, my coworker of five years, and he had bailed twenty minutes earlier with a woman named Stacey from the insurance booth. He'd winked at me on the way out. I'd told him I had the cleanup, which was true, and also that I had somewhere to be, which was becoming true.

Because the pottery table was still set up in the storage barn, and the woman who ran the class was still wiping clay off the wood.

Her name was Remi. She was thirty-two, she did network admin work for the club three days a week, and she taught pottery on the side. I had signed up for her Thursday beginner class in July for reasons I'd pretended were about hobbies. The reasons were about her. She was funny and she had clay-stained forearms and she never once made me feel stupid about the disaster bowls I kept producing.

I carried the last stack of folding chairs into the barn and set them against the wall. She was at the big table with a rag, working a dried stripe of slip off the surface.

"You're still here," she said without looking up.

"Someone's got to earn that volunteer hot dog."

"It ended two hours ago. You ate three."

"They were free. I'm a banker. I know value when I see it."

That got a laugh out of her, short and real. She tossed the rag into a bucket and turned around. She had a smear of white clay on her jaw that she clearly didn't know about. I didn't tell her. It seemed like the kind of thing you got one free pass on.

"You want a hand with the wheels?" I asked. "There's like six of them and they weigh a ton."

"You offering to help or offering an excuse to stick around?"

"Can't it be both?"

"It can," she said. "Grab the one by the door first. Careful with the pedal."

So we stacked wheels. It took twenty minutes because we kept talking, and the talking was better than the stacking. She told me about the guy who'd come to the fair earlier and tried to haggle over a five-dollar pinch pot. I told her about the time a client asked me if his mortgage could be paid in cash he kept in a hockey bag.

"Your job is wild," she said.

"My job is men in bad ties asking questions they already know the answers to. Mostly."

"And you like it?"

"I like the part where it ends at five." I set the last wheel down on the shelf. "What's that bowl situation over there?"

She followed my finger. On the display table, away from the good student work, sat a bowl I recognized. It was mine. It sat like a hat on a melon, lopsided, one side pinched fat and the other side sad and thin. The glaze had come out a muddy green that no one had asked for.

"That one's not for sale," she said.

"Thank god!"

"It's mine now, actually. I claimed it. It's going on my windowsill to hold keys or whatever."

"You claimed my disaster bowl."

"I did. It has character. It also has a story, which is that a guy in my July class made it while staring at the instructor instead of the clay."

I felt my face go warm. "I wasn't staring."

"Adrian. You put the handle on that mug in week three on the wrong side. Twice. You were staring at me so hard you forgot which hand you use."

"Okay," I admitted. "I was staring a little."

"Just a little?"

"Fine. A lot. Can I just say it plainly? I signed up for that class because of you. I saw the flyer at the bank, your name was on it, and I thought, that woman teaches pottery on Thursdays and I have nothing happening on Thursdays."

She leaned against the table and crossed her arms, and she was smiling, not the polite kind. "I know."

"You know?"

"I'm the network admin. I also help with the class signups when they come in. Your name came through and I looked you up on the bank's website and thought, huh. Then you showed up and couldn't center clay to save your life, and I thought, huh again."

"So the whole class was wasted on you too."

"Wasted," she said. "I wouldn't go that far. Your second bowl was almost round."

"That's generous."

"It's a lie. It was bad. But it was bad in a direction."

I laughed. I'd been doing a fair amount of that since July and it still surprised me every time.

I turned to grab the clay bucket and that's when I saw it, on the bottom shelf behind the kiln. A bowling ball. Marbled purple and yellow, one of those finger holes with a crack in it, and written across the front in fat black marker: JANNA.

"Remi. Why is there a bowling ball on your shelf."

"That's Janna."

"That's a bowling ball."

"Her name is Janna," she said, like I was the unreasonable one. "She's my counterweight. The wheel stand by the window wobbles. Old wood. So I put Janna on the bottom shelf and she holds everything steady."

"You named your counterweight."

"Everyone names things. You named your bowl, didn't you? I saw you talking to it in week five."

"I was not talking to it."

"You said, and I quote, come on buddy, you can do this."

"That's conjecture."

"That's memory. Janna came with the barn. Some club member left her here in, I don't know, the nineties. She's got her name and she's got seniority and she works, so she stays. Sometimes I say goodnight to her."

"You say goodnight to a bowling ball."

"I'm a well-rounded woman with a rich interior life."

I picked Janna up. She weighed a ton, exactly like you'd expect a bowling ball to weigh, and her finger holes were packed with dust.

"Thirteen pounds," Remi said. "I checked. She's a professional."

I put her back on the shelf and gave her a little pat. "Goodnight, Janna."

"You're a fast learner," Remi said, and the way she said it made the barn feel smaller than it was.

We got the rest of the table cleaned in silence for a minute. Outside, the lake kept doing its thing against the pilings. I thought about how it was past eleven, and how Russ was probably off somewhere being a disaster, and how the reasonable thing was to say goodnight and drive home.

"Adrian," she said.

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to say a thing and you can react however you want."

"That sounds ominous."

"Here it is. I like you. I've liked you since the mug with the backwards handle. But I just got out of a thing two years ago that went sideways because we worked together and I made it complicated. So what I want is simple. One night. No strings, no follow-up texts, no wondering what it means. You walk in, we have a good time, you walk out, and Monday we're just two people who volunteered at the same fair. That's the offer. It expires when summer does, and summer's basically done."

I stood there holding a sponge. The barn smelled like clay and old propane from the tanks in the corner.

"You've been thinking about this," I said.

"A little."

"And if I say yes, when?"

"Sunday. Tomorrow's Saturday, I've got a family thing. Sunday night, here. I've got keys, nobody comes up here after the season." She paused. "You can think about it. Honestly. If it's not your thing, no harm, and I still keep the bowl."

I thought about my quiet apartment. I thought about Emily and how the worst part of losing her was that I'd stopped feeling chosen somewhere in year three, and how I'd been chasing that feeling ever since without knowing it.

"I don't need to think about it," I said. "Sunday. And Remi?"

"Yeah?"

"Tell Janna not to wait up."

She laughed and threw the sponge at me.

Sunday night I drove out to the club with a change of shirt in my gym bag and no idea what I was doing.

Remi was already there. She'd opened the big doors at the back of the barn and the lake was doing its dark thing out past the pilings. She had a folding chair set up and a bottle of wine in a bucket of lake water, which is a thing I learned people do.

"You brought a bag," she said.

"Change of shirt. Toothbrush. I didn't know the protocol."

"The protocol is you bring yourself. But okay, boy scout."

She poured me a plastic cup of wine and we sat in the folding chairs looking at the water like a couple of retirees. Her hair was down, which I'd never seen at the club. It did something to the whole picture.

"Russ asked me today if I was nervous," I said.

"Russ. Stacey's Russ?"

"Stacey's Russ. Insurance booth Russ. He said, and I quote, just don't overthink it, man."

"Wise man, that Russ."

"He also brought a portable speaker to the fair and played the same four songs all afternoon."

"So a wise man with limits." She clinked her cup against mine. "To summer being basically done."

We drank. A loon went somewhere out in the dark. I kept waiting for the awkward part to arrive and it kept not arriving, which made me more nervous, if that makes sense.

"You want to see something?" she said after a while.

"Always."

She got up and pulled the tarp off the window wheel, the wobbly one. Janna was on the bottom shelf, holding everything steady. Remi sat down at the wheel and patted the stool beside her.

"Sit. I'll show you what a centered bowl looks like, since you never managed one."

"Low blow."

"Accurate blow."

She wedged a hunk of clay and threw it down and the wheel started up and her hands did that thing where the clay just obeys. I'd watched her do it a hundred times in class from across the room. Up close it was different. Her forearms, the little push of her lower lip, the way she talked the whole time like her hands were nothing special.

"So here's my secret," she said. "The wheel does most of it. You just have to stop fighting it."

"That's what you told me in July and I still fought it."

"You fought everything in July. You apologized to the clay twice."

"Once."

"Twice. I have records."

The bowl rose up between her hands, a real one, even and open. She cut it off the wheel with a wire and set it aside and wiped her hands on her apron, and then the barn got quiet in a way it hadn't been all night.

"Adrian."

"Yeah?"

"Stay a while."

"I was planning on it."

"No, I mean it. Don't check the time. Don't think about the drive. Stay."

I put my cup down. My mouth was dry and my heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my ears.

"Can I ask you something blunt?" I said.

"You've met me. Yes!"

"Is this a one-time thing? Actually one time. Because I'll be honest, I've been going back and forth on it since Friday. Part of me wants to pretend tonight is a door and not a wall. And I'd rather know now than find out Monday I was wrong about the terms."

She looked at me and didn't look away.

"It's a one-time thing," she said. "One night. That's the deal I can actually offer and I'm not going to upgrade it because it's convenient. I like you. That's true. And I also know myself, and if we do this twice it becomes a thing, and things are what I'm bad at right now."

"Okay."

"Okay? Just like that?"

"Just like that. You told me the terms Friday. I showed up anyway."

"Huh," she said. "You really did."

"I want to be the guy who takes the deal on the table instead of inventing a better one in his head. Emily taught me that, in a way. Four years of inventing a better one in my head."

She reached over and took my hand. Her fingers still had clay in the creases.

"Come here," she said, and it wasn't a question, but I asked one anyway.

"Can I kiss you?"

"You drove an hour for that? Yes, Adrian."

I leaned in and we kissed, and it was slow and a little clumsy, the way first kisses with a person you actually like are. She tasted like wine. Her hand came up and held the side of my jaw and I stopped thinking about anything, which for me is a genuine accomplishment.

We kissed against the wheel, her back to it, my hands on her waist. She made a small sound into my mouth and pulled me closer, and I was just starting to let my hands wander up her sides when she put both palms flat on my chest and pushed back an inch.

"Wait," she said.

I stepped back immediately. "Sorry."

"No, don't be sorry, nothing's wrong!" She was breathing a little fast and pushing her hair off her face. "I just want to say it out loud once, before we go any further. I'm not looking for a relationship. Not with you, not with anyone, not right now. I don't want