The Layover and the Endpaper

Katherine Cummings was thirty-four years old and had been awake for twenty hours. Her flight had landed at six in the morning at a regional airport she couldn't have found on a map a week ago. Forty-hour layover. The crew hotel was out past a village with one pub and a church with no roof.

She had a rental car and a bad idea.

The old convent sat at the end of a lane barely wide enough for the car. Gravel popped under the tires. Roses had gone feral along the wall, and lavender spilled over the path like it owned the place. Somebody had trimmed a walkway through the middle, though. Somebody was still here.

The workshop was a shed at the back of the garden, bigger than it looked. The door stood open. Inside, a man was bent over a bench, a big old book open in a press in front of him, a brush in his hand.

Joel Wolfe. Thirty-five now. Eight months since she'd last seen him, and it had been ugly and short and neither of them had said what they meant.

She stood in the doorway and breathed. The place smelled like glue and old paper and, underneath that, the lavender coming through the open door.

"You still use this glue?"

The brush stopped. Joel turned around with a stack of marbled endpapers in his other hand and nearly dropped the whole thing. Papers slid. He caught them against his chest with the brush hand, which left a gray smear across a nice sheet of Italian marbling.

"Katherine." He said it as if checking the word still worked. "What are you. How did you even find this place?"

"Layover," she said. "Forty hours. There was a flight crew hotel and a taxi driver who knew your name. Small country."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," she said. "It's not."

He set the papers down very carefully, like they might break, or like he might. He wiped his hands on his apron. He had glue on his knuckles and a pencil behind his ear and he looked exactly the same, which was the problem. She'd spent eight months building a version of him she could get over. The real one was ruining it in about four seconds.

"Do you want tea?" he said. His voice went up at the end like he was asking permission to exist. "I've got a kettle. It's not fancy tea. It's the tea I have."

"That sounded terrible," she said. "Yes. Tea!"

He pulled two mugs off a shelf that also held bone folders and a jar of brushes. One of the mugs had a chip in the rim she recognized. He gave her the good one and took the chipped one himself, and she hated him a little for that.

The garden had gone properly wild. Through the workshop's back window she could see a fig tree leaning over a wall and a bed of herbs that had mostly won their fight with the weeds. Bees everywhere. It was stupidly beautiful and she told it to stop being beautiful and it didn't listen.

"So," Joel said, leaning against the bench with his mug. "Flight attendant. Still flying."

"Still flying. Thirty-four now, if you're keeping track."

"I keep track," he said, and then looked like he wished he hadn't said it.

"You look good," she said. "Thinner. You eating?"

"I cook now. Actually cook. Not just beans on toast."

"Joel Wolfe learned to cook. Did the earth crack open?"

"Little bit." He almost smiled. Then he didn't, because the last conversation came back into the room with them. The one where he'd told her he was too ordinary for her life, too rooted, too much a man who stayed in one place with his presses and his glue while she crossed oceans. He'd said it like a favor. Like he was doing her one.

She hadn't agreed. That was the part that still stuck in her. She'd never once agreed.

She set down her mug and dug through her bag. The card was in the inside pocket, soft at the edges from years of handling. Cream colored, typed in some places, written over in pencil in her grandmother's cramped sideways hand. Lemon tart. The real one, the one nobody could get right because nobody wrote down the actual amounts.

"Question," Katherine said. "Does this garden have lemons?"

Joel blinked. "Lemons? Here? Outside? No. There's a fig tree and there was a plum tree until the storm got it. No lemons."

She held up the card. "My grandmother's lemon tart. There's a kitchen in the main house, the taxi man says the caretaker doesn't mind crew using it. And there's a shop in the village. So the lemons don't have to come from your garden. The question was mostly an excuse."

"An excuse to what?"

"Stay. Cook something. Eat it with you, if you're not busy." She put the card down on his bench, between the press and the jar of brushes, so it belonged to the room. "If you are busy, tell me now and I'll go back to the hotel and watch terrible television for two days and we'll never speak of this."

He looked at the card. He read the pencil notes upside down, which was a thing he used to do without thinking, and she watched him do it again and felt something in her chest do something it had no business doing.

"Your grandmother's recipe," he said quietly.

"Read the margin."

He turned the card around. In the corner, in that same pencil, was a note that said For Joel, he eats two pieces and lies about it. Her grandmother had met him exactly twice. The woman had him nailed inside of one dinner.

"She wrote that?" Joel said.

"Eighteen months ago. She liked you." Katherine folded her arms. "She liked you more than she liked the last one, and she made that known, and she was right, and I don't want to talk about the last one."

"Good. I really don't either."

"So. Tart. Yes or no?"

"Yes," he said. Too fast. He knew it too. "Yes, obviously. But I'm in the middle of a repair and if I leave the glue to skin over on this spine it's ruined, so give me forty minutes, and you can either sit here and tell me about every flight you've taken in eight months, or you can make yourself useful."

"Useful how?"

"There's lavender taking over the herb bed. There's gloves on the hook. If you're going to be in my garden, you can pull lavender like you're angry at it."

"I'm not angry at anything."

"You showed up at my workshop unannounced after eight months. You're angry at something." He said it lightly, but not nothing-light.

She put on the gloves.

* * *

Forty minutes turned into an hour because he had to wait for the glue to set to a certain tack and he wouldn't cheat it, even for her, even for this. She pulled lavender until her hands smelled like a soap shop and the bed stopped looking like a purple riot. He came out eventually with two chairs and set them in the shade by the fig tree and they sat with their tea like it was the most normal thing in the world.

"Tell me the real reason," he said.

"There isn't a real reason. There's a layover and a card and a garden."

"Katherine."

"And maybe," she said, looking at the fig tree and not at him, "maybe I got tired of pretending I was over it. Eight months is a long time to be over something and not be over it. That's all you get. Drink your tea."

He drank his tea.

"So what's this repair you ruined your morning for?" she asked.

He lit up in a way she remembered well. "Seventeenth-century parish register. Water damage. Somebody in eighteen-forty tried to fix it with what I'm pretty sure is tar."

"Tar."

"Tar and good intentions."

They got up eventually because the tart wasn't going to bake itself and because sitting that close to him for that long was doing things to her pulse she didn't have time for. The herb bed ran along the south wall of the garden, roses gone feral on one end, herbs holding the line on the other. Thyme, sage, a row of lavender she'd already beaten into submission, and rosemary gone woody and enormous.

"Rosemary for the pastry," Joel said, crouching down. "Grandmothers always sneak rosemary into lemon things. It's a law."

"It's not in the card."

"It's in the margins of the card. Pencil. Sideways."

She leaned over him to read. Sure enough, there it was, her grandmother's cramped hand running up the edge of the card like ivy. Something about rosemary, don't argue. Joel reached across her for a sprig and his hand brushed her waist. Just brushed. Through the shirt, no weight to it, there and gone.

She held still anyway. A second too long. Longer than a second, probably. Long enough that she could hear the bees working the lavender and her own breath doing something uneven.

"Sorry," he said, and his voice had gone careful.

"Don't be sorry. You were reaching for rosemary."

"Right." He pulled the sprig. He did not move away, though. Neither did she. They stood there like two idiots in a garden, crouched over an herb bed