The Lube Tango

My name is Jessi, I'm thirty-seven years old, and until last Saturday I had never lied to my husband about anything bigger than a dentist bill.

That's not exactly true. I've fudged the grocery total. Once I told Jon I loved his mother's casserole, which is perjury in most states. But I had never lied about where I was going. And there I was, standing in the kitchen with my purse over my shoulder, saying the words "dental conference" to a man who had known me for fifteen years.

"Since when do hygienists go to conferences?" Jon asked. He was reading on his tablet at the counter, coffee going cold next to him. He's thirty-six, an architect, a man who owns four identical gray sweaters on purpose.

"Since they invented new floss, Jon. There's a whole world of floss innovation happening in this city and I've been ignoring it."

"On a Saturday?"

"Saturday conferences are cheaper. The CE credits are the same." I said that with total confidence, which is the trick. Confidence is ninety percent of a lie. The other ten percent is not making eye contact.

He looked at me over the tablet. "Where is it?"

"The... Marriott."

"Which Marriott?"

"Jon. My God. Why are you cross-examining me? I'm going to sit in a ballroom and learn about tartar. Do you think I'm making that up for fun? Do you think 'tartar' is my secret thrill?"

He laughed and went back to his tablet. That's my Jon. Trusting to the bone. It made me feel terrible, which I want to note, because later that afternoon I felt things that were not terrible at all, and I need the terrible part on the record first.

"Take the kids' car," he said. "Mine needs an oil change."

"Will do. Love you. Bye."

"Love you, tell the tartar people hi."

I got in the minivan and sat there for a full minute with my hands on the wheel. Thirty-seven years old. Married at twenty-four, kids, house, a dental practice on Route 9 where I scrape other people's teeth and say "wow, you've been flossing" to liars all day long. My whole life was dependable. Dependable like a fence.

And on Tuesday, out of nowhere, a message had landed in my old college email, which I only check for alumni tax scams. Eva Chen. Forty-one years old now, owner of a used bookstore downtown, and the girl I'd had a slow, stupid, never-acted-on crush on my entire senior year. I was twenty-one then, she was twenty-five and a grad student working the library desk, and we flirted for nine months like two people playing chicken. Neither of us ever jumped. She graduated. I married a nice boy. Sixteen years went by.

Her message said: Saw your face on the practice website. You still floss-shame strangers? Come by the shop Saturday, I owe you a coffee from 2010.

I typed back "yes" before I had finished deciding anything.

* * *

Patterson's Paper & Page sits in the middle of the fancy-ification of downtown, wedged between a juice bar and a place that sells $14 candles. Inside it was all crooked shelves and paper smell, stacked so tight I had to turn sideways to get through. There was a little café corner in the front with two tables and an espresso machine that looked older than me.

Eva was behind the counter, and I recognized her instantly. Black hair with some gray coming in at the temples that she clearly wasn't fighting. Reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She looked up and said, "No," like she was insulted.

"No?"

"No way that's Jessi Robinson. You look exactly the same."

"I look exactly the same like someone who scrapes plaque for a living, Eva. That's not the compliment you think it is."

"It's absolutely the compliment I think it is." She came around the counter and hugged me, and the hug lasted about two seconds longer than hugs between old classmates last. She smelled like coffee and old paper. "Sit. I'm making you a flat white and you're going to tell me why your website says 'Best Hygienist 2019' like that's not lifetime ago."

"That was a real award. There was a certificate."

"There was a plaque, wasn't there."

"There was a plaque, Eva."

She made the coffees and we sat at the little table by the window, and it was easy. That's what got me. Sixteen years and two careers and my whole gray-sweater life, and talking to her was like picking up a phone call I'd never hung up. We talked about the store, her divorce three years back, my kids, the awful candle shop next door. She kept touching my arm when she laughed. Small thing. I noticed every one of them.

"Okay, wait," she said, standing up. "I have to show you something. You're the only person who'll appreciate it."

She disappeared into the stacks and came back with a big dusty book in both hands like it was a baby. "Illustrated anatomy atlas, 1880s, came in a box lot from an estate. Except somebody, some doctor probably, a hundred years ago, drew in the margins."

"Drew what?"

She set it down and opened it to a page about the pelvis, and there, inked in the margin in fine Victorian penmanship, was a naked woman and a naked man doing something the 1880s would absolutely not have approved of. And beside that, a second drawing. Two women.

"Eva," I said.

"I know."

"Someone drew two women in the margin of a medical atlas."

"Pen and ink. Detail work. This person had time and feelings." She turned the page and there was more, and I laughed, and she watched me laugh instead of the book, which I also noticed. "The dealer wanted forty bucks for the whole box because the atlas was 'water damaged.' Buddy. It's improved."

"It's a rare edition," I said. "Modified. Enthusiast's copy."

"Exactly. One of one." She leaned her hip against the table, way inside my space, and pointed at the two women with one finger. "See, this is why I messaged you. Back in the library, you were the only student who would have gotten this joke."

"Would I have?"

"Jessi. You used to shelve books upside down on purpose so I'd come fix them."

"That is a slander," I said, while remembering the many books I had shelved upside down on purpose so she'd come fix them.

She was still laughing, and I went for my purse to get my phone, to find the old photo I swear I had of the two of us at the library holiday party. And my purse, which is a black hole with a strap, produced a small plastic tube that hit the table with a click and rolled to a stop between the coffee cups.

A tube of personal lubricant. Travel size. There is no world in which there is a good version of this.

Eva picked it up, turned it over, and raised one eyebrow so high it nearly left her face.

"So," she said.

"It's for a sore jaw," I said.

Silence. A real one. The espresso machine hissed somewhere behind her.

"A sore jaw," she said.

"Occupational. Hygienists get jaw strain. From... scraping. There's a, uh, a massage technique, you use a little... glide."

She looked at the tube. Then at me. Then at the tube again, which was very clearly labeled for its actual purpose, in large friendly letters.

"Jessi," she said gently, "I have sold fifty thousand books and read the backs of all of them. That is the worst cover story I have ever held in my hand."

"I panicked."

"You panicked."

"It was in my purse for reasons that are, that are private, and unrelated, and I grabbed my phone and the whole bag just, everything fell out, there's also a receipt in there from 2022, it's a disaster in there, it's not a curated bag, Eva."

"Who curates a bag?"

"That's my point!"

She set the tube down on the table between us, right in the middle, like a chess piece, and took off her glasses, and looked at me in a way nobody had looked at me in about a decade.

"Okay," she said. "Sore jaw. Sure. I'll allow it, because I missed you and I'm not ruining this over a tube." She tapped it once with her finger. "But for the record, whatever the real reason is that you're carrying that around on a Saturday, walking into my store..."

"It's unrelated," I said.

"Uh huh. And the dental conference at the Marriott?"

"How do you know about the conference?" I asked, and she just grinned, and my stomach did something I hadn't felt since I was twenty-one, and from the front of the store a voice called out, "Hello? Anyone working here? I'm looking for a signed Chandler."

"I'm looking for a signed Chandler," the man at the counter said again, like volume would help us. He was maybe forty-five, tweed coat, the kind of mustache that takes commitment.

"That's my cue," Eva said, and stood up, and the tube stayed on the table between our cups like a little plastic accusation. "Signed first edition Chandler, rare, absolutely, give me ten minutes to check the back room inventory."

"Take your time," he said, already drifting toward the mystery shelf. "I'll browse."

"I'll help you look," I said, way too fast.

Eva looked at me. "You don't know where anything is."

"A year of shelving experience. Upside down, sure, but still."

"I know where it is," she said, quiet, just for me. "Back room. Come on."

And I went. That's the part I keep chewing on. She said come on and I went, no hesitation, leaving my purse and my cover story and my whole careful life sitting at the café table.

* * *

The back room was exactly what you'd want a bookstore back room to be. Narrow. Dim. Piles of unsorted hardcovers stacked everywhere like a paper avalanche frozen halfway through falling. One bare bulb. It smelled like dust and old glue and, faintly, the espresso machine through the wall.

"Watch the Ross MacDonald stack," Eva said, squeezing past me in the aisle. "It's load bearing."

"Sorry."

"It's not, that's a joke, nothing in here is organized."

"Where's the Chandler?"