The Merger Melt

The email came on a Tuesday and it had the word "synergy" in the first sentence, which is never a good sign. Harriet Parks, it said, forty-three years old, entomologist, eleven years at the Alpine Research Station, please attend a mandatory informational meeting Thursday at two regarding the proposed merger with the Institute for Mountain Ecology.

I read it three times at my desk with my coffee going cold next to a tray of frozen moth specimens. Eleven years. I'd come to Viremont when I was thirty-two, right after my doctorate, and I'd built the whole pollination study from nothing. The alpine bumblebee survey. Two hundred hours of field notes and a database I maintained myself because the station couldn't afford proper software. None of it was in the email. The email was about restructuring and shared administrative costs and a slide deck that was attached and that I had no intention of opening before Thursday.

The truth is I'd been nervous about the merger since the first rumors started in October. Everyone at the station had. The kitchen had that tense quiet that a workplace gets when nobody wants to be the one to ask the obvious question. The obvious question being, will there still be a job for me in six months.

My last serious relationship ended when I was thirty-eight, five years ago now, and I'd gotten comfortable with the idea that my life was going to be the station and the bees and a small apartment above a cheese shop. So maybe that's why the merger announcement hit me harder than it should have. It wasn't just a job. It was basically the whole thing.

Thursday came with fresh snow on the peaks and the road up to the station half plowed. I wore the good boots. The meeting was supposed to be in the conference room on the second floor, and I got there at ten to two with my notebook and a pen that barely worked.

There was a note taped to the conference room door. It said the meeting had been moved and there was a room number, 114, down on the ground floor. No signature. I should have thought about that for a second, because who moves a mandatory all-staff meeting and doesn't send an email. But I was distracted, running through in my head what I'd say if they asked me to justify my budget, so I just went downstairs.

Room 114 turned out to be locked. I stood in the hallway feeling stupid, and that's when I heard the fax machine going somewhere down at the end, near the greenhouse entrance. I walked toward it because I figured someone had to be near a fax machine.

The machine was on a little stand just inside the greenhouse door, and it was spitting out pages one after another. Merger documents. I could see the Institute letterhead on the top sheet, the same logo from the email. Page after page, the red light blinking, the machine groaning like it hated its job. I started pulling pages off and squaring them up. Budget projections. Staffing matrices. There was a column with names and a column with what looked like status codes, and mine had a letter next to it I couldn't figure out. R, maybe. Or P. The print was smudged.

I was squinting at the fourth page when I heard footsteps on the gravel path behind the tropical section, and a man's voice said, "You're early. That's fine, honestly, I could use the full hour."

Jake Townsend came around the row of gentians carrying a folded massage table under one arm and a bottle of oil in the other hand. He's the greenhouse manager, forty-five, has been there longer than I have. Tall, built like someone who moves pots for a living, which he does. He had his sleeves rolled up and there was potting soil on one forearm.

He stopped when he saw me. He looked at the massage table. He looked at me. He looked at the fax pages in my hand.

"Oh," he said. "You're not Glenna."

"I'm not Glenna," I agreed. "I'm looking for the merger meeting. There was a note on the conference room door."

"Room 114?" He laughed, and it was a real laugh, not a polite one. "That's this. I mean, the greenhouse. I wrote that note. For Glenna. The director. She books a massage with me every month, back bench by the workbench, and she's always wandering off so I leave her notes."

"You give massages," I said. It came out more like a question than I meant it to.

"I give one massage. Once a month. To my boss." He set the table down against the workbench and rubbed his hands on his jeans, which did nothing about the potting soil. "I took a course in physiotherapy years ago, back when I thought I might do something else with my life. She has a bad shoulder. It's honestly the least weird thing in the world. Well. It's a little weird. But she brings the coffee, and it has nothing to do with the budget, I'm very clear about that, so."

I held up the fax pages. "These were printing. I think there's a staffing list in here."

His face changed when he saw the letterhead. "That's tomorrow's problem," he said, but he didn't sound like he meant it, and neither did I. "Come on, you can't stand in the doorway in January. It's warm in here. Come look at the saxifrages, they're doing something ridiculous."

The greenhouse was, as always, about thirty degrees warmer than the rest of my life. Snow on the glass outside, green and dripping inside. He put the kettle on the little burner by the workbench, because Jake is the kind of person who has a kettle in every building he's ever worked in, and we stood there among the alpine cushions while the fax machine, apparently finished, went quiet behind us.

"So the meeting," he said. "You walked all the way down here for nothing."

"The note said 114."

"The note was for Glenna, who is now, I assume, sitting in an empty conference room on the second floor wondering where everyone is." He winced. "I should go fix that."

"You should absolutely go fix that."

He didn't move. He poured two cups of tea instead and handed me one, and we leaned against the workbench, and he asked me what I thought the merger meant for the bee survey and I told him I didn't know, and he said he didn't know what it meant for the greenhouse either, the collection took twenty years to build and you can't move a saxifrage collection like furniture. We stood there being worried together, which is more comfortable than being worried alone.

"I could still do your shoulder," he said suddenly, like the thought had just arrived. "I mean, if you carry field equipment. Your shoulders are probably wrecked. Nobody's using the table now anyway."

"My shoulders are fine," I said.

"Nobody's shoulders are fine at forty-three."

"I'm forty-three, yes. How did you know that."

"Staff directory," he said, and grinned, and I laughed, and the kettle ticked as it cooled, and outside the snow kept coming down over Viremont while inside the greenhouse it smelled like wet soil and thyme and, faintly, the massage oil he'd set on the bench, which was apparently almond.

"Ten minutes," he said. "If you hate it, I'll never mention it again. And I'll drive you up to the conference room myself and we'll tell Glenna the meeting was moved together and she'll never know I mixed you up with the director."

"That's a terrible plan."

"It's the only plan I have," he said, unfolding the table. Then he patted it. "Sit on the edge. Shirt stays on for now. I work through fabric at first anyway."

So I sat. The vinyl was cold through my blouse and then it wasn't. He stepped behind me and I heard the oil bottle click open, and then there was a little pause.

"It's warm," he said. "I keep it in the propagation bench. Sounds weird but it works."

"Nothing about this afternoon is going to sound normal, Jake."

"Fair."

The first touch was both hands flat on my shoulders, just resting there for a second, and then his thumbs dug in under my collarbones and I made a noise I had not planned on making.

"There it is," he said. "Yeah, nobody's shoulders are fine."

"Shut up."

He worked in slow circles, and the oil had soaked through the fabric in patches, and his hands were much stronger than I'd guessed from a man who spends his days carrying trays of seedlings. He found a knot near my right shoulder blade that I'd been living with since roughly the spring bee season and pressed into it until it gave up.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, that's. Okay. Yes!"

"Good spot?"

"That's the spot. Don't stop. I mean. Obviously."

He laughed, low, right behind my ear, and I felt it more than heard it. The greenhouse dripped somewhere. The kettle ticked. His thumbs worked down either side of my spine and my head dropped forward and for a while neither of us said anything smart, which was a relief, because I'd been smart at people all week.

"Harriet," he said, after a bit. "Can I undo the shirt? It's soaking up all the oil and I can't actually get at anything through it."

My head came up. I turned halfway around and looked at him. He wasn't doing a face. He was just standing there with oil on his hands, waiting, not leaning in, not assuming anything.

"It's a massage," he said. "That's all it is. If you want to stop at a massage, the massage is great. I just can't do the lower back properly through cotton."

And here is the part I keep going back over. I was forty-three years old, sitting on a massage table in my own workplace, my boss's monthly arrangement having gone sideways because of a note I probably should have taken as a warning, and every sensible part of me said this is not the afternoon for this. And then there was the other part, the one that had been alone for five years and carrying field equipment for eleven, and that part said, well, it's just a back.

"You can undo it," I said. "The lower back is genuinely terrible. Years of kneeling on scree."

"That I believe."

He undid the buttons slowly, one at a time, and there was nothing hurried in it, and I did not turn around and neither did he. The blouse came off my shoulders and he folded it and set it on the workbench next to the trowels, which struck me as funny at the exact moment I needed something to be funny.

"Face down," he said. "If that's okay."

"That's okay."

I lay down on my forearms and looked at the bench leg and a tray of saxifrage plugs about six inches from my nose, and then his hands landed flat on my back and everything got very simple for a while. Warm oil, spreading from the base of my spine up between my shoulder blades, his palms following it. He was thorough about it in a way that stopped being clinical somewhere around the third pass. The strokes got longer. His fingers spread wider. When he worked along the muscles next to my spine his fingertips came within an inch of the side of my breast through the bra and did not