The Micrometer Adjustment

Leigh had been a brewer for eleven years, and in that time he had learned that reliability was a compliment people gave you before they stopped thinking about you at all. His beer won small medals. His batch numbers never drifted. His Wednesday nights were as predictable as his mash temps, which was the problem, really. He was thirty-four years old and he could forecast his own evening the way he forecast fermentation, to within a degree, and it depressed him more than the town itself did.

Fitzroy Crossing did not offer much in the way of surprises. He had moved out here for the brewery job six years back and had settled into a life of quiet repetition, punctuated by the one irregular thing in his calendar, which was Kari.

Kari ran a mechanic's shop out of a shed on the edge of town, which is a real trade and not, as Leigh had assumed when he first heard it, a euphemism for anything. She was thirty-two, blunt, grease under the nails half the week and none of it faked, and she was the only mechanic in a hundred kilometres who had ever found the clog in his coolant line. His car had been overheating every second afternoon that first summer and she had fixed it in an afternoon and charged him less than he offered, and after that she kept showing up at the brewery taproom on slow Fridays, and after that he kept looking forward to Fridays in a way he did not examine too closely.

They flirted over engine blocks. That was the honest description of two years of knowing each other. She would say something dry about his timing belt and he would say something dry back and then they would drink a beer and she would go home and he would stand in his kitchen feeling as if he had been handed a gift and told not to open it yet.

So when she texted him on the Thursday and said, spring equinox, Saturday, signal cannon platform, bring nothing, wear something you can kneel in, he had read the message four times and replied "ok" like a person with no curiosity whatsoever, and then spent two days being curious about almost nothing else.

The signal cannon platform sat above the main intersection, a leftover from some colonial impulse to fire a gun at the sky on ceremonial occasions. It was a square of concrete and rust-streaked steel with a brass cannon bolted dead centre and a narrow railing around the edge, and you got up to it by a ladder that Leigh had never once had a reason to climb. On Saturday evening he climbed it, palms sweating on the rungs, and found the platform empty except for a small control booth with the door open, a camping lantern glowing inside, and Kari standing at the railing with a wooden case under one arm.

"Good, you can follow instructions already," she said. "Get up here properly."

He got up properly.

She looked, he thought, like she had dressed for the occasion, if the occasion were "mechanic at an important job." Work boots, canvas trousers, a shirt with the sleeves already rolled. Her hair was tied back. The wooden case she set down on a portable workbench inside the booth, next to a padded mat that had been laid on the floor with more care than any mat in Fitzroy Crossing had ever received.

"So here's the situation," Kari said, and opened the case. Inside, on green felt, lay a brass micrometer, old, heavy, the kind of tool that outlives its first three owners. "This belonged to my mentor. Dollie. She taught me most of what I know about measuring anything. She died last winter and left me her whole kit, and this is the piece I can't bear to have serviced by a stranger, and can't bear to leave seized."

Leigh looked at the micrometer and then at her. "Alright. What do you need me for?"

"The adjusting screw is seized. I can free it. But it needs a steady pair of hands holding the frame exactly level while I work the oil in, and I don't trust steady hands. I trust you." She said it flatly, the way she quoted prices. "Which brings me to the awkward part."

"The kneeling."

"You caught that, did you." She leaned against the workbench and looked at him, and for once she seemed to be choosing words rather than firing them. "I've been thinking about this a long time, Leigh. I don't want help tonight. I want an assistant who does exactly what I say, without question, until I say we're done. There's a thing I need from this that isn't about the micrometer. I need to be in charge of something and have it go right. And I need someone who wants to hand me that. I'm asking because I think that someone is you. Say no and we drink beer on the platform and that's the end of it. Say yes and you follow my instructions all evening."

The sun was going down behind the ranges and the light on the platform had gone the colour of the brass. Leigh thought about his Wednesday nights. He thought about two years of engine blocks.

"Yes," he said. "I'd like that. I want to do it properly."

"Good." Something eased in her shoulders. "Then listen. Your safeword is 'canon.' Say it, or tap out three times on anything, and everything stops, no questions, no hard feelings, done for the night. Everything else you hear from me is an instruction. Understand?"

"Canon. Understood."

"Then kneel on the mat."

He knelt. It was not a thing he had expected to enjoy as much as he did, the simple relief of being told where to be and going there. Kari watched him settle and gave a small nod, like a measurement coming out right, and turned to her tools.

What followed was an hour of the strangest, most absorbing work of his life. She had him hold the micrometer frame at chest height, level, dead still, while she applied penetrating oil to the seized screw with a fine applicator, one drop at a time. The lantern threw her shadow long across the booth. His arms ached within ten minutes. She noticed, of course she noticed.

"Still," she said, not unkindly, when his hands began to tremble.

"Trying."

"Trying is what beginners do. You're past trying. Hold." And he held, and the trembling got worse and then, strangely, better, because her voice kept coming, quiet and firm, counting his breaths down for him when he let them run fast, telling him when to shift his grip a quarter turn, when to freeze. There was oil on his fingers. There was her hand briefly steadying his wrist, warm through the dust on his skin. He had never felt so useful in his life and he was aware, distantly, that the feeling had nothing to do with micrometers.

When the screw finally turned, a grinding quarter rotation that Kari greeted with a word he would not repeat at the brewery, she sat back on her heels and looked at him for a while.

"You did well," she said. "That was the hard part. The rest is conditioning the thread, and I want it done slow, over the whole evening." She reached into the case's side pocket and brought out a leather strap, wide, worn soft. "Can I strap your wrists behind you? Yes or no."

"Yes."

He put them behind him without deciding to. She wrapped the strap around them and buckled it, snug, tested it with two fingers, and watched his face the whole time for anything she did not like. He gave her nothing to worry about. His pulse was doing