The Moving Day Umbrella

I was fifty-two years old and I was packing boxes full of glass eyes on a Saturday afternoon.

That's not a complaint, exactly. It's just where I was. Victoria, wedding planner, single, owner of a sedate gray sedan and a subscription to a cooking magazine I never cook from. My life ran on a schedule so reliable you could set a clock by it. Tuesdays I did site visits. Thursdays I did the books. Saturday, apparently, I helped an old almost-boyfriend pack up his taxidermy shop.

Ryan had dated me briefly two years back, after we met at that tourism expo where he had a booth with a mounted fox wearing a tiny top hat. It fizzled out after two months, the way things fizzle when neither person actually wants the fireworks, and we'd stayed friendly since. He was fifty-four now, moving to a smaller studio across town because the lease on this place got tripled.

"You can stop pretending you know how to wrap that," Ryan said, coming out of the back room with a roll of bubble wrap under his arm. He's a big man, gray at the temples, hands like catcher's mitts. "Those deer feet will break before the glass will."

"I'm wrapping them exactly as much as they deserve," I said. "Which is barely at all. These are horrible, Ryan."

"They're valuable."

"They're feet. On a stick."

"Antique footstools," he said, with the dignity of a museum curator. "Victorian. You'd be shocked what people collect."

I wouldn't have, actually. Fifteen years of wedding planning means I've seen a groom's cake shaped like a fishing boat and a mother of the bride demand a live peacock. But I let him have it.

The shop was already half empty. The front counter was bare, the display cases gutted, and what was left stood around in cardboard boxes like orphans at a station. Squirrel skins in one. A shoebox of badger teeth in another. I'd found a jar labeled MISC EYES and decided not to ask.

The door chimed around two, and Cassy came in holding two pizza boxes over her head like a waiter in a cartoon. Cassy is thirty-five, one of our tour guides at the agency, and the closest thing I have to a work spouse. She shares my office and uses my stapler without asking, which is basically marriage.

"Pizza's here, peasants," she announced. "Where do you want it, on top of the dead things or next to them?"

"Next to. Away from the eyes jar," I said.

Felix appeared from the back room wiping his hands on a rag. He's Ryan's business partner, forty, tall and lean and not much of a talker until you get two beers in him. He and Cassy looked at each other the way they always do, some history there I only know the outline of, and Cassy set the boxes down on the cleared half of the front counter.

"Pepperoni and a mushroom," she said. "I don't know who likes what anymore. The last time I fed Felix he was thirty-five and I was thirty and he didn't say thank you either."

"That was one time," Felix said.

"It was just that one time," Cassy said.

Ryan and I looked at each other. He raised an eyebrow. I raised one back. Neither of us asked.

We ate standing up among the boxes, which felt appropriate. Cassy picked up a mounted pheasant head and held it like a hand puppet.

"Say something, Darrin."

"The pizza is adequate," she said, in a posh voice, bobbing the bird.

"Put Darrin down, he's sold," Ryan said.

"He's sold to who? Who buys Darrin?"

"A man in Portland. He has a game room. You don't want to know more than that."

I was laughing, actually laughing, cheese grease on my fingers, and I thought again about how long it had been since a Saturday looked like this. My Saturdays were meal prep and a crossword and a phone call with my sister. I was fifty-two and well-behaved and the most reckless thing I'd done this year was buy a red coat.

Cassy dropped Darrin back in his box and dusted her hands. "So what's left to pack?"

"Nothing you two need to worry about. The heavy stuff. Why don't you two take the pizza remnants to the back room and stay out from underfoot," Ryan said.

"Yes, sir," Cassy said, with a little salute, and she and Felix wandered back with the box.

That left Ryan and me wrapping deer feet in peace, which sounds like the start of a joke nobody would tell. He asked about the Henderson wedding. I asked about his hip. Regular stuff.

Then the rain started.

Not a drizzle. A full sideways downpour, the kind that comes off the mountains in October and sounds like gravel on the roof. The front windows went gray. Cassy yelled something from the back room that I couldn't hear over it.

"Guess you're stuck with us," I said.

"Tragic," Ryan said, but he didn't look tragic about it.

I went back to use the little bathroom off the kitchenette, and that's where I found it, standing in the corner by the coat hooks like it had always been there. An umbrella. Not a normal one. A big golf umbrella, sure, but this thing was wide as a card table, wooden handle, the kind of umbrella you see in old movies where two people walk under it and the movie makes a point of their shoulders touching.

I carried it out into the back room, where Cassy was sitting on the old couch with her feet up on a milk crate and Felix was eating the last slice standing over the sink.

"Ryan," I called. "You know you own an umbrella for two?"

He came back wiping his hands. "That came with the shop. Previous tenant left it. I've had it five years and never used it once."

"An umbrella for two," I said again, holding it up. "Fancy. It's practically a honeymoon suite with a canopy."

Cassy tilted her head back off the couch arm to look at it upside down. "That's the biggest umbrella I've ever seen. You could fit three people under that. Easy."

"Three people and a pheasant," Felix said.

The rain hammered down and the light in the little room went dim and blue, and I stood there with this ridiculous umbrella in my hand, fifty-two years old, well-behaved for fifty-two years, and something in me decided to be a little less well-behaved. I'm not saying I knew what I was doing. I'm saying I opened my mouth anyway.

"Ryan," I said. "You're moving out. Last day. Rainstorm. Nobody can leave. This feels like the sort of afternoon that's supposed to be memorable."

He looked at me, then at Cassy, then back at me. Cassy had gone very still on the couch, in the way she does when she's interested and pretending she isn't.

"Memorable how?" Ryan asked, careful, as if approaching a deer he didn't want to spook. Which, given his profession, was probably instinct.

"How do you play a game with an umbrella for two when there are four of us?" I said.

Cassy sat up slowly. "Oh," she said. "Oh, that kind of game!"

"Is there another kind?" I asked.

Felix set his crust down on the counter, very deliberately, and looked at Ryan. Ryan looked at the rain. "Everybody sure?" he asked finally. "Say it out loud. And anyone can say stop, at any minute, and we stop."

"Sure," Cassy said.

"Sure," Felix said.

"Sure," I said, and found that I meant it.

I popped the umbrella open right there in the back room, which was a mistake, because it filled half the space and knocked a stack of newspaper over. Cassy shrieked and Felix ducked.

"Okay, new rule, we do this in the front room," I said. "There's floor space."

"The display cases are empty," Ryan said. "Floor's all yours."

So we trooped out front, four adults, one enormous umbrella, and rain hammering the windows so loud we'd have to yell to hear a fire alarm. Ryan propped the door open a crack so the umbrella could stay up without anyone holding it, which was smart, because I hadn't thought that far.

"Rules," I said. "Everybody under the umbrella. That's it. That's the whole game so far."

"That's not a game, that's standing," Felix said.

"Standing very close," Cassy said.

We stepped under it. It was tight. Four grown people under one canopy is less romantic and more like an elevator with weather. Cassy's elbow