The Off-Key Reunion

The plan was simple enough. Drive out to Milford on a Friday, sit through two days of dental conference talks that would mostly be about new bonding agents, and come home Sunday night. I'd made the drive alone last year and it was four hours of radio and gas station coffee, so when Liza mentioned at the hygiene station next to mine that she hadn't booked a hotel yet, I said the thing before I thought about it.

"We could just ride out together. Split the gas, you know."

She looked up from the autoclave tray she was sorting and gave me one of those looks, the kind where she's deciding whether to make it weird or not. Three years ago that look used to make me nervous. Now it just made me glad I'd said something.

"Yeah, okay," she said. "You still drive that same old Subaru?"

"Same one. Two hundred and eleven thousand miles on it now."

"God. That thing should be in a museum." She snapped the lid on the tray. "Fine, pick me up at six Friday. I'm not leaving any later than that, I want to check in before dark."

So Friday morning I was outside her apartment at six sharp, which for me meant six twelve, and she was already on the curb with a carry-on suitcase and a tote bag that looked like it weighed more than the suitcase. She's thirty-six, two years younger than me, and she still gets carded at the wine store, which she complains about loudly and I suspect she enjoys. She had her hair up and one of those big puffy jackets that makes everyone look like a marshmallow, and she waved at me like we were doing something completely normal, which I guess we were.

She tossed the tote bag into the back seat first, and I have to admit that little motion stirred something in me, because she used to do the exact same thing three years ago, that quick underhand flip without looking, like the back seat was a basket she'd thrown a thousand things into. Then she wrestled the suitcase in after it and got into the passenger seat.

"Morning," she said, buckling up. "Coffee?"

"Cup holder's yours."

"You're a gentleman and a scholar." She opened the thermos I'd brought and poured into the lid, and she didn't ask if I wanted any, just took it as hers, which was also familiar. That was one thing about Liza. She never asked permission to be comfortable around you. She just was.

We got out of town and onto the highway while it was still gray out, and the radio was mostly static so I turned it off, and for a while we just drove. It was a good quiet, the kind you can only have with somebody you've already run out of small talk with once before. Around Harrisburg she started talking about Mrs. Pelletier, who is one of our regulars, the woman who comes in every four months like clockwork and tells the same story about her son in Phoenix.

"She asked me again if I was married," Liza said, sipping from the thermos lid. "Every visit. Glen, every single visit, for like six years. And last time I said no and she goes, 'Well, you keep looking, honey, they don't find themselves.' Like I'm out here losing them in the couch cushions."

"Maybe you are."

"I have checked every couch cushion I own, thank you." She laughed and settled the thermos in her lap. "What about you, what did she tell you?"

"She told me I have a nice smile and I should smile more, which from your chair is a professional insult."

"That is an insult. You sit in my chair and tell me my smile is nice? I'd bill you for that."

I was on I-80 west with the sun coming up over the hills and I was laughing at a dumb joke with a woman I used to date, and I remember thinking that this was the most fun I'd had in a car in a long time, which is a sad thing to think, but there it is. Since my daughter went off to college in August the house has been so quiet I can hear the refrigerator hum from the other room, and I've been restless in a way I couldn't name. Two kids, both gone. My ex moved to Ohio years ago. It's just me and the dog, and the dog sleeps eighteen hours a day.

"So can I ask you something," Liza said, maybe forty minutes later, somewhere past Bloomsburg, and I knew from her tone it wasn't going to be about patients.

"Sure."

"You know how Brandi keeps bugging me about the Scranton opening."

I did know. Brandi Steiger, our other hygienist, and the office's self-appointed committee on everyone's personal business, had been mentioning the Scranton job to Liza for about two months, mostly because Liza's mother lives up there now and is seventy-one and starting to need help with stuff. Liza had been quiet about it at work, which for Liza is unusual.

"Yeah, I've heard her mention it."

"Well I applied. Last week. I didn't tell you because I hadn't decided if I even wanted it, and now they called and they want me to come interview in December, and I don't know, Glen." She was looking out the window at the hills when she said it. "My mom's not bad yet. But she's getting there. She fell on the ice two winters ago and she didn't tell me for three days. Three days, with a bruise as vast as a dinner plate. And I was two hours away and didn't know."

"That's rough."

"I know it's rough, that's why I'm telling you." She picked at the label on the thermos. "It's a good job. Same money, maybe a little more. It's just that everything else is here."

I didn't say anything right away because I was doing that thing where I try to figure out what "everything else" means, and whether I was in that list or not, and I hated that I was doing that. Three years ago Liza and I went out for about four months, dinner and a few movies and one weekend at her sister's lake place, and it ended fine, or what everybody calls fine, which is that nobody yelled. She wanted more than I had to give at the time. My kids were still in high school, I was still doing the every-other-weekend dad thing, and I told her I couldn't promise her anything with a shape to it, and she said okay, and she meant it, and it ended there. We've worked three chairs apart from each other ever since and it's been fine too, actual fine, no weirdness, but there's always been this little hum in the air when we're both at the sterilization counter at the same time that I've never once mentioned to anybody.

"What's your gut say," I finally asked. "About Scranton."

"My gut says go. My gut's a real pain in the ass, honestly." She turned in the seat to face me a little. "What would you do? If you were me."

"I'd go see my mom more."

"That's the answer my gut gave." She laughed, but it came out shorter than her usual laugh. "See, you're no help. You just agree with my gut and then my gut gets smug."

"It's a good gut."

We drove a while after that without much talking, and I kept thinking about what she'd said, everything else is here, and I kept not asking what she meant, because I'm thirty-eight years old and I still chicken out of asking things like that. Then, coming up on the exit for Milford, I said something I hadn't planned.

"You know we're passing right by Milroy. The choir hall's like ten minutes off 80."

She turned her head slow, the way she does. "The church? St. What's it, St. Alban's?"

"St. Alban's. Thursday rehearsals, that awful podium that wobbled."

"Oh my god, the wobbly podium!" She was grinning now, full grin, the one I remembered. "You still remember the alto part to that thing we butchered at Christmas?"

"I remember you elbowing me every time I came in early."

"You DID come in early. Every time. Tenor section, always a half beat ahead, like you were being chased." She looked out the front window at the exit sign, and then she said, "Is it seriously close? We've got time before check-in."

"Ten minutes. Maybe twelve with the back roads."

"Well then." She pulled her jacket off and dropped it on the tote bag. "Detour, doctor. Take the exit."

I took the exit.

We came off the interstate and onto the back roads, which were the kind I remembered, two lanes with a yellow line gone chalky and farm fields lying flat and stubbled on both sides, and after a while the trees opened up and there it was, St. Alban's, white clapboard and a steeple that looked shorter than I remembered, sitting back from the road behind a crooked sign that said the Wednesday supper was meatloaf. I pulled onto the gravel shoulder and shut the engine off and for a second we just sat there with the tick of the cooling motor, because that's the thing about places like that, they don't look like much until you haven't seen them in a while.

"It's smaller than I remember," Liza said, leaning forward to look up at the steeple. "Everything's smaller. I know that's the oldest line in the world but it keeps being true."

"The podium's probably still small too."

"The podium was the right size, it was just possessed." She was already getting her door open, gravel crunching under her sneakers, and she called back over the roof of the Subaru, "Come on, let's see if it's open. Churches are open, that's their whole deal."

It was not open, actually. We tried the main doors and both of the side doors and stood around on the front steps like a couple of burglars, and then Liza walked around back and found the little door by the kitchen entrance standing ajar, which is exactly how it always was on Thursdays too, some lady from the altar guild propping it for air. We went in through the back hall, past the coffee urns and a corkboard with a sign-up sheet for the meatloaf supper, and the whole building smelled like old paper and furniture polish, and we both stayed quiet, we just walked.

The choir hall was off to the side of the sanctuary, a low room with folding chairs set in rows on risers, and somebody had left the lights on over by the piano, probably by accident, probably weeks ago for all I know. Liza went straight to the second row like she had a homing beacon, and I followed, and there they were, the alto seats, and two seats over and slightly behind, the tenors.

"Okay, this is my seat," she said, sitting down on a folding chair that complained under her. "Third from the left, second riser. I sat here for four years and I have no idea why I remember that."

"Third from the left. Yeah." I sat down in the tenor section, one seat in, because that had been mine, and the chair wobbled the way everything in that room wobbled, and she looked back at me over her shoulder and laughed.

"You're in my sightline. Did you know that? From here I could see the whole tenor section, and you were the one who sat right in the middle of it."

"I knew that," I said, and then, because we were in an empty room and there was no reason left to chicken out, I said the rest of it. "I always watched you during the alto solos. That's why I came in early. Not because I couldn't count, which Brandi still believes, but because when you stood up to sing I'd lose the whole measure watching you."

She turned around all the way in her chair, one arm over the back of it, and she didn't laugh this time and she didn't look away either, which is a lot of information from Liza, who is very good at laughing things off.

"Three years," she said. "You watched me three years ago and you're telling me now, in an empty church, in a folding chair."

"It seemed like the right place to say it."

"It's a terrible place to say it. There's no exit strategy in a church." But she was smiling, not the full grin, something smaller and more careful. "I knew you watched me. Mrs. Pelletier's husband used to sit in the back and he told me once, he said, that tenor fella never looks at the music. I decided not to bring it up because it was nice, having somebody watch."

The radiator under the windows made a clank and neither of us said anything for a second, and then she stood up and patted the piano like it was an old dog and said we should probably go before somebody caught us trespassing at their church, and she was right, and also I noticed she'd said it was nice, having somebody watch, past tense, and I filed that away with everything else I was too slow to ask about.

The drive back to the interstate took twelve minutes exactly, like I'd promised, and the motel in Milford was the kind of place that hosts conference people every October, a long two-story building with an ice machine and a sign about a continental breakfast, and there was a line at the front desk, three other dental people ahead of us by their lanyards, and by the time we got up there the guy behind the counter was already shaking his head before I said a word.

"Double-booking weekend," he said, typing with two fingers. "I got one room left. One bed, king." He looked at Liza, then at me, with the flat professional apologetic look of someone who has said this sentence four hundred times this weekend. "There's a motor lodge nine miles up the road, but the Scranton folks booked that out too. Conference season."

"Nine miles in the wrong direction," I said, and I was already reaching for my wallet to ask about the king, when Liza said, "No room with two beds?"

"We got one room, one bed. There's a fold-out couch option in some units but the last