the olivewood leg

Penelope Boone is forty-three years old and she has never loved a job this much in her whole life, and the funny part is the job is mixing fake moon dust in a quarry shed in Fleetwood, North Carolina. That's it. The romance of it is exactly that, if you can call it romance. She clocks in at six at night, she ties on her dust mask, and for eight hours the only faces she sees are masks and the only voices she hears are the mixers.

Is that sad? People keep asking her if that's sad. Her sister asked, and the girl at the pharmacy asked, and even Henri asked once, in his careful supervisor way. But here is what nobody gets. When you come out of a twelve-year relationship, six months back, and the apartment is suddenly twice as big as it used to be, and every mirror in that apartment is a little ambush waiting to happen, you start to appreciate a place with no mirrors at all.

The quarry shed has exactly zero mirrors. It has steel catwalks, it has mixing drums the size of Hot Wheel garages on steroids, it has pallets of bagged simulant stacked to the ceiling, and it has a ventilation grate that hums a low steady note like the world's most boring choir. Penelope loves that hum. She would marry that hum if it were legal.

Summer in Fleetwood is a furnace with a grudge, so the roll-up doors stand open at both ends of the shed and the night air comes through hot and dry, carrying quarry dust that mixes with the simulant dust until Penelope can't always tell which dust is work and which dust is just North Carolina being North Carolina. She's a hygienist, which out here means she's the one who makes sure nobody breathes a lungful of powdered fake moon, and she's good at it, and it's quiet work, mostly.

Quiet. That's the word. The whole operation runs on quiet. The mixers do their low grinding, the ventilation hums, the forklift beeps maybe four times a night, and that is the entire soundtrack. Six months of this. Six months of going home to the big apartment, sleeping alone, coming back, and knowing that for eight paid hours nobody on this earth is going to say her name out loud.

So of course it can't last. Nothing good lasts, that's basically the rule of the universe.

"Boone! Got a minute?" Henri Johansen comes across the concrete floor at the start of her shift on a Tuesday, waving a clipboard like the clipboard owes him money. Henri is fifty-one, swing shift supervisor, hired her six years ago when she was thirty-seven, and he's a decent man who wants exactly one thing out of life, which is for this facility to run without drama. He is about to have a very bad week.

"Depends," Penelope says, pulling her mask down around her neck. "Is it drama?"

"Wish I could say no." He flips a page. "State forestry service called. They're sending a guy out, three nights, starting tonight."

"Three nights doing what? We don't have trees. That's kind of the whole point of a quarry."

"Tree ring fella. Cross-dater. He needs our side bench, the one by the east door, because it's got good acoustics or some such. He's bringing his own gear." Henri pauses, and Penelope knows that pause. That pause is the bad news arriving. "He's recording a wooden leg, Penelope."

She blinks. "I'm sorry, run that by me again?"

"A leg. A wooden one. Olivewood, he says, very rare, some kind of core sample, and he needs to record it with specialized microphones while he taps it. That's what he told me on the phone. Tapping. For three nights."

"Who taps a leg for three nights?"

"A man named Mikey Lowe, apparently, and he has paperwork, so we say yes." Henri rubs his eyes. "Look, he keeps to the side bench, you keep to your drums, everybody wears hearing protection if the tapping bothers them, and this is over Thursday. Can you do that for me?"

"I can do that," Penelope says, and she means it, right up until about three hours later.

Because the thing about Mikey Lowe is this. She knows him. She knows him the way you know a splinter. Three years ago, when they were both working some shared state contract nonsense, there was an argument over workspace, an argument that got loud, an argument that Penelope won on points but lost in her soul, because Mikey Lowe does not forget and neither does she. He's forty-seven now, she's forty-three, and in three years they have exchanged maybe forty words and zero pleasantries.

So when the pickup truck rolls up to the east door at nine o'clock and Mikey Lowe climbs out, Penelope is standing on the catwalk with a bag of simulant in her arms and she says, out loud, to nobody, "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

He's a big fella, Mikey, forearms like bridge cables, gray coming in at the temples, wearing a forestry service polo that's seen better decades. And he's carrying, of all things, a wooden leg. An actual carved wooden leg, from the knee down, olivewood by the color of it, some pale gold wood with a grain like frozen water. He carries it like it's a sleeping baby and he's looking around the shed like he owns it.

"Evening!" he hollers up at her, because of course he hollers, in a shed where the quiet has been carefully maintained for six years. "You're the hygienist, right? Boone?"

"Penelope Boone," she says, coming down the catwalk stairs slow, making him wait. "And you're the leg tapper."

"I'm the tree ring cross-dater, actually, but sure, leg tapper works." He sets the leg on the side bench with the care of a man handling a newborn. "Henri didn't mention you worked nights."

"Henri didn't mention you were you, either, or I'd have taken my vacation days." She's being petty and she knows it and part of her does not care one bit. "What's the story with the leg, anyway?"

"This?" He pats it. "Nineteen twenty-something, Italian maker, olivewood, which is about as rare as it gets in prosthetics. There's a question about whether the maker used a specific joinery technique, and wood tone tells you things. So I record it. Taps, resonances, the whole deal. Specialized microphones, calibrated mallet."

"A calibrated mallet. You brought a mallet."

"Two mallets," he says, with the dignity of a man who has thought hard about mallets, and starts unloading gear from the truck. And what gear. There's a stand, and there's a box of microphones that look like tiny silver submarines, and there's a laptop, and there's a foam pad, and there is, sweet lord, a sound level meter he sets on the bench like a little judge.

Penelope watches him arrange everything for a solid five minutes, hoping against hope that maybe, just maybe, the tapping will be quiet. Gentle. Respectful of a shared workspace and a woman's fragile peace.

Then Mikey Lowe picks up the small mallet, positions the leg dead center between two microphones, and whacks it.

The sound goes off like a bell in a church. It clatters across the concrete floor, bounces off the mixing drums, runs up the catwalk, and rattles around inside Penelope's skull. Somewhere across the shed a patio umbrella rib, some leftover junk leaning against a wall, snaps loose and clatters to the floor in sympathy, which honestly feels personal.

"Sorry!" Mikey hollers, not sounding sorry. "Should've warned you, olivewood carries."

"You think?" Penelope grabs her own ears. "This is a quiet facility. Do you understand that? Quiet. There are people here who would commit crimes for quiet."

"It's nine at night, who's sleeping?" He taps again. The bell rings again. Nicola Patterson, the twenty-nine-year-old assistant who wants nothing to do with any of this, pokes her head out of the office, looks at the scene, and withdraws without a word, a smart woman.

"Three nights," Penelope says, staring at him. "You're doing this for three nights?"

"Unless the leg talks sooner." He grins at her, that infuriating grin, and taps the leg again.

And Penelope Boone, guardian of the quiet, six months lonely and fresh out of patience, stands there in the heat with dust in her hair and a plan forming. Because two can play at noise, and she knows where Henri keeps the leaf blower.

Penelope goes for the leaf blower around ten o'clock, and she wants it on the record that she gives him a full hour of tapping first. A full hour of that bell noise bouncing around her shed like the world's worst wind chime. She has earned this.

She fetches it from the supply closet by the office, the big orange Stihl that Henri uses to blow simulant dust off the catwalk grates, and she carries it out to the floor like a knight carrying a sword, that is to say with a lot of unnecessary ceremony.

"What's that?" Mikey calls, mallet paused mid-air.

"Recreational equipment," Penelope says, and she pulls the cord, and the leaf blower roars to life like an angry dinosaur.

It is a beautiful sound. It is the sound of justice. She walks it up and down the floor, blowing nothing in particular, just moving air around for the pure joy of drowning out a man who brought two mallets to her quiet facility. The microphones, those little silver submarines, are going to pick up about forty decibels of pure spite, and she feels wonderful about it.

"Hey." Mikey hollers over the roar. "Hey. Are you serious right now?"

"What's that? I can't hear you over my recreational equipment."

"You're going to ruin the recording."

"You're ruining my night."

He actually stomps over, which is funny, because a man that size stomping in this heat, sweat already rolling down his temples, polo stuck to his back, is not the menacing picture he probably thinks it is. He plants himself in front of her and shouts directly into the noise.

"Cut it off and talk like an adult."

"Oh, like an adult, he says. The man with two mallets."

"I need the shed quiet for the resonance readings. Quiet. That's the whole methodology."

"Turn yours off, I'll turn mine off," she hollers back, and to her mild surprise, he does. He reaches over and kills the leaf blower with one big hand, and the sudden silence rings in her ears, and then, because the universe has a sense of humor, he taps the leg.

The bell rings again.

"That's cheating," she says.

"That's work, Boone. You want to complain, take it up with Henri in the morning. Oh wait, you'll be asleep. Night shift."

Oh, he did not. Penelope points a finger at him, the classic finger, the finger of last resorts, and says, "You know what? Fine. Fine. Do your little taps. I hope your readings come back saying the joinery technique was garbage and the Italian guy was a fraud."

"That would actually be a significant finding in the field of dendroprosthetics."

"There is no field of dendroprosthetics, you made that up."

"There is a field. It's small, but it's real, and I'm one of maybe six people in it, which makes me kind of a big deal, actually."

And that is so ridiculous, so perfectly, confidently ridiculous, that Penelope laughs. A real laugh, out of nowhere, a snorting thing she hasn't done in months, and she hates him a little for getting it out of her. He grins like he knows it too.

"So what's fake moon dust even for?" he asks, settling onto a pallet like he plans to stay a while. "Seriously. Explain your job to me like I'm five."

"I don't explain my job to a man who taps legs."

"Come on. It's rocks, right? You mix rocks?"

"Simulated lunar regolith. Crushed, sifted, blended to a specific mineral spec so researchers can test drills and rovers without flying to the moon. It has to be exactly right, down to the grain shape, or some professor in Tucson has a meltdown."

"Huh. That's actually kind of neat."

"Of course it's neat. It's real work, unlike hitting furniture with a hammer and calling it science."

"It's not furniture, it's a historical prosthetic, and it's not hitting, it's acoustic profiling, and if you'd stop talking for ten seconds you'd hear my readings get done twice as fast."

"The audacity. You come into my shed."

"Henri's shed."

"My shed in spirit."

And this, this stupid bickering, is somehow the most conversation Penelope has had in six months. She realizes it somewhere around the third insult exchange and it stops her cold for a second. Twelve years with Marjorie, and then six months of an apartment twice as big as it needs to be, talking to nobody, eating dinner standing at the counter like a horse. And now she's having a genuinely good argument with a man who brought a mallet to her workplace. Life is stupid.

"Boone? You in there?" He's waving a hand.

"Sorry. Zoned out. Keep cheating with your mallet."

"It's not cheating if it's methodology." He taps. The bell rings. He taps