The Pie Safe Promise

The package had been sitting on Tracy's porch for three days before she noticed it, mostly because she only walked out to the mailbox on days she remembered the mailbox existed, which during a stretch of twelve-hour shifts at the base gate was not often. It was a Saturday in October, the wind coming off the fields flat and mean, and she had been planning to spend the whole of it in sweatpants watching old reruns, but the box changed that, because the box had Millie's name on it.

Well, it had a name on it, printed in careful block letters on a label from a company in Kansas City, and the name was M. Calloway, and Tracy's address was on the second line where Millie's actual address on Maple Street should have been. The return address meant nothing to her, something called Corsetiere & Co., and the box was heavy for its size and rattled faintly when she tipped it, which was strange, because corsets, if that's what they were, should not rattle.

She tried calling Millie first, twice, and got nothing, and so she did what she always did when Millie didn't answer, which was drive out to the old Way Station diner at the edge of town and find her sitting in the gravel lot with her knees pulled up and her phone in her hands, looking like the world had ended sometime around Thursday.

Tracy was twenty-three and had been a guard at the base for a year and a half now, and Millie was twenty-two and had been a court stenographer in the county courthouse for about that long, and the two of them had been friends since Millie moved to town four years back, which was a fact Tracy thought about more than she let on. The diner had been closed since the interstate rerouted four years ago, but Millie had a key from her aunt, who owned the building and mostly used it for storage, and the kitchen still worked, and the two of them went out there sometimes to make food in a place where nobody could see them and nothing mattered.

"Hey," Tracy said, easing out of her truck with the box under one arm. "You ghosted me twice. What's going on, you look like somebody died."

Millie looked up, and her face did something complicated, relief and terror fighting for the same real estate. "Tracy, oh my god, oh my god, please tell me you have it, please tell me it came to you."

Tracy held up the box. "This thing? Yeah, it's been on my porch since Wednesday, I think. There's a name on it but it's not yours exactly, it says M. Calloway."

"That's me, that's me, that's the fake name, that's the name I use for, okay, okay, give it here, no wait, don't give it here, come inside, come inside first." Millie was up and moving toward the diner door, digging the key out of her jacket, and Tracy followed, because when Millie got like this the only thing to do was follow.

Inside, the diner smelled like dust and old coffee, and the light came through the front windows in long dusty slats across the cracked vinyl booths, and the jukebox in the corner still had a Hank Williams record stuck in it from before either of them could legally drink. Millie went straight past all of it to the back, where the old pie safe stood against the wall, and she pointed at it with a shaking hand.

"Open it," she said.

Tracy set the box on the counter instead and gave her friend a long look. "Millie, honey, you are vibrating. Sit down. Tell me what's happening before I open anything, because you look like you're about to pass out and I don't catch people who pass out."

"It's a delivery issue, it's not, okay, it's partially a delivery issue." Millie sat down on one of the kitchen stools and pressed her palms flat on the counter like she was steadying herself against turbulence. "You know the name I use, M. Calloway. I use it for mail, for orders, for anything I don't want tied to my real name, my legal name, because of work."

"Because of Judge Diaz," Tracy said, and Millie nodded, and Tracy felt her stomach start to drop, because she knew where this was going and she didn't like the road it was on.

Judge Diaz ran the county courthouse the way some men run their churches, which was to say tightly and loudly and with a lot of opinions about how everybody else ought to live. Millie had never told him she was trans, and she had built her whole work life around never telling him, and she had made Tracy swear years ago that her secret stayed between them, and Tracy had kept that oath without ever once considering it a burden, because that's what you did for the person you, well, for your best friend, Tracy corrected herself, your best friend.

"Whatever's in that box," Millie said, "it was ordered under that name, to an address I used to have before I moved, and apparently the company just, they just sent it to whatever they had on file, I don't know, and now it's sitting in your house and if anyone opens it, if anyone at the courthouse finds out, Tracy, he would fire me. He would find a reason. He'd dig until he found one. And it's not just the job, it's, people around here, you know how they are, I could lose everything, I could lose my apartment, my whole life here is built on nobody knowing."

"Okay, okay, breathe," Tracy said, and she reached over and put her hand flat on top of Millie's, which she did maybe once a year and always felt strange about afterward. "First of all, nobody's opening anything. It came to my house. I live alone, I have a deadbolt, and the only person who touches my mail is me. Second, I still don't know what's in it that's so scary. It's a corset company. You ordered corsets. Who cares?"

Millie went very red, which Tracy pretended not to notice, and then she said, "It's not one corset, Tracy. It's a whole, it was supposed to be a discreet order, and then I got an email about a backorder and I panicked and never cancelled, and then they, I think they sent me the whole, there's like six of them in there, custom ones, with my measurements on the tags, my measurements, that's the part that kills me, it's basically signed."

Tracy looked at the box for a while, at the careful block letters, at the Kansas City return address, and she thought about the math of it, the odds of some courthouse busybody ever seeing a package that had gone to the wrong house and would now go straight into a pie safe behind a closed diner nobody visited. The odds were small. But she also knew Millie, knew how fear worked on her, how it didn't do math, it just sat on her chest.

"Alright," Tracy said slowly, because an idea had walked into her head and she hadn't invited it and now it wouldn't leave. "Here's a dumb thought, and you can say no."

"I already don't like it," Millie said, but she was listening.

"If anybody ever asks, those are mine," Tracy said. "Not yours. Mine. I ordered them, they got misdelivered, big mix-up, funny story. You just helped your friend Tracy pick them up."

Millie stared at her. "Tracy, those are custom corsets with your name nowhere on them and your build nowhere near them, that doesn't hold up."

"It holds up better than you think," Tracy said, and she heard herself keep going, which was a thing that happened to her sometimes around Millie, words just leaving without clearance. "Because here's the version that actually holds. You and me. We're seeing each other. Secretly, because, I don't know, I'm military and you work for a conservative judge and neither of us wants it all over town yet. And I like corsets. On you. They're gifts, they're a kinky little secret, and kinky secrets stay in bedrooms, the entire point of them. Nobody at the courthouse asks the stenographer about her love life with a soldier, they'd be too busy being scandalized to check tags."

The kitchen was quiet except for the wind rattling the screen door, and Millie was looking at Tracy in a way Tracy couldn't read, and Tracy wished very suddenly that she had kept the idea in her head where it belonged.

"You'd do that," Millie said. "You'd tell people we're, that you and me are."

"It's not a hard sell," Tracy said, looking at the counter. "We're out here every weekend anyway. People already joke about it at the diner on Main Street, I've heard them."

"They joke about us?"

"People at the courthouse call us the fridge and the freezer, because we're always together and we're both kind of cold to strangers. I don't love the nickname but it's established."

Millie laughed, a real one, sudden and wet, and then she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said, "God, Tracy. Okay. Okay, yes, let's do it, let's be fake dating, this is the most insane thing we've ever done and I once helped you bury your motorcycle in your backyard so your dad would stop asking about it."

"We didn't bury it, we covered it with a tarp, there's a difference," Tracy said, and she picked up the box, and it rattled again, and she raised an eyebrow at it. "So what's rattling, if they're fabric?"

"Hardware," Millie said, with a small, doomed dignity. "Bones and busks and a bunch of spare lacing. They're serious corsets, Tracy."

"Open it then," Tracy said, setting it down. "If we're doing this, I should at least know what I'm claiming I bought you."

Millie took a breath, sliced the tape with a butter knife from the drawer, and folded the flaps back, and Tracy looked down at the layers of tissue paper and the dark, structured shapes underneath, and something in her chest did a thing she decided not to examine until later, maybe never.

"Oh," Tracy said.

"Yeah," Millie said.

"So," Tracy said, because somebody had to. "Which one of these is supposedly the one I bought you first?"

Millie lifted the top corset out of the tissue paper and held it up, and it was a serious thing, dark purple with steel bones you could feel when you squeezed it, and she said, "This would be the first one, logically, this is the plainest, the others get more elaborate as you go down, which is a problem I didn't anticipate when I ordered them like six months ago."

"Why is that a problem?"

"Because if we're claiming a timeline, a fake boyfriend who escalates from plain to elaborate over a year is sweet, but six at once looks like a binge, and binges raise questions," Millie said, laying it flat on the counter and smoothing the tissue paper like she was tucking it in. "Also this one has my measurements on the tag, which we established is basically signed, so I'm cutting the tags out, all of them, tonight, with these scissors."

She went to the drawer and got the scissors and did it right there, snip snip snip over the sink, and Tracy watched her and thought again about how long she had known this woman, four years now, since Millie moved to town and started coming into the diner on Main Street where Tracy waitressed summers before the base took her a year and a half ago, and how some friendships just calcified into a shape you stopped questioning.

"Okay," Tracy said, hopping up to sit on the counter because her feet hurt from standing all day at the gate. "If we're doing this, we should rehearse. Cover stories fall apart when they're improvised, everybody knows that, that's basic."

"You were a guard for a year and a half and you're already thinking like an investigator," Millie said, but she pulled a stool over and sat down across from her, and it was strange, suddenly, to be looking at each other like two people on a date instead of two people splitting fries.

"Alright, first question. How long have we been together," Tracy said, and even saying it out loud made her feel warm in the ears, which she decided was just the kitchen being stuffy.

"Three months," Millie said immediately. "Long enough to be real, short enough that nobody's hurt we didn't say anything. And we kept it quiet because of my job, which is exactly the kind of thing Judge Diaz would believe, because he believes everybody is terrified of him, and he's right."

"Where did we meet?"

"Nowhere, we've known each other four years, it just shifted one day, that's the most believable kind of story because it doesn't require any details, it just requires feelings, and nobody can fact check feelings," Millie said, and then she frowned. "Wait. Except people will ask how it happened. The moment. Everybody asks about the moment."

Tracy opened her mouth and nothing came out, and Millie looked at her expectantly, and the silence went on about four seconds too long before Tracy said, "We'll say it happened here. In the diner. We were cleaning up after a shift of pretending to clean, and a song came on the jukebox, and, uh."

"The jukebox hasn't worked in four years, it just eats the one Hank Williams record and clicks at it."

"Then it happened while the jukebox was clicking at the record, don't correct the story in the story, that's how cover stories die," Tracy said, and Millie laughed, and Tracy reached out without planning to, just to tap her knee or something, some punctuation for the joke, and her hand landed on Millie's hand instead, on the counter, over the scissors and the cut tags.

Neither of them moved.

It was a small thing, a hand on a hand, and Tracy had touched Millie a thousand times, elbows and shoulders and once a whole hug at a funeral, but this one had a different weight to it, because they were sitting close, and because the touch was pretending to be something it wasn't, except Tracy's pulse was not pretending anything, her pulse was being extremely sincere.

"Your hands are cold," Millie said, quietly, not moving hers.

"The courthouse would say that checks out for the freezer."

"Tracy."

"I know," Tracy said. "I know. I'm looking at it."

And what she was looking at, honestly, was the fact that Millie had turned her hand over, palm up, so Tracy's was resting in it, and that neither of them was laughing anymore, and that the wind had stopped rattling the screen door so the kitchen was very quiet, and that Millie was twenty-two years old and had never once, in all the years Tracy had known her, talked about dating anybody, which Tracy had always filed under busy and was now re-filing under something else.

"So the rehearsal is going well," Millie said finally, and her voice was doing something careful.

"It's going great, we're extremely believable," Tracy said, and she didn't take her hand back, and Millie didn't take hers away, and outside a car went by on the old highway, headlights sweeping the dusty windows, and they both watched it go like two people caught at