The Plumb and the Lavender

I can handle the pump myself. That's what I texted him, five words, no emoji, no question mark, nothing friendly in it at all. I hit send and I put the phone face down on the workbench and I told myself that was the end of it.

Carlos had called the night before. "I heard the festival's short-handed, and I know pumps, Noor. Let me help, just that." And I said, "It's not a good idea," and he said, "Probably not," and somehow that turned into me saying fine, Saturday only, and now here we were.

Well. Here I was. Saturday, seven in the morning, in the distillation hut out at the edge of the lavender fields outside Tombstone. Corrugated tin walls, copper condenser gleaming in the corner, shelves stacked with dried bundles that smell like my whole life now. I'm forty-one years old and I run the still for a woman named Dell who pays me okay and doesn't ask questions, and I like it that way.

The pump is the heart of the place. Old belt-driven thing Dell's uncle hauled off a decommissioned ship fifty years back, and it's temperamental as a cat. The belt had been slipping for a week and I'd been putting off ordering a new one because I kept telling myself I could true it up with wax and stubbornness.

So there I was at the workbench with my coffee, and my phone buzzed. I flipped it over. Carlos. A photo of the belt, the actual belt, sitting on my workbench in his hand, and underneath it a message with the part number. The exact part number. Gates brand, the metric size, the whole thing.

How does he know that? I texted back, "Where are you," which is not what I meant to send, and he answered, "Parking lot. Been up since five. Didn't want to bug you early." I stared at that for a good minute. Five. He'd been up since five, sitting in his truck, waiting for a decent hour like some kind of considerate ghost.

I went out and there he is, leaning on the tailgate of a borrowed silver pickup, forty-three years old and grayer at the temples than when I'd last seen him a year ago. "Morning," he says, all casual, holding up the belt like a fish he caught.

"That's the right one?"

"It's the right one."

"How do you even know the part number, Carlos? You're a spreadsheet guy."

He shrugged. "I called the shop in Sierra Vista Friday night. Described the pump. Guy knew it, said everybody knows that pump." Then he handed it over, and here's the part I keep chewing on. His knuckles brushed mine. Just knuckles, just a brush, half a second, and my whole arm lit up as if it had been struck. I took the belt and walked back inside faster than I needed to.

Later that morning I found the plumb bob. That's the part that really got me. Dell's lead-dipped plumb bob, the old one we use to check the alignment on the still's pipework, hangs from a rafter nail when it's not in use. Except that morning it was hanging crooked, way off plumb, and the nail had fresh scuffs on it like somebody unfamiliar had been fiddling with it.

Which means he'd been in the hut before dawn. Not just up since five, in his truck. In here. In my hut, touching my tools, probably trying to be helpful, hanging the bob back wrong because he didn't know Dell's rule about it. And instead of being mad, I stood there under the rafter and my chest did something complicated. He'd been here. He'd cared enough to come look at the pipework in the dark.

That evening I wrote my sister Lana an email. I write her everything, she's in Phoenix and she's the only one who gets the whole picture. Here's part of what I told her:

"He handed me the belt with this smirk, Lana, this exact smirk I used to want to slap off his face, and his knuckles grazed mine and I felt it all the way up to my shoulder. Who does that? Nobody. He does. Two years we were together, met at that gallery opening in Tucson when I was thirty-seven, and he got comfortable, he got careless, and I left. That was the right call. I know it was the right call. So why am I writing you a whole paragraph about his knuckles?"

Then Thursday night, couldn't sleep, I wrote in my diary. I keep one now, started it after the breakup, mostly grocery lists and complaints about the heat. But that night I wrote three pages. I admitted something I hadn't said out loud to anybody, not even Lana. I've been replaying it. Every time he touched me, all of it, the whole two years. The way he used to put his hand flat on my back at parties without even looking. The way he'd tuck my hair behind my ear when I was bent over a book. I've been sitting in the hut stripping lavender stalks and replaying his hands like a movie I already know the ending to.

And I'm scared. That's the word I finally used. Scared to want him again, because wanting him again means betting on a man who already showed me who he is once. What if he hasn't changed? What if I've changed and he hasn't? What if the only thing that's real is the belt and the pump and the festival deadline and I'm dressing it up as fate because the hut smells good and I'm lonely?

Once he came in that Saturday, with two coffees and a toolbox, I made him sign Dell's liability waiver first because I'm professional if nothing else, and he signed it without a joke, which surprised me. Old Carlos would've made a joke. This one just said, "Where do you want me?"

"By the pump. Don't touch the still."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

We got the belt on by ten, and it ran clean, no slip, that old ship pump chugging like it was brand new, and I'll admit I whooped and he laughed at me and I didn't even mind. We broke for lunch at the little table outside the hut door, and it was easy, is the thing. Too easy. We argued about whether cilantro belongs in salsa, the same argument we've had for four years, and he let me win, and then I caught him grinning and realized he'd let me win on purpose, and I threw a tortilla chip at him.

But here's what I can't stop turning over. When I came back from checking the condenser gauge that afternoon, there was a note on the workbench. Typed. He'd typed it, on his phone or whatever, and left it folded next to my plumb bob, which he had hung back up, and this time he'd hung it straight.

It said: "The balance of the still needs a steady hand. Remember how we used to steady each other?"

I read it four times. Then I folded it up and put it in my shirt pocket, right over my heart like some fool in a movie