The Puppet's Arm

I moved to town in March, and for the first couple weeks I mostly unpacked and found the grocery store. I was sixty-two, recently retired from forty-one years of doing hair, and I will admit the quiet got to me faster than I expected. You spend four decades with a chair full of talk and then one day it's just you and a toaster.

The tea house was two blocks from my rented place. The Moonpetal, narrow building, two stories, a little garden out front that somebody clearly fought for. There was a flyer in the window about a pie auction, Friday night, benefits the library roof. I like pie and I had nothing against libraries, so I went in to ask about it.

The woman behind the counter was Lucia, the owner, forty years old, dark hair pinned up with what looked like a paintbrush. She also had a man in the back carrying boxes, who turned out to be Shawn, her partner, a carpenter about my build.

"You're the new barber," Lucia said. Word travels fast in a small town, even when you've only been cutting hair at the retirement center twice a month.

"Hairdresser, but close enough," I said. "I hear you need helpers for the auction."

"We always need helpers," she said. "Can you come Saturday? Shawn has a display half built and I have four hundred pies to bully people into donating."

So Saturday I showed up at nine in the morning. Shawn put me on box duty in the back room. It's a deep room, older than the rest of the building, with stacks of props and old linens along the walls and a half-finished puppet display on a work table in the middle. The puppet was maybe three feet tall, a jester thing with a painted face and only one arm. The other arm was sitting on the table next to a roll of tape.

Shawn explained it while he ate a sandwich. "Puppet's for the entrance. Lucia wants it waving at people, except I haven't figured the arm yet. The joint's cracked."

"Bring me your epoxy and I'll tell you if it's saveable," I said, because forty years of hair taught me more about broken plastic joints than you'd think.

While he went to the truck, the front door chimed and a woman came through the back hallway like she owned it. She was thirty-eight, maybe, dark hair cut short at the jaw, wearing the kind of tidy blouse that says she came from work. She had a lanyard in her pocket and a hotel name tag folded over.

"You must be the new helper," she said. "I'm Kelsie. I do concierge work at the Marlow, and Lucia roped me into the auction committee."

"Billy. Retired hairdresser, current box mover."

"Perfect. I need somebody with steady hands." She picked up the puppet and held it out to me. "Hold this upright? I need to tape the arm back on long enough to see how the joint sits, and I can't do it one-handed without him flopping."

I took the puppet by the middle. It was lighter than I expected, mostly fabric over wire. Kelsie pressed the loose arm against the shoulder socket and tore off a strip of tape with her teeth, and I held the thing steady while she worked. Her fingers kept crossing over mine on the puppet's torso. The first time I figured it was accident. The second time I figured she had small hands and a narrow job. By the fourth time I stopped doing math about it.

"Hold still," she said, though I was already still.

"I'm a statue."

"You're doing great." She smoothed the tape down and then, instead of stepping back, she stayed there a second with her hand flat on the puppet's shoulder, right next to my knuckles, and looked up at me. Not a glance. A look with some weight in it. I looked back because I didn't know what else to do with my face.

"Good grip," she said, and stepped away like nothing had happened.

My heart was doing something undignified at that point, but she was already talking about box labels.

Kelsie is thirty-eight, and she told me that herself about ten minutes later while we sorted linens. "People assume I'm younger and then they act weird about it," she said. "So there it is. Thirty-eight. Single. In case the town gossip gets it wrong."

"Sixty-two," I offered. "Never married. Cut hair since I was twenty-one."

"Huh." She folded a tablecloth and didn't make a face about the numbers, which I appreciated. "You ever do anything besides hair?"

"Not really. I was good at it and it kept me busy."

"That's either very sad or very zen," she said, "and I haven't decided."

"It's both, most days."

Lucia hollered from the front about a pie supplier crisis, and Kelsie went, promising to be back in ten minutes. She took her coffee with her and left a ring of condensation on the work table.

So there I was, alone in the back room with a one-armed puppet, a roll of tape, and several hundred boxes. I did what any reasonable man would do. I picked up the puppet to see how the arm sat, thinking maybe I could save Shawn some epoxy trouble.

The puppet's remaining arm hung loose at its side, and the palm of the fabric hand had a split in the seam. Inside the split there was a folded piece of paper, small, tucked in like somebody meant it to stay hidden. I should have put it back. I know that. But the paper had writing on the outside edge where it showed, and my curiosity has never once in sixty-two years lost a fight.

I worked it out with two fingers. A grocery list torn quarter, blue ink, tidy handwriting.

"Meet me at the clock tower at midnight."

That was all. No name, no day. I stood there in a dusty back room holding a note in a puppet's palm like it was a live wire. The clock tower is the old stone one by the bank, doesn't run anymore, but it's a landmark. People say "meet me at the clock tower" the way other towns say the fountain.

I put the note back in the palm and folded the seam closed and set the puppet down, and then I picked it right back up and checked the seam, which is the kind of loop my brain runs sometimes. The note was still there. I hadn't dreamed it.

The question, and I asked it out loud to nobody, was whether the note was for somebody specific or whether it was an old prop from some play the tea house did years ago. Community theater leaves debris everywhere. It could be ten years old. It could be last week's.

Or it could be fresh, and I had no business caring which.

Kelsie came back smelling faintly of espresso and said Lucia needed everybody in the front room for a committee argument about table placement. "Committee argument" turned out to be Lucia, Shawn, Kelsie, and a retired teacher named Dot, and it lasted forty minutes over whether the pie tables should make an L or a U. I moved boxes through it and kept my mouth shut.

When it broke up, Shawn went back to the puppet with his epoxy, and I watched him work the arm loose from the tape. He flexed the hand idly while he waited for it to set, and the seam in the palm gaped open, and the note was gone.

I saw it clear as anything. Empty palm. I didn't say anything, because what would I say, "excuse me, I went through your puppet's pockets"? But I did look at Kelsie, who was across the room arguing about tablecloths, and she wasn't looking at me at all, which somehow felt like the loudest thing in the building.

I finished my shift, said my good nights, and walked home the long way, past the bank. The clock tower was lit by one street lamp and the face has been stuck at eleven forty since before I moved here.

Midnight, the note said. It didn't say which midnight, or who.

I made dinner and ate it standing up, which is a habit nobody should pick up, and I thought about a woman who'd held my gaze one second too long over a broken jester. Then I looked at my watch, which said nine fifteen, and I told myself I was just going out for a walk.

* * *

The walk took me past the bank and then I made myself walk past it again, and the third time I just stopped. There was a figure under the street lamp by the tower, small, hands in her coat pockets, smoke curling up past her jaw. I knew the jaw. I'd been noticing it all afternoon against my better judgment.

"You found the note," Kelsie said, before I'd even finished walking over.

"I found the note."

She took a drag and looked up at the face stuck at eleven forty. "I wrote that thing three weeks ago, before Shawn finished the puppet. It was a joke to myself. I never figured anybody would go digging in a puppet's hand."

"I wasn't digging. I was checking the arm."

"Sure you were." She flicked ash. "You checked it twice, by the way. I saw you pick it up, put it down, pick it up again."

"That's a habit of mine. Doesn't mean anything."

"It means you're careful. I like careful." She stubbed the cigarette out on the stone base. "It's cold out here. Are you going to stand there looking responsible, or are you going to tell me why you came?"

I told her the truth, which was that I didn't know. I'd eaten dinner standing up and put on a coat and left, and somewhere around the second pass of the bank I'd stopped pretending it was exercise.

"I've never done anything like this," I said. "In sixty-two years I've never once done anything reckless. I cut hair for forty years and went home and