The Quarry Oven

The alarm went off at four. I was already awake. I'd been awake since three, lying there doing the math on whether a grown man, twenty-four years old, once burned by marriage, should drive an hour into the desert to time a bread bake.

I went. Of course I went.

The quarry sits outside Mexican Hat, down a washboard road that shakes your teeth loose. I got there before anybody. The sky was just barely gray, and the oven door was propped open like a mouth, breathing out that sweet juniper smoke. They'd been feeding it all night. The cork roast thing ended decades ago, but the oven stayed, this big stone hulk built into the sandstone wall, and once a year the town stuffs it full of loaves and calls it tradition.

I got out of the truck and just stood there a minute. Warm air rolling over me. Cold air at my back. Smelled like burnt juniper and dust and, underneath it, something almost like toast.

Here's the part I don't tell people at faculty mixers. The duffel in my truck bed has a dress in it. Has had one for two years now. A green cotton dress with little white buttons, bought at a thrift shop in Flagstaff on a day I can't even explain. My ex-wife Liz never saw it, never knew about it, never once caught me pausing too long in the women's section at Target. I told myself for two years that it was a joke purchase, a gag, something I'd wear to a costume party and laugh about.

It's not that. I know what it is now. It just took the divorce to make me admit it.

I want to wear it. I want somebody to see me in it and not laugh. Here is the ugly truth, and I drove out here partly to be around strangers who couldn't read it off my face.

They started showing up around six. Bakers mostly, hauling proofing baskets and folding tables and little propane burners for the contest staging. I found the timer clipboard, which was mine by virtue of being the only volunteer who answered the email, and started taking names.

That's when I saw her.

She was across the oven pit, laughing at something a baker in a flour-dusted apron had said. Blonde hair pulled back. Jeans. That same easy way of standing like the ground had personally invited her to lean on it. My stomach did a thing I haven't felt since field camp in Moab, three years back, when I was twenty-one and she was twenty-four and we kissed once behind a gear truck and then both pretended it hadn't happened.

Angie.

She joined a field trip I led for fun, back when she was running raft trips summers. We'd talked about nothing for a whole week and it was the best week of my twenties, which says something sad about my twenties. Then she went back to the coast, and I got married too fast to somebody who was wrong for me, and it ended there.

Except apparently it wasn't, because there she was, covering some bread contest for a maritime trade magazine of all things, and my heart was doing an unprofessional amount of work.

She spotted me before I could duck behind a table.

"Emile? No way!" She came across the gravel fast, grinning. "You're the timer? The email said a lecturer at the community college. I thought that'd be some old guy."

"I'm twenty-four. Old guy ship has sailed."

"Congratulations on the not-old-guy thing." She hugged me, quick, one arm, and it still shorted out half my brain. "What are the odds? I'm home for two weeks and my editor goes, hey, go write about a rock oven."

"Your beat is ship paperwork."

"Oil record books, yeah. Extremely glamorous." She held up her hands like she was framing a shot. "But this has smoke and loaves and weird local history. Editor loves it. So. You live around here now?"

"Teach in Blanding. Commute forty minutes."

"Married? Please tell me you're not married, I remember you being married-adjacent even back then."

"Not anymore. Divorce went through in March." I said it flat and she didn't do the face people do. She just nodded.

"Mine was two years ago. Also March, actually. Weird."

"March is a bad month for promises."

That got a real laugh out of her. I forgot how much I liked making that happen.

By eight the quarry was busy. Tables up, baskets everywhere, the oven glow picking up rust and black basalt in the walls so the whole pit looked like the inside of a kiln. Somebody's radio played country from a tailgate.

Angie needed photos of the staging area, which turned out to be the quarry's old office, a low stone room cut into the wall behind the oven, back when the cork operation had a foreman and paperwork and, apparently, a labeling system. She had three proofing baskets stacked and wobbling, so I took the top two and followed her in.

The office was dark and cool, one high window letting in a bar of light. Metal desk. File cabinet. Shelves of moldering sample trays. Somebody had run a power strip in from a generator, and a string of work lights made everything look like evidence photos.

"Watch the threshold," she said, stepping over a chunk of broken casing. "This place is trying to kill people."

"It's a geologist's paradise, then. Death by doorway."

She set her baskets down by the desk and started poking around, because of course she did, she was writing a piece. I put mine down next to hers and turned to the file cabinet, because my hands wanted a job.

That's when I saw the label.

Taped to the top drawer, handwritten, old ink gone brown and smudged where a thumb had rubbed it a thousand times. Three words in careful block letters.

KEEP WARM.

I stood there like an idiot reading three words. But it landed somewhere below my ribs and stayed. Some foreman, decades dead, telling the next shift to keep the oven warm, keep the bread warm, keep whatever warm. Two words of instruction and one word of kindness.

"You okay over there?" Angie asked. She'd caught me staring.

"There's a label on this drawer. Says keep warm."

She came over and looked. Read it twice. "Huh. That's sort of beautiful for a cork quarry filing system."

"Yeah."

"You got quiet all of a sudden." She wasn't pushing. She was just noticing, the way she used to notice things back in Moab, when I'd go off on a rock strata tangent and she'd wait out the end of it without checking her phone.

"Just tired," I said, which was maybe forty percent true. "Up since three."

"Three?" She made a face. "Nobody should see you before sunrise, that's basically illegal."

The baskets needed moving to better light for her photos, so we moved them, and for ten minutes it was easy, her directing me around like a prop guy, me holding loaves at flattering angles. Normal stuff. I kept glancing at the drawer, though. Keep warm. Like the quarry had been waiting all these years to tell somebody.

Somewhere out by the oven, a horn blew. That was the lighting ceremony signal, and it meant I had about ninety seconds to get to my clipboard and start being a functional timer.

"Go do your job," Angie said. "I'll shoot this room after the ceremony. Save me a spot near the pit?"

"Yeah. I can do that."

I got to the door and she called my name. I turned.

"For what it's worth," she said, "it's really good to see you."

And then I had to go time bread with sweaty hands, wondering how in the hell I was going to get through the night without telling her everything, including the part about the green dress folded in the bottom of my duffel, which was sitting fifty feet away in a truck bed like it was listening.

She found me after the ceremony, near the pit, where the heat rolled out in waves you could feel from ten feet back. The loaves went in one basket at a time, and the whole quarry smelled like yeast and woodsmoke. People clapped. Somebody's kid yelled. I wrote times on my clipboard and tried to be a person.

"You look official," Angie said, nodding at the clipboard. "Clipboards suit you."

"They're the only thing keeping me upright."

We ended up back in the office while the crowd thinned. She sat on the edge of the metal desk going through her photos, and I stood by the file cabinet like a guy with no other place in the world to be. Which, honestly, was close to true.

"Can I tell you something sort of embarrassing?" she said.

"Please!"

"I didn't come here for the bread." She was looking at her phone screen, not at me. "I mean, I did, the editor wanted the piece. But when I saw the event listing and it said Mexican Hat, I looked up who was running it. Your name was on the volunteer sheet from last year's site, still cached. So I emailed the organizers and asked who was timing this year, and they said a lecturer who'd actually answered the email."

I didn't say anything. My throat did something complicated.

"Three years, Emile. I went back to the coast, got the auditor job, got married, got unmarried. And every so often I'd think about some guy in Moab who could name every layer of rock in a canyon wall and kissed me behind a gear truck and then just, poof, gone." She finally looked up. "So yeah. I came because of you. There it is."

"You flew two thousand miles because of one kiss behind a truck?"

"The kiss was good." She said it plain. "I figured the guy attached to it might be too."

Here's where I should have said something back. Something equal and brave. Instead my hands went to the drawer again, to the label, thumb finding the smudged part where some dead foreman had rubbed it a thousand times. KEEP WARM. My fingers were shaking. Not from the cold, the office was the warmest room in the county right then. From the thing pressing up against the back of my teeth, the thing I'd been carrying since before Liz, since before Moab, since a thrift shop in Flagstaff two years ago where a green cotton dress with white buttons followed me to the register like it had chosen me.

"You're doing the quiet thing again," Angie said. Softer now.