The Rivet and the Rivet

My divorce went through in March, and by June I was still eating dinner standing at the counter like someone who hadn't figured out his kitchen yet. I was twenty-eight, calibrating rail weigh bridges for a living, which is a real job no matter how it sounds, and my ex had taken the good couch and most of my self-respect. What she left me was a quiet apartment, half a record collection, and a habit of saying yes to things just to fill a Saturday.

That's how I ended up agreeing to Trent's overnight at the dry dock.

Trent had worked with me at the calibration yard for four years. He was the kind of guy who organized things constantly, poker nights, a fishing trip nobody went on, a group camping weekend that turned into three guys sitting in a parking lot. In August he got it into his head that the crew needed a social event at the Lauterbrunnen dry dock, where his cousin managed the basement workshop, and everyone would bring a date, and it would be great.

The problem was I didn't have a date. The bigger problem was that Trent had watched me get divorced in real time, and the look on his face when I said I'd come alone was the exact look I couldn't stand. Pity. So I lied. I said I was seeing someone. Then I spent two weeks trying to figure out who I could possibly ask to play that part without it becoming a whole thing.

Diane was the answer, mostly by accident. She was thirty, a veterinary radiographer, and a friend of Sandra from accounting, which is how she'd ended up at the same party I did two years back. We'd talked for maybe twenty minutes by the snack table and then never again. When I finally worked up the nerve to message her, I expected a no. Instead she wrote back that a weird night out sounded better than her laundry, and that I owed her the full story of why a grown man needed a fake girlfriend for a work thing.

So there I was on a Friday evening, standing at the open garage door of the dry dock's basement workshop, waiting for a woman I'd met once to show up so we could pretend to be in love in front of my coworkers.

The workshop itself was doing its best to be worse than that plan. Rows of old mannequins stood in the dusty half-dark, dozens of them, arms at their sides, faces smooth where paint had worn off. Somebody's uncle had probably used them for a shop display decades ago and never moved them out. On a workbench near the back sat a fox skull with a brass rivet set into its forehead, next to the calibration tools I'd actually come to look at. The whole room smelled like machine oil and old plaster.

Headlights swung across the gravel. A car I didn't recognize stopped, and Diane got out.

She was wearing jeans and a jean jacket over a green top, hair down, and she took one look at the garage door and stopped walking. "Okay," she said, hands going into her pockets. "You said a work thing. You did not say haunted workshop."

"It's a dry dock," I said. "There's a basement. The basement has mannequins. Nobody explained it to me either."

She came closer and peered past me into the dark. "There must be forty of them. Are they looking at us? It feels like they're looking at us."

"They're not. I checked. That's a sentence I never thought I'd say."

She laughed and stepped inside, and I watched her do a slow turn, taking in the rows of blank faces, the workbench, the skull with the rivet. She pointed at it. "What is that."

"Fox skull. Brass rivet. I have no theories that hold up under questioning."

"A rivet in a fox skull," she said, and just left it there, like the whole place was a complete verdict on my life choices. "Sandra told me you were normal. This is not the evidence I was expecting."

"Give it an hour. It gets worse."

We walked in and I showed her where the chairs were getting set up, where Trent had strung lights along a shelf of chain hoists, where the cooler was. She kept drifting back toward the mannequins. She'd stop in front of one, tilt her head, and move on to the next, the way you'd walk a gallery. Finally she turned around and looked at me with her arms crossed.

"Alright," she said. "Tell me the truth. Because I've been driving ten minutes thinking about this, and something's off. A guy invites a woman he's known once, for twenty minutes, two years ago, to a couples night at a workshop full of mannequins. Either this is a very elaborate murder, or we're not actually dating."

I should have had a lie ready. I'd had two weeks. Instead I looked at the floor, which had a rust stain shaped like a country I couldn't name.

"We're not dating," I said. "I told my coworker Trent I was seeing someone so he wouldn't look at me the way he looks at me. Like I'm a charity case. I got divorced this spring, we were married three years, and I couldn't take the face. So I said I had a girlfriend, and then I had to produce one, and you were the only person I could think of who might say yes."

She didn't say anything right away. One of the mannequins seemed to lean in. Then she pulled a folding chair over, sat down on it backward with her arms on the rest, and looked at me like she was settling in.

"Okay. Now I'm interested. Start from the beginning and don't skip the embarrassing parts."

So I told her. The apartment, the couch, the standing dinners, Trent's fishing trip that ate two hundred dollars of deposit. She asked questions at the right places and didn't do the sympathetic head tilt, which I appreciated more than she probably knew. When I finished she drummed her fingers on the chair back.

"Here's what I think," she said. "I think tonight is fun. I like weird rooms and free beer and watching your coworkers try to figure out how long we've been together. And I think you owe me a drink some other night, and that's the whole bill."

"That seems fair."

"Also," she said, and pointed at the nearest mannequin, a tall one with no arms and a crack down one shoulder, "you have to dress one of those up. That's the dare. I refuse to sit in a room with forty naked mannequins and not see at least one of them in an outfit."

I laughed before I could stop myself. "I don't have outfits. This is a workshop."

She raised an eyebrow and pointed again, slower this time, toward a trunk sitting against the far wall under a shelf. It was one of those old steamer trunks, the kind with leather straps, and it had been sitting there the whole time like it was part of the furniture. I'd noticed it earlier and decided not to think about it.

"That's asking for it," she said. "Trunks like that are asking for it. Go open it."

"It's not mine. This isn't even my building."

"Byron." She said my name the way you'd ring a bell. "Open the trunk."

For my own sake, I will explain that I did not open that trunk because she told me to. I'd been looking at it since I got there. I'd noticed the little padlock on it was already undone, the hasp just resting closed, like whoever owned it expected someone to come along. I'd felt a pull toward it that I hadn't let myself name, the same pull I'd felt my whole life in the corners of stores I walked past quickly, in a drawer at home I kept telling myself I'd clear out.

My hands were not steady on the straps. I'll say that plainly. They shook a little, and Diane, watching from her chair, either didn't notice or was kind enough not to say. I undid the hasp and lifted the lid, and the smell of the inside came up at me, cedar and old fabric and something faintly like powder.

On top, folded in tissue paper, was a dress. Vintage, dark green, the same green almost as Diane's top, with short sleeves and a line of tiny covered buttons down the front. Under it I could see more fabric, white, a slip maybe, and a pair of shoes with a low heel, and a rolled pair of stockings.

Nobody said anything. Behind me I heard Diane stand up out of the chair.

"Well," she said, after a while, quieter than before. "The trunk was asking for it after all."

Trent's voice came down through the open garage door behind the stairs, bouncing around the concrete before it reached us. "Batch is sorted! Container's on the 11:40, so we've got the whole night. Don't break anything down there, my cousin does inventory on Mondays."