The Roofer and the Winemaker

The gas station sat halfway between the winery and the ferry dock, which meant I ended up there more often than any reasonable person would. It was one of those desert places with a faded awning, two pumps, and an ice cooler that hadn't been fully cold since before I moved out here. I'm Leigh Smiths, thirty-four years old, and I make wine for a living. Reds, mostly. It's slower work than people think and hotter than anyone believes.

That Friday afternoon I pulled my truck in for gas and a bag of ice, and that's when I saw her again. Mackenzie Douglass, up on the roof of the feed store across the road, shirt tied at the waist, moving shingles around like the sun was a rumor she'd heard about secondhand. It was a hundred and six degrees. I could see the heat shimmer coming off the blacktop between us, and she was up there squatting and stapling like it was a pleasant spring morning in Oregon.

I hated her a little for it.

Not real hate. More like the kind of hate you get when somebody is better at something than you and doesn't pretend it's hard. I'd been watching her work roofs around town all summer. She was a roofer, thirty-six, built like she'd been assembled in a shop that only made one model, and she never seemed to sweat in the places I sweat. Meanwhile I'd spent that same summer hauling crush equipment around in the winery cellar, soaking through two shirts a day and complaining about it to anyone who would listen.

"You're staring again," Viola said from behind the counter when I came in.

Viola Hale ran the register at the gas station. She was twenty-eight, had moved to town three years back from somewhere greener, and knew every single thing about everybody within fifty miles. I liked her fine. I just didn't like being read that easily.

"I'm not staring," I said. "I'm assessing a safety hazard."

"Uh huh." She rang up my ice without looking at me. "You've been assessing that safety hazard since June."

"It's July now, so that's a whole month of professional concern."

Viola laughed and slid my change across the counter. "You want the good ice or the ice that's mostly water?"

"Good ice. I'm making a bad decision later and I want it cold."

Being the polite one my whole life had that quality about it. I'd done everything right. Winemaking degree, steady job, saved my money, called my mother on Sundays. Even my one wild stretch, a fling with a fellow winemaker when I was twenty-nine, had ended so politely we still texted each other harvest updates. I was tired of polite. I just didn't know what the opposite of polite looked like yet, other than maybe the woman on the roof across the road.

I carried my ice out, and of course that's when Mackenzie came down her ladder. She had a coil of something over one shoulder and that walk people get when their knees seem to have their own judgment but their pride has more. She dropped her gear by her white flatbed and went straight for the outdoor cooler by the pumps, where the water jugs live.

My water jug.

Okay, technically it was a community jug. Technically anyone could use it. But I had bought that jug, I washed that jug, and I had developed a whole quiet little system about it, and there she was, tipping it up, drinking half of it in one long pull, then pouring the rest over her head.

"You have your own truck," I said. "Your truck has its own water, I assume."

Mackenzie looked at me over the jug. Water dripped off her chin and she didn't even wipe it. "It's the community jug, Smiths."

"It's my jug."

"You bought it. Sure. But you set it out here for everyone."

"I set it out here for everyone who asks nicely. You have never once asked nicely."

"Nice is for people who don't work roofs in July." She set the jug down on the cooler, empty. "You want water? Viola's got a whole fridge of it."

"That's not the point."

"Then what's the point?"

The point, if I was honest with myself, was that she'd been living rent free in my head since about the second week of June, and every interaction we had came out sideways. She'd borrowed my pry bar at the hardware swap and returned it with a scratch. I'd taken the shady parking spot she liked twice in one week on purpose. She'd told Viola my wine tasted like "fancy grape juice," which, fine, but still. It had become a whole thing, the two of us, and neither of us had ever actually said that out loud.

"The point is common decency," I said, which sounded even dumber than it read.

Mackenzie grinned. She had a good grin and I resented that too. "Common decency. Says the woman who keyed my..."

"I did not key your truck."

"You know I can see that spot from the roof, right? The one you park in just so I have to walk farther?"

"That spot is public parking."

"It is, and you use it like a sniper."

I opened my mouth to come back with something, anything, and Viola saved us both by leaning out the doorway with two cold bottles and a look on her face like a mom at a playground.

"Okay, children," she said. "Leigh, Mackenzie, water. Both of you. On me."

"We're not children," Mackenzie said, taking the bottle anyway.

"Then stop acting like two goats on a bridge." Viola handed me the other one. "I swear, you two come in here all summer doing this dance, and I'm the one who has to hear about it from both sides. Leigh complains you're rude. Mackenzie complains Leigh is..."

"She's rude," I said.

"She's stuck up," Mackenzie said at the same time.

"See?" Viola threw up her free hand. "Every day. Every single day. You know what I want? I want peace. I want to run my register without a soundtrack. Can we do a treaty?"

"Fine," I said.

"Fine," Mackenzie said.

We said it at each other, which was not a treaty, and Viola knew it. She looked between us like a woman doing math she didn't like.

"The treaty is this. Jug is shared. Mackenzie fills it when she drains it, that's the tax. Leigh gets first drink when it's cold. Nobody parks sniper-style. And nobody talks about anybody's wine."

"That last one is mostly for you," Mackenzie said.

"It's for both of you." Viola went back inside, then stuck her head out one more time. "And Leigh? Next time you come in, buy a second jug. Solve half this problem for six bucks."

I got in my truck with my good ice and my free water and my wounded pride, and I sat there a minute with the engine off. Through the windshield I could see Mackenzie climbing back up her ladder, jug tax apparently paid, because the community jug was sitting full and sweating in the sun where she'd left it.

I hated that she'd filled it. I hated that filling it made her look decent. I drank some water and told myself the rest of the flush in my face was just the heat.

That night at the winery I sat on my little back porch with a glass of my own pinot and thought about what Viola had said, the part about the dance. Because it was a dance, wasn't it. Six weeks of jugs and parking spots and pry bars, and underneath all of it was the fact that I watched that woman climb a roof every chance I got.

I'm thirty-four. I've had exactly one relationship worth the name and one fling worth remembering, and both of those, I'd been handed. Somebody came to me. Somebody made the first move while I stood there being agreeable. I had never once in my life climbed a ladder and said what I wanted, mostly because I didn't know how without rehearsing it in the shower first.

My phone buzzed. It was my mother, asking if I was eating enough and whether I'd met anyone nice. I typed out yes and not really, deleted the second part, and sent just the yes. See? Dutiful. Right to the end of my thumbs.

The next morning was Saturday, and I made the mistake of stopping at the station again before the ferry run. I had crates going over to the island inn that afternoon, twelve bottles for Lynda Connelly's restaurant, and I always built in an hour of sitting around before the dock. Lynda ran the inn on the island with her wife, and she was one of the few people out here I'd call a friend. She'd been telling me for years I worked too much, and for years I'd been proving her right.

Viola waved me in. "Your rival's on the feed store roof again. Third day."

"She's not my rival. She's a nuisance with a ladder."

"Sure. Hey, did you hear she turned down the Hartwell job?"

That got my attention, because everyone out here knew the Hartwell job. Big money, big house, a whole month of work. "Why would she turn that down?"

"Didn't say. Took the little jobs instead. The ones nobody else wants." Viola shrugged. "People do stuff for reasons, you know."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. Here's your ice." She pushed the bag across the counter and gave me a look that meant it was not nothing, but I let it go.

I went out to load the crates, and as I passed the community jug, now full and cold, I tipped it up and took the first drink. Cold water, hot morning, the sound of a nail gun starting up across the road.

I stood there in the middle of it, ice melting in my truck, ferry leaving in an hour, and realized I was already planning to still be here when she came down for lunch.

So much for polite.

I was halfway through loading the second crate when something clattered onto the asphalt behind me. I turned around and there it was, a pocket knife, lying in the shade of my truck's tire where it had bounced off the feed store roof. Mackenzie was up there on her knees, working a shingle loose, and she hadn't heard it drop.

I should have hollered up at her. That would have been the polite thing, the dutiful thing. Instead I picked it up.

It was a small knife, well used. The handle was worn smooth in the middle, like a river stone, and there was a nick in the bone near the pivot where somebody had pried something they shouldn't have. It fit in my palm like it had been waiting there. I stood in a hundred and six degrees of morning holding Mackenzie Douglass's knife and feeling the worn spot with my thumb, over and over, and I could not make myself put it down.

It wasn't even a nice knife. That's what I kept telling myself. It was a work knife with dirt in the hinge and a scratched blade, and I was holding it the way other people hold jewelry.

"You find something down there, Smiths?"

She was leaning over the roof edge, looking down at me, sweat running off the point of her chin. I closed my hand around the knife too fast, which was the same as confessing.

"You dropped it," I said. "I was going to give it back."

"Were you. When?"

"When I finished loading my crates."

"So sometime next winter." She came down the ladder fast, that easy drop-climb roofers do, and landed in the gravel in her boots. She was closer than I expected when she turned around. "Give it here."

"It's my toll now. You scratched my pry bar, remember."

"That was a year of wear coming off, that's not a scratch, that's character." She held out her hand. I looked at it. Her hand was bigger than mine, sun-dark to the wrist, and I noticed that the way I'd been noticing her hands since June, which was a problem I had been not dealing with.

We were maybe eight inches apart by the ice cooler, which I hadn't planned. She smelled like cut cedar and sweat, and I hated that my brain filed the cedar away for later. I put the knife in her palm and my fingers dragged across it on the way out, deliberately or not, I still don't know.

"That handle's worn in," I said. "You've had it a long time."

"Since I was twenty-two. Bought it off a guy at a swap meet in Yuma for three dollars." She thumbed it open, checked the blade, closed it. "You were going to keep it."

"I was not."

"You had it a full thirty seconds and you didn't holler."

"I was busy."

"With my knife." She slid it back in the sheath on her belt, and I watched the whole motion like an idiot. "Careful, Smiths. That's how people end up owing each other things."

"I don't owe you anything."

"No?" She stepped past me to the ice chest, lifted the lid, and took a handful of the good ice I'd just paid for, because of course she did. She crunched a piece and looked at me over it. "You drank from the jug first thing this morning. Treaty says first cold drink is yours, so fine, that's the treaty. But you took it grinning, and I saw the grin."

"That wasn't a grin, that was heat stroke."

"Sure it was." She dropped the lid and walked back toward her ladder, and she did not look back, which annoyed me more than if she had. "Your crates are baking, winemaker."