The Seed Analyst's Ex

The Silver Spoon Mall sat off Route 6 like it always had, a long low building with a tin roof and a hand painted sign that had been fading since before I was born. I parked my Honda at the far end of the gravel lot and sat there a minute with my hands on the wheel, breathing. This was Friday, the last Friday in October, and I was thirty-three years old and about to do something either very satisfying or very stupid.

Deirdre, I told myself, you are going to walk in there, let that man remember what he lost, and walk right back out. The entire plan consisted of that. Shane Jeffries had spent two years of my life staring at a laptop while I ate dinner alone, and my Aunt Vicki had conspired with his mother to set this up, and I had said yes only so I could watch his face fall when I left him standing in an antique mall.

He was at the entrance when I got there. I spotted him before he spotted me, which felt as if I had won a small victory. He was holding two glass bottles of grape soda from the retro cooler they keep up front, the kind with the twist caps, and he was reading the label on one of them like it was a patent filing. He looked good, and that made me mad. Thirty-six now, same shaggy brown hair, same plaid shirt he probably thought was casual. He turned, saw me, and lit up as a porch light does.

"Deirdre! You came. I wasn't sure, I mean, Aunt Vicki said you'd said yes, but she also said you'd said yes to the Christmas thing last year and then moved." He handed me one of the bottles. "Grape. You still like grape, right?"

"You remembered," I said, and hated that my voice went soft on the last word.

"So. Welcome to the Silver Spoon. I've got, well, there's a thing I want to show you. But we can walk around first. It's a maze in there, you'll get lost, everybody gets lost."

We went in past the register, where a woman my mother's age waved Shane through like he was staff. He steered us left into a corridor of booths crammed with dolls, hundreds of them, porcelain faces staring out of glass cases with prices taped to their foreheads. I made a show of looking at them so I wouldn't have to look at him.

"So how's the seed business," I said. It came out flatter than I meant it to.

"Good! Actually good. We finally got the hybrid rye trial data back from Cornell and the germination rates held, ninety-six percent under cold stress. You have no idea how long I've waited to tell somebody that who isn't already sick of hearing it."

"Ninety-six percent," I said. "Shane."

"I know, I know, boring. It's just, you spend four years on a problem and then one day the spreadsheet says yes and nobody in your life cares."

And this was the issue, this was always the issue with him. Three and a half years ago at a mixer in Scranton he had cornered me by the pretzel table and explained alfalfa root depth for eleven minutes, and I had been annoyed, and then somewhere in minute twelve I had been charmed, and then I had been his for two years, and then I had been alone at a table with two glasses of wine watching him refresh his phone. Eighteen months since I ended it. I had counted.

"Anyway," he said, "it's up here on the left. My corner."

His booth was tucked in the back where the lighting was bad, a jumble of vintage farm stuff, a seed drill from some forgotten decade, hand tools with worn wooden grips, a sign that read JEFFRIES, RESTORATIONS. And in the middle of it, dominating the whole corner, stood something big under a canvas drop cloth.

"Okay," he said, and his voice changed, went careful. "I want to show you this. I finished it in June."

He pulled the canvas off, and I stood there looking at a barn door. Not just any barn door. His barn door, the old oak one from his workshop that used to lean against the wall the summer I lived with him, the one with the grain that ran like water down the left side. He had cleaned it, restored the wood to a deep honey color, and mounted it upright in a heavy black steel frame bolted to a platform.

"It's beautiful," I said, and meant it, and then I saw the rest of it and stopped meaning anything at all.

There was a leather cradle mounted on the face of the door at hip height, padded, shaped like a saddle horn's broad cousin, with straps and a studded pad beneath it. Set into the oak above and below were two handles carved from the same wood grain, polished smooth, angled the way you'd grip something if you were leaning your whole weight into it. And lower, half hidden by the frame, a mechanism. An adjustable one.

"What is this," I said.

"It's a manual pleasure mount," he said, matter-of-fact, like he was describing a seed drill. "Antique design, the originals show up in auction catalogs from the 1890s onward, usually mislabeled as horse grooming equipment. I found a partial one in a barn outside Tioga two years ago and rebuilt it. The cradle takes attachments, there's a whole hardware system, and this lever here adjusts the angle. See?" He worked the lever and the padded assembly tilted smoothly. "You brace here and here, and the rocking does the work. It's better engineering than the modern ones, honestly. The Victorians overbuilt everything."

"Shane." My hand was on the door. I hadn't decided to put it there. The oak was warm from the shop lights, worn in the places where a body would wear it. Where my body would wear it. I looked at the width between the