The Shed in the Back

My name is Lionel, I'm thirty-four, and I build cabinets in Oro Madre, which is basically everybody in Oro Madre. Population three thousand, one stoplight, and a diner called The Hatch where the coffee is strong and the pie is acceptable, and I do mean acceptable, nothing more.

So anyway, here's how this started. Sarah Sorenson needed a house-sitter.

Now, I hadn't actually spoken to Sarah since one date thirteen years ago, back when I was twenty-one and fresh out of college and she was a year ahead of me. It was a weird date. We shook hands at the end. Who shakes hands at the end of a date? We did, apparently, and then she moved away and I forgot about her for a decade, the way you do.

Then in March she walked into the hardware store where I was arguing with Allan about lumber prices, and she said, "Lionel? Lionel, oh my god, you still look like you carry things for a living," and I said, "Because I do," and that was that. We caught up over coffee. She's thirty-five now, she does pottery, she rents a craftsman bungalow on the east side of town with a big backyard, and she needed somebody to watch the place and feed the cat while she went to a craft fair up in Oregon for two weeks.

I said sure. I like houses that aren't mine. I like sitting in other people's kitchens wondering how they live. It's a carpenter thing, probably.

* * *

She left on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I'd settled in properly, meaning I had my own towel and I was snooping through her fridge like it was my job. I want to defend myself here and say that checking a fridge is part of house-sitting. If the milk goes bad while she's gone, that's on me.

Her fridge was mostly condiments and a bag of carrots with some fight left in them. There was leftover soup in a yogurt container that was not yogurt, which is a law of nature. And there was a note taped to the shelf at eye level, in her handwriting, that said:

"Lionel: cat eats at 7am and 6pm, don't listen to her begging in between, she's a liar. Sprinklers run Wednesday. And feed the fish thing on the porch, it's not a fish, don't ask."

Underneath that, smaller, like she'd added it late: "PS don't worry about the back shed. It's fine. It locks. It's fine."

She wrote "it's fine" twice. Anybody who writes "it's fine" twice is not fine, and also she had never mentioned a back shed, not once, in any of our three coffee dates or the two phone calls since. My curiosity, which is my worst quality and also my best one, lit up like a strike match.

I finished the soup, because it was going to go bad and that's on me, remember, and I went out back.

The shed sat at the far end of the yard past her pottery studio, which was a garage she'd converted, all dust and kiln and shelves of half-finished bowls. The shed was smaller, wooden, newer than the rest of the property, and it had a real padlock on it, the kind you buy on purpose. Not a shed you throw rakes in. A shed you mean.

I walked around it once. One small window, curtained, up high. No peeks. I stood there like an idiot in her backyard for a while and then let it go, mostly.

* * *

That night I went to The Hatch for dinner, because house-sitting means cooking for zero people and eating alone somewhere with a counter is better than eating alone at a stranger's table. I had the meatloaf. I had a slice of that acceptable pie. I read the paper I already read online that morning, because it was the whole ritual and I wasn't going to improve it.

At some point I pulled out my phone and called Trina.

Trina is a woman I'd been seeing off and on since January. She sells insurance in the next town over, she's thirty-three, she's funny in a dry way, and every time we went out I kept waiting for the part where I'd feel something, and the part never came. But old habits, so I called.

"Hey, you," she said. "Where are you?"

"House-sitting in Oro Madre. Cat duty. How's the week?"

"Killed. Mrs. Pardo changed her mind about the umbrella policy for the fourth time. Fourth. I may develop a twitch."

I laughed and said something back and she said something back and the whole call just rolled along like a shopping cart with a bad wheel, going somewhere, technically, but nobody steering. We talked about a movie neither of us had seen. She asked if I was going to be around Sunday and I said probably, and I realized while I was saying it that I was already hoping Sunday would get cancelled.

I got off the phone about ten minutes later, sat there with my coffee, and felt nothing. Not sad nothing. Just nothing. Like a door in the house you've walked past so many times you forgot it was a door.

The waitress refilled my cup. "You look like a man doing math," she said.

"Something like that," I said, and left her a good tip.

* * *

Back at the bungalow, the cat lied to me about dinner, as promised, and I said no, as promised, and she yelled at me about it. Then I did the thing I'd been circling all evening. I went out to the yard in the last of the light and took a photo of the shed with my phone and texted it to Sarah with just a question mark.

She replied fast, which surprised me. Up in Oregon, at a fair, at nine at night, she replied in under a minute.

"Oh god, don't go in there!"

Then, before I could even type anything:

"I'll be back tomorrow. I'll explain."

Then a third one, just: "Sorry."

I stood in her dark backyard holding my phone, reading Sorry, and the cat came out and wound around my ankles and complained about dinner again. I told her she was a liar. She was a liar.

I texted back, "No rush, it's your shed," which was true, and also I was lying through my teeth, because now I was not going to sleep. "It's fine. It locks. It's fine," plus a padlock, plus don't go in there, plus I'll explain, that's not a shed, that's a whole story, and I have never once in my life been able to leave a story alone.

I turned off the porch light and went inside. The guest room bed was fine, the towels were fine, the cat screamed at the bedroom door for an hour, all of it fine.

I kept thinking about that note. The handwriting got smaller on the part about the shed. You could tell she'd written it last, standing at the fridge, wondering whether to say anything at all. Twice she wrote it's fine, and twice she didn't believe it.

I fell asleep around midnight, thinking about padlocks, which is not a thing I recommend.

Sarah came back a day early, which I found out at seven in the morning when a car I didn't recognize pulled into the driveway and the cat lost her entire mind.

I came out of the guest room half awake, hair going all directions, and there she was on the porch with a travel mug and a duffel bag, looking like someone who'd been caught doing something. "Lionel. God, I'm sorry, I know I said tomorrow, I mean I know I said tomorrow, I had it in my head all wrong, the drive was easy and the fair kind of wrapped up early and I just... drove."

"It's fine," I said, which was apparently my new catchphrase. "You own the place. I just feed the cat."

"You fed the cat?"

"Twice a day. She screams either way."

Sarah laughed, and then she did that thing where the laugh runs out and something more serious is standing behind it. "Okay. Coffee. Come on, I'll make it, and then I'm going to tell you about the shed, because I owe you that and you've clearly been thinking about it since last night."

"I wasn't," I said.

"You texted me a question mark at nine p.m."

"Fair."

So she made coffee, good coffee, strong, and we sat at her kitchen table, and she wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at me the way you look at someone when you're about to hand over something fragile.

"First, the shed is just a workshop," she said. "My pottery stuff is all in the back room of the house, the kiln and everything. But I do woodwork too. Furniture. That's what the shed is for, and it locks because the tools are good and I'm paranoid, not because of anything exciting. I know that note sounded insane."

"That's it?" I asked, because it clearly wasn't.

She took a breath. "There's a second part. Lionel, I'm a trans woman. I transitioned a long time ago, and I've been out for years, but every new person, every old person from before, there's this conversation, and I never know how it's going to go. So when you texted a photo of the shed, my brain went to about forty bad outcomes and I panicked a little. Hence the note. Hence sorry."

I sat there with my coffee. I'm not going to tell you I had some graceful response lined up, because I didn't. I was mostly doing math about college, about the one date, about thirteen years ago, and how none of that had come with any context at all, just a handshake and then she was gone.

"Okay," I said finally. "Thank you for telling me."

"That's it? Okay?"

"That's not nothing, that's a decent amount. But it's fine. Sarah. It's fine."

"You keep saying that word."

"It's a good word. It has a proven track record."

She laughed, real this time, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders, and I realized she'd been carrying that panic all the way down from Oregon in a little car by herself.

* * *

After breakfast she took me out to the shed. It was weirdly formal, her leading me across the yard with the padlock key in her hand, like a tour, and I had to stop myself from grinning.

"Okay, so, disclaimer," she said, working the lock. "It's a mess in here. Woodshops are messes. That's how you know they're alive."

She got the door open and swung it wide, and the smell hit me first. Cedar and sawdust and something like finish oil, warm. It smelled like a real shop. There were planes and chisels laid out on a bench with actual care, clamps hanging on a pegboard, boards stacked and stickered along one wall waiting for their turn. A radio on a shelf. A broom leaning in the corner, used recently, judging by the floor.

And in the middle of it, on sawhorses, a rocking chair, half done.

I walked over to it before I could say anything smart. The rockers were shaped and mostly smoothed, and the back was a set of curved slats, and the curves weren't the kind you draw with a ruler. They swooped. They looked alive, like the chair had grown instead of been built.

"Sarah, this is..." I ran my hand along one slat. "I build cabinets. Straight lines, mostly. Boxes with doors. This is a different animal."

"It's walnut," she said, coming up beside me. "The spindles are oak. Steam bent, which took me three tries, so if you ever mention the first two failures to anyone in this town I will deny everything."

"Your secret dies with me. How long?"

"Off and on, a year? It's for me, which is why it's taking forever. When you're building for a client you make decisions. When you're building for yourself you just keep asking the wood what it wants."

"Who taught you?"

"Mostly YouTube and swearing," she said, and I laughed. "I started after I moved back. Pottery pays the booth fees, but wood is where I go when I don't want to talk to anybody. Which, given how this week started, might be telling."

I picked up one of the rockers and sighted down