The Sourdough Surprise

Jeannie here. I'll tell this from the start, and I'll tell it straight, because that's the only way I know how to tell anything. Ask anyone who's hired me to run an auction.

I'm forty-two. I've been single on purpose for most of ten years, since a short thing in my early thirties that ended the way good things end, with a handshake and no hard feelings. I sell farm equipment and estate lots for a living, which means I talk fast for money and slow for free.

So when my little company finally merged with its bigger rival in February, I decided to throw a party. Not the stuffy one the new owners threw at the hotel. A real one, for my people. I booked the Aspen Ridge Retreat Center, which is a modern lodge with windows as vast as barn doors that gaze upon the Rockies, and I invited the whole of Pine Cone Court.

That's my street. Four houses in a circle, four garages, one shared garden patch where we've burned more burgers than we've grown tomatoes. Ike has been next door for over a decade. He's forty-four, retired from the railway, and he treats my snowblower better than I do.

And there was Miri. Miri is forty-one, a ski instructor up at the resort, and she's been my friend since we were both in our late twenties, back when we met at a climbing gym and she out-climbed me on every wall in the building. She transitioned a few years ago, which I mention because it matters to this story only in the way that all honest things matter. She's a woman. She's my friend. She's also the reason everything got complicated, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The party was on a Saturday. Around seven, the bar was stocked, the fireplace was going, and the windows had gone that deep blue they do in the mountains before full dark. Sebastian showed up with Miri. He's thirty-eight, works the rental shop with her, and he's the kind of guy who laughs at his own jokes out of politeness to himself.

Miri came in carrying a ceramic crock as big as a small dog.

She set it on the rustic bar with both hands, careful as a bomb tech, and I just looked at it. Then I looked at her.

"You brought a sourdough starter to a merger party?"

"It's from my mother starter," she said. "The original. I've been feeding it for three years and four months and it needed a name day."

"A name day. Miri. There is a caterer ten feet from you with trays of things."

"I like my things better." She straightened the crock about a quarter inch to the left. Her hands weren't steady. I noticed that, filed it away, said nothing. That's a habit of mine I paid for later, but I didn't know it yet.

Ike arrived with a cooler and his wife Renata, and by eight there were a dozen of us in the lodge, and I did what I always do at parties, which is stand up on a chair before anyone asks me to.

"If I could have everyone's attention for one minute," I said, tapping my glass with a fork. "One minute. I'm a professional, I know how long a minute is."

"Hear her out," Ike called. "She charges by the minute at work."

"Thank you, Ike, that's the spirit of a free market. So. As of the first of the month, Hutchins Auction Services is now Hutchins and Vale. Which means I have a new boss who is eleven years younger than me and calls meetings that could have been emails. It also means, and this is the part I actually care about, that I got a signing bonus big enough to buy everyone in this room dinner and I did not have to sell anything to do it."

That got a laugh. Sebastian raised his glass. Renata whooped.

"So here's the toast. To mergers. May your partnerships be profitable, your accounts be clean, and may nobody at the table find out at the holiday party that the other company has a different Christmas bonus policy than the one you promised them." I paused. "That actually happened, by the way. Not to me. To a guy I sold a tractor to. Different story, worse party."

"To Hutchins and Vale!" somebody shouted, and we drank, and it was a good minute. It was a good hour, honestly. The fire cracked, the windows went black, the mountains vanished and left just our reflections looking warm and lucky.

Miri stood near the bar most of that hour, mostly not drinking. She'd had half a glass of red wine and was holding it like it owed her money. I drifted over around nine.

"You're quiet," I said.

"I'm always quiet. You're loud. The volume in this room is calibrated to you."

"That's fair. Are you all right, though? You've been babysitting that crock like it's going to bolt."

She smiled at the counter. "It's fine. Long week at the resort. Everybody wants lessons in February, nobody wants them in April, so it's all whatever the opposite of a slow season is."

"A rush."

"A rush. Thank you. I'm a ski instructor, you'd think I'd know words."

She went to take a sip and Sebastian said something behind her, something about the wine list, and she turned her head and her elbow caught the stem of her glass. It went over. Red wine, half a glass, straight across the bar and down the front of her shirt.

"Oh no," she said. "Oh, no, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"

"Miri, it's a bar. It's fine."

"It's your party."

"It's a party I threw for my friends. Wine happens at parties. That's practically the definition." I grabbed napkins off the bar and blotted the counter while she stood there holding the front of her shirt away from her stomach, and the stain was already spreading, a big dark bloom across the pale gray cotton. Somebody brought club soda. Sebastian offered his jacket to wear home. Ike said the lodge surely had a laundry.

"The guest suites are down the hall," I said. "They have those little travel irons and everything. Come on, I'll get you some club soda and a towel and we'll fight it before it sets."

"I can do it myself."

"I know you can. But you'll use cold water and cold water sets red wine, and then you'll be sad in your car on the drive home, and I'll have thrown a party that ruined a shirt, and I'll have to live with that."

"You're so bossy."

"I'm an auctioneer. Bossy is the job description."

So I grabbed the club soda and a stack of towels and led her down the hall. The guest suites at Aspen Ridge are nice, better than nice, little rooms with a bed, a sitting chair, a big bathroom, all blond wood and clean lines. I'd booked two for out-of-town guests who had canceled, so we had the run of them.

I wet a towel in the bathroom sink and came out and Miri was standing in the middle of the room holding her shirt away from her body again, wine down to her waistband now, and she looked, and I want to be careful how I say this, she looked stuck.

"Okay, take it off," I said. "You can't club soda a shirt you're wearing. There's a robe on the bathroom door, hospitality-grade, all yours."

She didn't move for a second. Then she went into the bathroom and shut the door most of the way, not all the way, and came out a minute later in the white robe with the shirt balled in her hand.

I worked the stain at the sink. Cold water first, which I'll admit to, then salt, then the club soda, and it started lifting the way red wine does when you catch it early. Miri sat on the edge of the bed and watched me.

"You're good at that."

"I've ruined enough clothes to get good at saving them. Balance of the universe."

"Jeannie." She said my name and then stopped.

"Hm?"

"Nothing. Never mind. Thank you for this."

I kept working the fabric. Down the hall the party hummed along without us, somebody's laugh, the clink of the cooler lid. Miri's starter sat on the bar out there with three years of feeding behind it and a name day pending. And my friend sat on the edge of a bed in a borrowed robe, wringing her hands, and I still hadn't asked the question I'd been carrying since she'd walked in with that crock and those unsteady hands.

I'm an auctioneer. I know when somebody's about to make an announcement. I just didn't know yet that this one was mine to hear.

I hung the shirt over the shower rod to drip and sat down in the sitting chair, which left Miri the bed and about four feet of carpet between us. She had her hands in her lap under the robe and was looking at the big window instead of me. The windows in those suites are enormous, floor to nearly floor, and the mountain was just a black shape now with a few lodge lights climbing it.

"Okay," I said. "Spill."

"Spill what?"

"Whatever it is. You've had it since you walked in tonight. Possibly longer. You knock over drinks at parties about once a decade, so either you're the world's clumsiest person having a rare off night, or something's chewing on you." I leaned back. "I've sold farm equipment to men who hid their reserve price better than you're hiding this."

Miri laughed, but it came out thin. "That's a terrible comparison."

"It's the one I had. I've had wine, you'll recall. I'm running on whatever's left."

She picked at the robe's belt. Down the hall the party went on, and someone turned the music up a notch, and it felt like we were in a little pocket off the side of the night where nobody could follow.

"I've been trying to tell you something," she said. "For a while. Months, actually. Since before Christmas."

"Since before Christmas? Miri, that's a couple of months of trying."

"I know."

"You could have just said it in a text. People say things in texts all the time. Whole marriages have started over text."

"This isn't a text kind of thing."

"Well, now I really need to hear it." I set the club soda bottle on the floor and gave her my whole attention, which for me is a lot of attention. "Whatever it is, it's fine. Whatever you're worried about, it's fine. We've known each other what, thirteen years? You transitioned a few years ago and my main reaction was asking if I could borrow your old climbing harness, which, in hindsight, not my best moment."

She winced. "That was a rough week for both of us."

"Rough week, great harness. Point is, you've seen me at my worst, which is mostly just me talking too much at yard sales. There is nothing you can say in this room tonight that changes anything."

"You can't promise that."

"Watch me. I'm an excellent promiser. Ask anyone on Pine Cone Court."

Miri took a breath and let it out, and then took another one, and I realized her hands had gone still in her lap, which for Miri meant she was either about to say something enormous or about to fake an excuse to leave.

"I have a crush on you," she said.

The room got very quiet. Even the party down the hall seemed to hush, though of course it didn't.

"I have for a while," she went on, fast now, like a gate had come open. "A long while. Before the transition, honestly, which confused me for a long time because I didn't have a framework for it, and then after, once I sorted myself out, it just kept being true. And I kept telling myself I'd tell you at the right moment, and there's never a right moment, so instead I brought you a sourdough starter like some kind of coward with a hobby."

"Is that what the crock was about?"

"The crock is just a crock. The crock is three years of feeding. But yes, I brought it to your party because I couldn't walk in empty-handed and also couldn't figure out how to say the other thing, so I split the difference."

I sat there. I'll be honest, my first thought was not a thought at all, just a sort of hum, like when the auction crowd goes silent before the first bid.

"Say something," she said. "Please. You're never quiet, this is terrifying."

"I'm processing."

"Process out loud, I'm begging you."

"Okay. Okay." I held up a hand. "First, thank you for telling me. That took guts and I know it, because I watched you work up to it since seven o'clock tonight. Second, I am flattered, genuinely. Third, and I need you to hear this part, nothing between us has changed on my end. You're still my friend. You're still the woman who out-climbed me on our first day at the gym and then had the decency to never once bring it up for thirteen years, which is its own kind