The Stargazer's Night Off

The house is too quiet. The entire problem is that, if you ask me. Ever since Nina left for university in Turin three weeks ago, me and Margaret have been rattling around this apartment like two marbles in a jar.

She's nineteen now, our girl. Can you believe it? Nineteen and off studying physics like her mother, and here I am, forty-three years old, standing in the kitchen staring at a camping stove I've never once lit.

"Edgar! Are you still packing?" Margaret shouts from the bedroom. "The sun sets at eight twenty! We'll miss the whole show!"

"I'm coming. I'm coming," I yell back, though I'm not coming, because I can't figure out where the damn fuel canister goes on this stove.

Margaret appears in the doorway with her boots already on, arms crossed. She's forty-one and she still looks at me the same way she did when I first walked into her stargazing night at the community college, back when I was twenty-two and knew nothing about anything except delivery routes. That was twenty-one years ago now.

"Is that the new stove?" she asks.

"It's the new stove."

"And have you ever used the new stove?"

"...No."

She laughs, that big honest laugh that made me fall for her before she even finished her first slide about the Andromeda galaxy. "Oh, Edgar. What could go wrong? We hike twenty minutes up the trail, we can't make coffee, we come home. It's fine. Bring tea bags, we'll suffer."

"I'm a grown man, I should know how to light a stove," I grumble, shoving the thing in the backpack.

"You're a grown man who can rebuild a transmission blindfolded. I'll allow you one gap in your education." She kisses my cheek and pushes me toward the door. "Keys?"

"Got 'em."

Famous last words, people. Famous last words.

* * *

The trail above Silver Pine smells like pine, obviously, and cold rock, and that thin clean air you only get this high up in the Alps. We live in this little lodge community near Cervinia, all wood shutters and tourists in expensive jackets, and Margaret's observatory dome sits up on the ridge like a big white golf ball. She runs it for the university in the summer and does public stargazing nights, which is how we met, like I said.

The sunset is gorgeous, all orange and pink over the Matterhorn's shoulder. We find a flat rock and I set up the stove like a man with a plan.

"So you just turn this knob," I say.

"Do you have the fuel attached?"

"It's attached."

"Did you bleed the line?"

"The what?"

She sits down on the rock, crosses her legs, and grins at me. "Oh, this is going to be good."

I turn the knob. Nothing. I turn it again and press the little igniter button. Click, click, click. Nothing. I press harder like that ever helps anybody. Click click click.

"Maybe there's a safety," I say.

"There is, you have to hold the ring down while you... no, wait, that's the old one."

"I bought the new one specifically so it would be easier."

"And how's that working out for you, darling?" She's laughing so hard she has to lean back on her hands. "Do you want me to look?"

"No. I've got it. It's a matter of principle now."

"Your principles are going to starve us."

I mess with it another five minutes. I shake it. I turn it upside down, which Margaret says is definitely wrong, and I turn it back over. I even read the little instruction pamphlet, which is in Italian, and I get about halfway through before I admit to her that I thought "accensione" meant fuel.

"It means ignition, love. The word is basically ignition in a hat."

"Then why didn't they just say ignition."

"Because we're in Italy, Edgar."

The light's going fast now, that purple alpine dusk, and finally I sit down next to her with the useless stove between us like a dead animal.

"Well," she says. "That was the best comedy show I've seen all summer."

"I'm glad my humiliation entertains you."

"It does. Truly. We should charge admission." She bumps my shoulder with hers. "Come on. It's not the end of the world. We'll go home, I'll make real coffee, and we can watch the stars from the balcony. There's a clear front coming in, it should be a beautiful night."

So we pack up and walk back down in the dark, and it takes about forty minutes because Margaret stops twice to point out satellites, which she does every single time, and I love her for it, honestly I do.

We get to our building and I pat my jacket pocket. Nothing. I pat the other pocket. Nothing. I dig through the backpack, the stove, the tea bag pouch.

"Margaret."

"I know that voice," she says slowly. "Edgar. Where are the keys?"

"They were in my hand. I had them in my hand when you asked me at the door."

"Then where are they?"

"On the counter. I put them on the counter when I was wrestling with the fuel canister."

She stares at me, and I stare at her, and then we both look up at our balcony on the third floor, where the door sits there being locked at us.

"Oh, this is perfect," she says, and she's laughing again, she can't help it. "The man who can't light a stove also can't hold a key."

"It was in my hand. You witnessed it."

"I did. And then you put it down and never picked it up, because you were too busy being defeated by a camp stove."

The rental office closed at six, obviously, because the world hates me. I knock on the manager's door anyway and get nothing but a big sign that says emergencies only, call this number. It's not an emergency. It's just deeply stupid.

"Okay," Margaret says, thinking. "Okay. Options. We could wake the Rinaldis."

"And explain that the professional astronomer and the grown delivery driver locked themselves out over a camp stove? No."

"We could break a window."

"It's triple glazed, we'd break our arms first."

"We could sleep on the bench by the fountain as students do."

"Don't say students, that's depressing. We're in our forties, my back would file for divorce."

She snorts at that one. Then I get an idea, and I'm almost proud of it.

"The fire hall," I say. "It's two streets over. Casey's on duty tonight, she told us at the barbecue. She said if we ever needed anything, just knock. And they've got cots, don't they? Fire halls have cots."

Margaret's eyebrows go up. "Casey. Hmm."

"What does 'hmm' mean?"

"Nothing. It means fire hall, yes, good idea, very resourceful." But there's something in her face, something almost like a plan forming, and I've been married long enough to know that look means I'm about to be surprised by something. "She's a good one, Casey. Two years here now? Fun, that one. Very... hands-on."

"It's a cot in a fire hall, Margaret, not a spa."

"Sure, sure." She loops her arm through mine and pulls me down the street. "Let's go see. Honestly, this might be the most interesting night we've had since Nina left."

The fire hall has its bay lights on and the little office window glowing yellow. Casey's truck is parked outside, all mud and skis in the rack. I knock, and there she is, thirty-eight years old, blonde braid, volunteer firefighter and ski rental tech, grinning at us through the glass.

"Well, well. The astronomers. What'd you do, burn down the mountain?"

"Worse," Margaret says. "We need a cot."

Casey lets us in waving both arms like we're aircraft. "Oh my god, come in, come in. Did you really burn down the mountain? Tell me you burned down the mountain."

"We locked ourselves out," I say. "The keys are on our counter. Third floor."

Casey laughs so hard she has to hold the door frame. "Third floor. Edgar. You're killing me." She wipes her eyes and points us toward the little kitchen in back. "Sit. I've got real coffee, not that volunteer-hall sludge, I bring my own. Cots are in the bay, I'll air a couple out. You two are the best thing that's happened to me all shift."

So that's how I end up drinking coffee out of a chipped mug at a fire hall at ten at night, still smelling like camp smoke, while my wife chats with a blonde firefighter like they're old college friends. Casey perches on the table edge with her own mug and asks about the hike, the stove, all of it, and I tell the story of my defeat and both women cackle at me.

"The fuel canister was on, Casey. It was on the whole time."

"Of course it was," she says. "My ex did the same thing. Men and stoves. It's a whole thing."

Margaret looks at me over her mug with this little smile. "He's a good man, though. He carried the whole pack up and never complained once."

"Once," I say.

"Once. That's a record." Casey raises her mug to me. "To Edgar, defeated by appliances but handsome about it."

* * *

Casey goes back to her paperwork and leaves us at the corner table, and that's when Margaret does the thing with her foot, the slow one, under the table. I look up. She's still got that smile.

"You've got a face on," I say.

"I have a face on?" She laughs, quiet, into her mug. "Fine. Yes. I have a face on. I've been thinking."

"That sounds dangerous."

"Edgar. Be serious for one minute, can you? One minute." She puts the mug down and takes my hand across the table, and her thumb runs over my knuckles, back and forth. "Nina's been gone three weeks. We've been tiptoeing around each other like two polite roommates. And tonight you locked us out and we're sitting in a fire hall and honestly? This is the most fun I've had in months. Isn't that sad?"

"It's a little sad," I admit. "I was thinking it on the walk down, actually."

"Right. So. Here's my thinking." She squeezes my hand. "I want to make tonight interesting. Not balcony-and-cocoa interesting. Actually interesting. And there's something you should know first, because I want you to trust me, and I don't want to start that with a secret sitting between us."

My stomach does a small drop. "Okay. That sounds ominous."

"It's not ominous. Well. A little." She takes a breath. "When I was twenty-eight, and you and I had been married six years, I had a fling. A visiting researcher, one summer, it lasted about six weeks. It was... adventurous. She taught me things. And I've never told you, and it's not because I'm hiding anything bad, it's because it was mine, and it didn't seem relevant. But it's relevant now, because I've been missing that side of myself. That brave side. And I want it back. With you."

"A woman," I say, mostly to hear it out loud.

"A woman, yes. That's the part you're going to land on, isn't it?"

"Give me a second, I'm having several feelings at once."

She laughs, and her foot goes still, and she waits. That's Margaret. She'll wait all night if she has to.

"Six weeks," I finally say. "When I was thirty I was doing delivery routes and you were having a summer affair with a researcher. God, the things I didn't know."

"Does it bother you? Truly? Because if it does, we stop right here and I'll make cocoa and we'll never speak of it."

"Does it bother me?" I turn my mug a slow circle on the table. "It's a lot, Margaret. But no. It doesn't bother me. It's actually... I don't know the word. It makes you bigger, somehow? You're not just my wife the astronomer, you're a person who's had a whole life and kept a whole secret and is sitting there offering me a piece of it."

"Oh," she says, soft. "That's a good answer. I was braced for worse."

"What did she teach you?" I ask, and I watch her face go pink, forty-one years old and blushing like the day I met her at that talk, twenty-one years ago, when I was twenty-two in the back row and couldn't stop staring.

"Things with my hands. Things with words. How to ask for what I want." Her eyes flick toward Casey's desk and back. "And how to share."

"Share," I repeat.

"Share." She leans in, drops her voice. "Now, before you spiral. Nobody is doing anything you don't say yes to. Not me, not Casey, not anyone. I'm asking you to trust me, Edgar. Tonight only, we throw out the rulebook, the quiet-dinner rulebook, the go-to-bed-at-ten rulebook. You can stop anything at any second and I will never once be anything but fine about it. That's the deal. Do you trust me?"

I look at her hand on mine. I look at the coffee ring on the table. I look at the office window where Casey is humming to herself over her paperwork, blonde braid swinging, the friendliest person on this mountain.

"What exactly are you asking for, Margaret? Say it plain, because I'm a simple delivery man and I need it plain."

She grins, and it's the grin from the lecture hall, the one that got me. "I'm asking my husband to spend the night having an adventure with me. Maybe with company. Maybe just us, in a fire hall cot, like idiots. Either way, I'm asking."

"Casey's a neighbor," I say. "She's got to live here after tonight. We've got barbecues with these people."

"She's flirted with both of us at every barbecue for two years, Edgar. She knows exactly what she's doing, and so do I, and the only one asleep at the wheel is you."

"That's... fair."

"So," she says, and squeezes my hand one more time.