The Subwoofer Above

Tucker was under a pickup at the shop when his phone buzzed on the workbench. He wiped his hands on a rag and looked at the screen. It was Alissa, the woman he'd matched with online three weeks ago, the one flying in from Nairobi tonight for two days of insurance meetings in Mwanza.

Her text said, "I cannot sleep. My floor is literally vibrating. The nightclub downstairs has a subwoofer the size of a truck engine and it goes until 3 AM."

Then a second text. "It is 11:40 PM. I am standing in the middle of my room holding my pillow like an idiot."

Tucker laughed out loud in the empty shop. He typed back, "Do you mind sheep?"

Three question marks came back. Then, "Explain. Now. Please!"

So he called her, because typing that explanation would have taken him an hour.

"Okay, so, don't laugh," he said, leaning against the truck's fender. "I bought a hayrick last year. Old one, on my friend Winnie's farm out past Kayenze. Sheep farmer, she's forty-five, we've known each other ten years. I've been fixing it up to rent out as a guesthouse. It's maybe half done, but the bed works and there's no subwoofer within six kilometers."

There was a pause on the line. Then Alissa said, "You are offering me a hayrick. A stack of hay. As a hotel."

"A restored hayrick! Well, being restored. Half restored. Two thirds restored, honestly."

"Tucker."

"Yes?"

"It's midnight and my floor is shaking and you are the only person in this entire city I have actually spoken to before. I would sleep in a ditch if you offered. Yes. Obviously yes."

Tucker grinned, which was stupid because she couldn't see him, but he grinned anyway.

"Give me forty minutes," he said.

He drove through Ilemela with the windows down, thinking the whole way that this was either the best or the dumbest idea he'd ever had. They'd talked online nearly every evening for three weeks. She was thirty-two, an accountant, she did something with reinsurance sidecar portfolios that he still didn't fully understand, and she'd told him once that she spent so much of her life in airports and spreadsheets that she'd forgotten what a real conversation felt like. He was thirty-four, single, never married, a plumber, and his last real connection had been a brief online fling at thirty that had ended so amicably it barely counted as a breakup. So maybe they were two people who had both gotten good at almost.

She was waiting outside the hotel with a rolling bag and a jacket she clearly wasn't wearing for the weather. She saw the truck, a beat-up blue Hilux, and waved, and when Tucker got out she just stood there looking at him.

"Okay," she said. "You're taller than your photos."

"You're shorter than yours."

"I'm standing on a curb, that's cheating in my favor. Hi."

"Hi. Rough night?"

"My floor has been playing bass guitar at me for two hours. Hi. Thank you for coming. Is this weird? Tell me if this is weird."

"It's a little weird," Tucker admitted, taking her bag. "But good weird. Get in."

They drove out past the edge of Ilemela with the windows down again, and she asked questions the whole way, quick ones, the way she apparently did everything. Did he really live near the lake? Did he like plumbing? Was Winnie going to think a strange woman was showing up at midnight? He answered all of them and only lied about one, the plumbing, because he actually loved plumbing and it embarrassed him to say so.

"She won't think anything," he said. "Winnie has been telling me for a year to invite someone out there. She'll probably cry."

"Ten years of knowing you and she still does that?"

"She's worse than my mother. She helped me through the online fling thing at thirty, brought me soup like I'd had surgery. When I bought the hayrick she acted like I'd finally joined a religion she approved of."

The farm came up on the left, a gate, a dirt track, and then the field with the hurdles around it, the wooden panels making little pens where the sheep dozed in the dark. Tucker parked and killed the engine, and for a second they both just sat there.

"Wow," Alissa said quietly. "You can hear the lake."

"And nothing else. No subwoofer. I checked personally."

He walked her in past the hurdles, one hand on her rolling bag, and she stopped in the middle of the path.

"Wait. Are those the sheep? Can I see them? It's midnight, I know, but I've never, okay, there are sheep, that's enough, that's enough for midnight." She laughed at herself. "Sorry. Two days of spreadsheets ahead of me. I get giddy when numbers aren't involved."

Inside the hayrick, the guestroom was half finished and Tucker knew it. The bed was made, a proper bed he'd built himself, and there was a lamp and a window with a curtain, but one wall was still bare timber and the floor by the door had a strip of bare concrete he kept meaning to tile. He felt his face go hot as he set her bag down.

"So," he said, rubbing his jaw instead of looking at her. "It's not done. The floor's the worst of it. And the bathroom's through the back but the door sticks, you have to lift the handle. And I haven't, you know. There's no TV."

Alissa looked around the room, and he braced for the polite face.

"This is the nicest room I've ever been in," she said.

"You don't have to say that."

"Tucker. I have stayed in forty-dollar airport hotels for three years. There's a bed you built yourself. There's a window with sheep behind it. There's no subwoofer. I might cry, actually. Don't look at me."

He laughed and pointed out the lamp, the sticking door, the jug of water on the shelf, and then stood there like a man with nowhere to put his hands. The whole drive out he'd been fine, but now she was actually here, in his half-finished room, and he suddenly wanted her to think well of it more than he wanted almost anything.

"The rest of the hayrick's through here," he said, wanting to fill the silence. "It's the part I like most. Come see, if you're not dropping."

"I'm not dropping." She followed him down the short hall, and he showed her the main room, the table he'd made from old boat planks, the shelves, and on the table, sitting in its open box, the thing he'd been avoiding all night.

"What is that?" she said, stepping closer.

"It's a jigsaw puzzle. A thousand pieces. It's a map, sort of. A made-up continent. My sister sent it, no wait, a friend sent it, Chandler, he's a race mechanic, we met at a car show eight years back. He sent it as a joke because I complained once that there was nothing to do out here at night."

Alissa leaned over the box and looked at the picture on the lid, the invented coastline, the invented mountains, the invented cities with names nobody had ever lived in.

"You haven't started it," she said.

"Started it, then stopped. I got the coast done and I got stuck. The middle's all mountains and I lost interest in mountains."

"Tucker. I do puzzles. I am an accountant. I am, and I mean this, extremely good at puzzles."

He looked at her, standing there at midnight in his half-finished hayrick with her jacket still on, and something in his chest went loose and warm.

"Okay," he said. "First thing tomorrow. But you have meetings all day."

"Meetings end at five. Then I'm all yours, puzzle-wise. Are you good at puzzles?"

"Coastlines. Coastlines and rivers."

"Edges man. Fine. I'll take the interior, you take the edges. Deal?"

"Deal."

She went back to the guestroom, and Tucker stood a minute in the main room with the lamp on, listening to the sheep shift somewhere out in the dark and the lake doing what the lake does at night, which is nothing, a long low nothing that he'd missed without knowing it.

"Tucker?" her voice came through the door. "Thank you. Really. This was the best hotel swap of my entire life."

"Sleep well! The door sticks, lift the handle."

He heard her laugh once, and then quiet, and he went out and got in the truck and sat there a while before starting it. He was grinning again. He kept doing that.

At the gate he texted Winnie, because she'd want to know. "Hayrick guest arrived. Friend from online. She's staying a few nights."

The reply came back in under a minute, which meant Winnie had been awake, which meant she'd been awake waiting for this text, he was sure of it.

"FINALLY. Don't ruin it. Feed her breakfast. I'm bringing eggs in the morning."

He drove home along the lakeshore road feeling, for the first time in a long time, like something good had just been handed to him and he hadn't even had to ask for it.

The next day crawled. Tucker fixed two burst pipes and a toilet that wouldn't stop running, and every hour he checked his phone with the compulsive urgency of youth, which was embarrassing, so he stopped, then started again twenty minutes later. At 5:07 his phone buzzed. "Free. Survived. Where do we stand on mountains?"

He picked her up at the hotel gate at half past five. She came out with her jacket over her arm and her hair tied back and she looked, he thought, like someone who had won an argument with a whole conference room and was still riding the win. "How was it?" he asked as she climbed in.

"Endless. I priced reinsurance for a cyclone that hasn't happened yet. That's my whole job, Tucker. I price disasters that haven't happened." She buckled her belt. "Anyway. Mountains. I've been thinking about mountains all day."

"You've been thinking about a fake continent all day?"

"I have been thinking about a fake continent all day, yes, and I'm not ashamed."

Back at the hayrick the light was going gold and long across the field, and the sheep were dozing in their pens behind the hurdles like little grey rocks. Alissa stood at the window of the guestroom for a minute just looking at them, and then she washed her hands at the tap and came to the table and got to work, and Tucker got to work too, and for a while there was no talking at all, just the small dry clatter of pieces and the sound of the evening.

She was good. He'd said she was good and she'd said she was extremely good, but he hadn't understood what that meant until he watched her. She sorted by color into little fan-shaped stacks, and she held a piece up to the light and turned it and put it down in the right spot almost without looking, like she already knew where it lived. "That's the Kelvar range," she said, tapping the lid. "It goes like a broken finger across the middle. See? Three pieces and it's started."

"Where'd you learn to do that?"

"Do what?"

"See it before it's there."

She shrugged and reached for another piece. "Practice. Three years of hotel rooms, Tucker. A thousand-piece puzzle is one night in Nairobi, two nights in Dar, three nights in Kampala. You get fast." She fit the piece in. "You get very fast, and then you notice you're eating dinner alone in a hotel restaurant again and the puzzle is the best part of your week, and that's when you should probably worry."

Tucker looked up from his edge pieces. She didn't say it sad. She said it like a fact, the way you'd say the tap drips. That was somehow worse.

"You hate the travel," he said.

"I hate the travel." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "I used to love it. When I was twenty-eight I took this job because it came with flights and I thought that was everything. Now I know every airport bench from here to Accra and I can sleep through a sunrise landing and I have exactly one serious relationship in my past and it ended because I moved cities for work and he didn't follow, which was correct of him, actually. Both of us were right and it still ended." She looked at the puzzle. "There. Your fake continent has a bay now. I made a bay."

"It's a good bay."

"It's a very good bay." She smiled at it. "What about you? Tell me the Tucker story. You've heard my sad spreadsheet life. Why is a thirty-four-year-old plumber restoring a hayrick out past Kayenze?"

"Because Winnie's farm is cheap and quiet?"

"Tucker."

He fiddled with a piece for a while, an edge piece, sky-colored, that wouldn't fit anywhere. "I don't know. It's not a good story. I've been plumbing since I was twenty-two. Twelve years. Same jobs, same pumps, same four streets along the lake. My friends all got married or moved and I stayed, and one day I was forty pounds of pump parts on Chandler's floor at a car show and he said, you know, you talk about the water like it's the same water every day, and I said it is the same water every day, and he said that was my problem, not the water's." He set the piece down. "So I bought a hayrick. Everyone thought I'd lost it. You restore it a bit at a time and one day it's a guesthouse and people pay you to sleep in a thing that used to hold hay. That's the plan, anyway."

"And it feels stuck sometimes," she said. "The thirties. Like the decade is one long corridor."

"Exactly that. You said it better than I did." He laughed, surprised at how it came out of him. "Sorry. It's just, nobody ever says it out loud. Everyone posts like their thirties are a victory lap."

"Tucker, I price disasters for a living. I can afford to say one true thing."

The piece in his hand clicked into the corner. He hadn't even looked. "The bay connects to the corner," he said. "Look at that."

"Beginner's luck," said Alissa, who had placed it.

The light went from gold to purple while they argued about whether the invented river should curve left or right, and then a pickup crunched up the track and Winnie got out with a covered dish in both hands. She was forty-five and built like the farm itself, wide and warm and not to be argued with, and she came through the door without knocking because it was, in her view, her hayrick.

"Evening," she said. "Tucker, why is there a strange woman doing my puzzle?"

"It's my puzzle," said Tucker.

"It's on my table on my farm, so it's my puzzle. Hello, I'm Winnie. Are you feeding this man or is he feeding you? Either way I brought stew."

"You brought stew?" said Tucker, standing up. "Nobody asked you to bring stew."

"Nobody asked you to be born either, and yet." She set the dish down and lifted the cloth, and it was goat stew with rice and it smelled like somebody's kitchen, which it was. "There are chapatis under the rice. Don't argue. Alissa, is it? He texted me at midnight like a boy. 'Hayrick guest arrived, friend from online.' I