The Tab Dividers

I got to the potluck late, which was deliberate, because showing up on time to a thing in a long low room full of people I mostly knew from passing nods meant standing there while everyone decided whether to talk to me, and I'd rather skip that part. My name is Tegan, I'm thirty-four, and I test vapor return lines on bulk tankers, which is a real job even though when I say it at parties people go quiet and change the subject. The canning kitchen sits a mile north of the trailhead hut where I do my paperwork, and by the time I pulled in that evening the tomato pressing had been done for hours, the press itself pushed against the far wall and still shiny with juice, and the tables down the middle of the room were lined with jars in rows, quart jars mostly, some pints, all of them still warm enough that the lids ticked now and then like slow insects.

Ruby spotted me from across the room before I'd gotten my coat all the way off, and she waved with her whole arm the way she does, thirty-two years old and veterinary assistant in town and the kind of person who has never once in five years of knowing me let me stand alone at a gathering for longer than four minutes. I appreciated it and I resented it in about equal measure, which I've decided is just what friendship looks like for me. She was elbow deep in a crate of empty jars she was clearing, and she shouted something at me that I didn't catch over the general noise, and I held up a hand to say hang on, and I stood in the doorway a second longer than I meant to.

Because Dean was there. Dean was by the tomato jars, of course he was, because Dean has this habit of positioning himself near whatever is most organized in a room, and thirty-five jars of crushed tomatoes with their labels written in Ruby's careful handwriting were the most organized thing in that kitchen by a wide margin. He was thirty-five now, a year older than me, and we'd met twelve years back in a community college chemistry lab when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three and we'd been paired on some titration neither of us remembers anymore. He worked the wildlife research station near Hesar these days, and for three years our schedules had crossed at the trailhead hut during my testing rounds, late evenings mostly, the two of us drinking bad coffee off the shared burner and talking until my eyes went gritty. He had never once made it strange. That was the quality of Dean, and the quality I'd been avoiding thinking about for about three of those years.

He saw me in the doorway and didn't wave big the way Ruby did, he just lifted his chin a little and went back to reading a jar label like it was a contract, and somehow that made my chest do a small thing I didn't approve of. I hung my coat on the peg by the door and went in.

The food was the usual potluck spread, casseroles and flatbread and someone's bean thing that always made the round at these events, and I filled a plate mostly to have something to do with my hands. Ruby appeared at my elbow before I'd even sat down, wiping her hands on a towel.

"You came," she said, like I was a cat that had wandered in from the cold. "I owe Christopher ten toman, he said you'd show by eight."

"I'm always here by eight on pressing days," I told her. "You people bet on me?"

"We bet on everything, Tegan. It's the only sport available in this town." She steered me toward the long table with a hand between my shoulder blades, gentle, not pushy, and I let her. "Sit, eat, don't hover. Dean saved you the spot next to him, not that he'd say so."

"He did not," I said, but the bench beside Dean was conspicuously empty, his plate already set up next to the space, and Ruby grinned at me and walked off toward the jars again like she'd won something.

I sat down. Dean didn't make a speech about it, he just moved his cup a few inches to make room and said, "Rough rounds this week?"

"Three tankers with sticky meter seals," I said. "You don't want to hear about it."

"I do, actually," he said, and he did, this was the truth, he asked real questions about vapor return lines that nobody else had ever asked me, and I talked with my mouth half full like a person with no dignity, and he listened the way he always listened, which is fully, without checking the room over my shoulder.

The divider tabs came out of my jacket pocket around then, without my quite deciding it. I carry a set of plastic dividers, the kind meant for organizing files, and the labels on them have been peeling for years, little curled corners of white plastic that my thumb finds on its own. I sort them by color when I'm thinking, edge them into stacks, square the stack, mess it up again. I was doing it at the table, not thinking about it at all, when I noticed Dean's eyes had come down to my hands.

He didn't say anything. He just watched, in that quiet way he had, and something in me that had been sitting dormant for a long while sat up.

So I did something I don't fully have an explanation for even now. I let one of the tabs, a red one with its label half peeled, slide off the stack and off the edge of the table, and it landed on the bench on my side, close to my thigh, and I left it there. I didn't pick it up. I kept sorting the rest and talking about meter seals, and Dean's eyes went from my hands to where the red tab rested against the fabric near my leg and back up to my face, and his expression didn't change at all, which somehow made it louder.

"You dropped one," he said finally.

"I know," I said.

He looked at me then, really looked, and I felt it the way you feel sun come through a window onto your arm. "You've carried those things for three years," he said. "Never once seen you drop one."

"First time for everything," I said, and my thumb found the peeled corner of another label and worried it, and he watched that too.

Ruby came back down the table collecting empties, and the room noise folded around us, and I reached up with my free hand and did the second thing, the thing I'd been circling for ten minutes. I shifted the shoulder of my shirt. Slowly, deliberately, a few inches down my arm, so the collar slid with it and the top of my collarbone was just there, plain as anything, in the warm light. I wasn't performing for the room. The room didn't exist. I was doing it where Dean could see it, if he looked, and he looked.

He cleared his throat and picked up his cup and drank, and set it down, and said, "Testing rounds start again Monday."

"They do," I said.

"The hut key's in the same drawer," he said, which was not a question and not exactly an answer, and I picked up the red tab from the bench and put it back on the stack, label still peeling, and we went on eating like two people who had not just agreed to something neither of us had said out loud.

Dean caught me looking at him, and instead of the usual thing where a person glances away and pretends the last three seconds didn't happen, I held it, and then I let my eyes drop, slow, all the way down to the red tab on the stack like I was checking on it, and I could feel him tracking the whole trip down and the whole trip back up. It was the slowest I had ever looked at anything in my life, and it wasn't subtle, and I knew it wasn't subtle, and that was the entire point of it, because subtle had gotten me twelve years of nothing but friendship and a drawer with a hut key in it.

I picked up my cup. I drank. I set it down and squared the stack of tabs again, and Dean said nothing, and the nothing he said was louder than anything Ruby had ever yelled across the kitchen about my tomatoes. Then I did the third thing, the one I had been saving, I suppose, without admitting I was saving it. I put my hand in my lap and shifted the hem of my shorts, just an inch, just enough that the fabric sat different against my leg, and I did it while he was watching, not while he was looking away, and I saw his jaw change, the smallest tightening, a man holding very still so nothing would escape.

He reached for the bread basket. He tore off a piece. He did not look at the bread once while he did it, which was funny, honestly, the way he handled that crust like it was a technical document he was pretending to read.

That was when the door banged and Christopher came in with the cold on him, cheeks red from the runs, that