The Talent Show Confession

I work at the Heritage Museum in town. Museum assistant, which mostly means I sort other people's donations and write little cards nobody reads.

Today I was sorting exhibit notes. Paper, mostly. A box of letters from 1954 that some farmer's widow dropped off last spring.

I read maybe three of them. Then I sat there with a pen in my mouth and thought about the thing I have never told Bert.

Here's the thing. Wait. No. Here's what it is, plainly.

I want Bert to take charge in bed. Gently. I want him to decide things. Tell me what to do. Hold my wrists down and not ask first. I have read enough to know this is a normal thing a lot of people want, and I still can't say it out loud to the man I've been dating for two years.

I turn twenty-four in four days. Twenty-four. I'm an adult, I pay rent, I have a job where old men hand me taxidermy and expect me to know what it's worth. And I go red in the face thinking about asking my own boyfriend for something half the romance novels I buy at the gas station are about.

Two years with Bert. He's forty-six. He was married once, way back, before me, and it ended fine, they just ran out of things to say. He's a rodeo clown most weekends and an antique dealer the rest of the time. I met him at the Ozark Antique Mall when I was twenty-one and he was selling me a lamp I did not need.

The pen fell out of my mouth and hit the letters.

"Addie, you absolute coward," I said to the empty back office.

Mrs. Holtz poked her head in. "You say something?"

"Nope. Talking to the letters."

"Well talk quieter, they're historical." She left.

Fair point.

* * *

The Ozark Antique Mall is a two-story barn of a building out on Route Z. Two floors, forty vendors, one elevator that has not worked since before I was born. Nobody's fixed it. The elevator's become a storage closet and, according to mall gossip, a nap spot.

Bert sleeps in it during rodeo season. I hold opinions about this. He calls it his office.

I drove out after work on Thursday. His truck wasn't in the lot yet, so I went in and loitered. That's the word. I loitered by the vintage clothing booth like a person with no purpose, which I was.

Aileen spotted me immediately. Aileen Freemont runs the clothing booth. Thirty-eight, divorced three years back, built like she could throw me over her shoulder. She probably could.

"There she is," Aileen said. "The museum girl. You're hovering."

"I'm browsing."

"Nobody browses the booth with the ugly hats. What do you want?"

"Is Bert in?"

"Break room. Washing his face off. He clowned the Springs rodeo tonight." She stacked an armload of sequined vests. "You doing anything Saturday?"

"Saturday?"

"Mall's twenty-fifth anniversary. Timothy's doing a talent show."

I blinked. "A talent show. In an antique mall."

"In the back lot. Bring a chair. It'll be terrible. I'm entering."

"You're entering."

"Most Original category. There's three categories, Addie. Most Original, Best Act, and Crowd Favorite. I'm going for Most Original and I will win, because my competition is a man who whistles through his hands."

That would be Emeka. Emeka whistles through his hands. He is very good at it.

"I'll think about it," I said, which was a lie, because I was already walking away, and somewhere in my skull a bad idea had just lit up like a carnival.

* * *

The break room is behind the tool booth. Fluorescent light, a microwave, a poster about forklift safety from 1998. Bert was at the sink, scrubbing his face with dish soap.

There's something about watching a rodeo clown take off his face. He goes from a grinning white-masked fool to just Bert. Forty-six, gray coming in at his temples, forearms like rope. He's got a scar on his chin from a bull named Widowmaker, which I maintain is the best fact about my boyfriend.

"Hey, baby," he said, eyes still shut, scrubbing. "You're here."

"Yep."

"Good day?"

"Sorted letters." I sat on the counter. Waited.

He rinsed, toweled off, looked at me. He's good at looking at me. Two years and he still does it like I'm a thing he might buy.

"You're chewing your lip," he said. "That's your thinking look."

"It is not."

"It absolutely is. You chew the left side. What's on your mind?"

Everything, is what was on my mind. The whole secret, sitting right there behind my teeth like a chicken bone.

"Saturday," I said instead. "The talent show."

"Lord. You heard about that already."

"Timothy's serious?"

Bert laughed and sat down across from me, knees wide, elbows on them. He'd changed out of the baggies into jeans. "Timothy's been planning it for three months. He's got a clipboard. He made a clipboard, Addie. Laminated."

"Timothy York made a laminated clipboard?"

"Fifty-two years old and prouder of that clipboard than of anything else he owns. He wants us all to perform. I told him clowns don't clown for free, and he said fine, do it for the anniversary. So Saturday I'm doing... something. I haven't decided what."

"Are you scared of bulls or of talent shows?"

"Talent shows. Bulls, you can read. A crowd of antique dealers just does what it wants."

The door banged open and Timothy came in, actually holding the clipboard. Timothy York. Tall, bent, sixty pounds of enthusiasm in a man shaped like a fence post.

"There she is!" he said. "Addie Thatcher. Bert, your girl. Listen, both of you, Saturday, two o'clock, back lot. I've got eleven acts. Eleven! Emeka's whistling, Aileen's doing a fashion thing, Marv's doing woodcarving live, which I told him is a fire hazard, and he said that's the point."

"It's not the point of anything," Bert said.

"It's the point of art, Bert." Timothy checked his clipboard even though he'd clearly memorized it. "Two days. Two days out. Bert, you're on the list as 'TBD,' which I need you to fill in."

"I'll fill it in."

"Addie." He pointed the pen at me. "You're not on the list. Fix that."

"I don't have a talent."

"Everybody's got a talent. You work at a museum. Talk about an artifact. People love that."

He banged back out. The door took a second to settle on its hinges.

Bert looked at me. "You could do that. Talk about an artifact. You'd be good."

And then the bad idea finished lighting up, and I nearly said it right there, sitting on a counter next to a forklift poster.

Because here's what occurred to me. I'm bad at saying things in bed. I go quiet. I go red. But a stage? A stage with a microphone, a crowd, an excuse? I have seen myself give a tour to forty third-graders. I can talk on a stage. It's the pillow talk where my throat closes.

I could get up at that talent show and say something. Say the thing. Not the whole thing, not graphic, but enough. Enough that Bert would know, and could take it from there, gently, the way I want him to.

"A penny for it," Bert said. "That look."

"Just thinking about the elevator."

"The elevator?"

"It's your office, right? Rodeo season. You nap in there."

"It's the best nap spot in Missouri. Padded walls. Dark. Nobody fixes it, nobody opens it. Why?"

"No reason!" I slid off the counter. "I've got an idea for Saturday, is all."

"Yeah?"

"Maybe. Don't ask."

"You know I'm going to ask."

"And you know I'm going to not tell you, and you're going to let me not tell you, because you're the most patient man alive."

He smiled at that. He stood up and came over and put a hand on my waist, careful, always careful, and asked, "Can I kiss you good evening, or are you too busy scheming?"

"Kiss first. Scheme after."

He kissed me. Soft, unhurried. My whole face went warm and I thought, four days. Four days until I'm twenty-four and I have wanted this thing for over a year and I'm going to confess it on a stage in a parking lot full of antique dealers, or die of embarrassment trying.

Aileen's voice floated down the hallway. "Addie. You want to borrow a dress for Saturday? I've got one in your size and it says things."

"See?" Bert said. "Even the dress says things."

"Everyone in this building says things except me."

"There's two days left," Bert said. "Say them Saturday."

Oh, I intended to.

Bert let me help him close. He never lets anyone help him close, but Aileen was gone and Emeka had left through the back as a man escaping a crime scene would, and the mall is too big for one person at seven on a Thursday.

"Booths," he said, and handed me a clipboard of my own. Not laminated. I checked.

"Timothy would cry," I said.

"Timothy laminated the whole concept of clipboards. Don't tell him mine's bare. He'll take it personal."

We did the loop. Back row first, then the middle aisles, then the front booths with the lamps and the dishes. I turned off lights as we went. The mall at half dark is a different animal. Mismatched everything, forty vendors' worth of taste shoved together, and shadows in all the corners where nobody ever sweeps. Somewhere upstairs a door ticked in the wind. I have worked around old buildings long enough to know that tick is just a building breathing. Mostly I know that.

"Mrs. Holtz asked about you today," I said. "At the museum. She wants to know if you're still selling that pie safe."

"That pie safe is spoken for and she knows it. She's worn me down on three things this year. She's not getting the pie safe."

"She said you'd say that."

"She knows me too well." Bert locked the gate at the end of the toy booth. "There's pie in the break room fridge, by the way. Aileen brought it. Peach."

"You're saving that for Saturday."

"I'm saving half of it for Saturday."

We ended up at the front, by the elevator. Of course we did. It sits in the middle of the lobby like a monument to nothing, brass doors, a little grille, a sign somebody hand-lettered in 1970-something that says OUT OF ORDER, PLEASE DON'T. The please don't is my favorite part. Please don't what? Ride it? Breathe on it? Nobody knows.

Bert leaned against it and looked at me with that face he makes when he's not asking for anything.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. You look happy. You look like a person with a plan."

"I don't have a plan."

"You've got the scheming face on. Same face you had in the break room."

I put my arms around his neck, because it was easier than arguing. "Kiss me again and stop analyzing my face."

"Can I?"

"You already know the answer to that."

He kissed me. Longer this time. His hand came up slow along my jaw and I made a small noise into his mouth that I'm sure was very dignified. Two years and he still kisses like he's got all night, which is a thing I normally appreciate and tonight found slightly torturous, for reasons he did not know about yet.

And that's when the elevator rattled.

We both jumped apart like a couple of teenagers caught... no. Like two grown adults, twenty-three and forty-six, caught making out next to a dead elevator by the dead elevator.

"What was that?" I whispered, which was stupid, who was I whispering to.

Bert didn't even flinch, the show-off. "Settling," he said. "Happens when the heat kicks off. Whole building does it."

"It rattled."

"Stuff shifted. It's full of stuff."

"Full of..." I looked at the doors. "Bert. What is in there?"

He had the look of a man deciding whether to show you a magic trick. "You've never seen it?"

"I've leaned on it for two years. I've never been inside it."

"Well." He pulled a key ring off his belt. "It's rodeo season. My office should be shown in its best light."

"You keep your office locked?"

"Nobody fixes it, nobody opens it, nobody steals my cot." He worked the lock on the brass doors and slid them apart with a screech that set my teeth on edge. The grille came next. Then he reached in and pulled a chain, and a bare bulb came on, and there it was.

His office.

He wasn't lying about the padded walls. Somebody, decades back, had glued quilt batting inside the cab, and it had gone the shade of weak tea, but it was still there, soft and brown and weirdly cozy. A folding cot against the back wall, made up tight, army corners. A battery lantern. A crate he used as a nightstand, with a paperback facedown on it. A hot plate. A coffee mug with a cartoon bull on it, the bull wearing sunglasses.

"You live in here," I said.

"I nap in here. There's a difference. Living would be a step down."

"You made the bed."

"I always make the bed. You'd nap better too if you made your bed." He stepped in behind me, which meant I was now standing inside a forty-year-old elevator with my boyfriend, and the cab is not big. It is the opposite of big. "Watch your head. There's the good stuff."

"What's the..."

He pulled a canvas tarp off the back corner, and under it was a saddle. A real one, old, tooled leather gone dark at the edges, silver conchos down the skirt.

"That's beautiful," I said.

"1940s, maybe older. Fella in Sterling brought it in a box. Vendor wanted full retail, I said I'd