The Tandem Gambit

The tandem bike showed up on a Tuesday, and it wasn't even ours.

I'm Debby Gonzalez, I'm twenty-nine, and I farm forty acres of beans and squash about six miles from the Hollis Creek research station. Rory, my husband, is thirty and blows glass for a living, which sounds fancier than it is. Mostly he makes pipes and little paperweights and once a year a chandelier for a restaurant in the city. We've been married five years. We dated two years before that. We met when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three, at a farmers market where he had a booth and I had too many zucchini.

Anyway. The delivery guy left the tandem bike leaning against our fence with a shipping label that had our road name but the wrong number. It belonged to somebody three miles up. I texted the number on the label, the woman said come by whenever, and there it sat in our yard for four days because neither of us got around to driving it over.

That bike has one important quality, though. Seven years ago, back when we were still dating and stupid about it, we took a tour of the seed bank at Hollis Creek. Rory's aunt worked there, so we got in after hours, and we stood in that big vault room with all the metal canisters lined up in rows, and Rory whispered that we should come back someday with a tandem bike and ride it through the aisles naked at midnight. I laughed so hard I snorted. We never did it. We chickened out, got married, and turned into people who go to bed at ten.

So for four days that bike sat in my yard and I looked at it every morning while I checked the irrigation lines, and every morning I thought, huh.

Rory came home Friday around six, smelling like the kiln, which he always does, and stopped dead in the yard when he saw it.

"Debby. Is that a tandem?"

"It's not ours. It's Lucinda's, up the road. Wrong address."

He walked around it twice like it was a horse he was thinking of buying. "You know what that is, right?"

"It's a bike with two seats, Rory."

"That's the bike." He pointed at it like I didn't know what he meant. "From the vault. From the dare."

"We were twenty-two and twenty-three. We're not doing the dare."

"We are absolutely not doing the dare," he said, and then he wheeled it up onto the porch, which I took as a bad sign for my argument.

We had pork chops and the last of the sweet corn, and the bike leaned against the kitchen wall the whole meal, between the coat hooks and the window. We ate mostly quiet, the way married people do. I kept glancing at it. He kept glancing at me glancing at it.

Finally he set his fork down. "Okay, say something."

"Say what? We've been married five years, Rory. Our big adventure last month was reorganizing the seed packets in the shed."

"That's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying." He pushed his plate an inch toward the middle of the table. "We used to do stuff. Remember the quarry? Remember when you dared me to jump off the low ledge and I split my swim trunks?"

"You still owe me for the new pair."

"Debby." He said it low, the way he does when he means something. "The guard at Hollis Creek, the night guy, he goes off shift at eleven. My aunt told us that herself, back then. Nobody else is out there."

I looked at the bike. I looked at him. I felt something in my stomach that I hadn't felt in a good while, a little flip, like I was on the first drop of a fair ride. "If we get arrested I'm telling the cops it was your idea."

"If we get arrested we tell them the bike belongs to Lucinda and we were returning it."

"That's not terrible, actually."

He grinned at me across the table, and it was the grin from when he was twenty-three, and honestly that did more to me than anything he's done in the bedroom lately, and I mean that in every sense.

We loaded the bike into the bed of the truck at ten thirty, under a tarp, like we were hiding a body. Rory brought a blanket and a flashlight with a red filter, which he apparently owned already, which told me he'd been thinking about this longer than one dinner. I brought a thermos of coffee. I also went upstairs before we left and dug through the bottom drawer of my dresser, past the socks, to a little padded box.

Inside the box was a glass dildo Rory made for me back when we were dating. He'd made it in his studio during an open week, blue with a swirl of white through the middle, smooth as an egg. We'd used it plenty those first years. Lately it lived in the sock drawer like a relic. I put it in my jacket pocket and didn't say anything to him. Some things you keep in your pocket until you need them.

The drive out took twenty minutes on dark roads. We parked past the gate, on the gravel shoulder where the tour buses turn around, and walked in along the service path Rory half-remembered. He was wrong twice and right the third time. The side door of the admin building has a code pad, and the code his aunt used seven years ago still worked, which honestly says something about that station's budget.

Inside, the halls were lit by those little green exit lights. Our footsteps echoed. The vault door stood open at the end of the corridor, because the climate system runs all night and somebody had propped it for the airflow.

The cold hit us first. The vault runs at fifty degrees, maybe forty-eight