The Teahouse Wheel

Briana was thirty-four years old and she felt like furniture.

Not the good kind either. Not the kind people notice. She felt like the chair in the corner that everyone moves past when they want a real seat. Nine years of marriage to Mortimer and their nights had gone quiet. Not angry quiet. Just empty.

She knew the exact year it happened. Six years ago, give or take. That was when the words started shrinking. Goodnight. Pass the salt. Did you feed the dog. Somewhere in there they stopped touching in the hallway just to touch. Somewhere in there she stopped waiting up for him.

Mortimer was a police officer in Jameh Shuran. Thirty-six, broad through the shoulders, hands like paddles. He'd loved her since she was twenty-three, since the climbing trip where she'd dropped her rack down a crevasse and he'd spent two hours helping her fish it out. They married two years later. She remembered the wedding more clearly than she remembered last Tuesday.

He came home that Thursday with an envelope and a face that looked shattered.

"What's wrong?" she asked. She was peeling potatoes. She didn't look up. That was a habit now. Not looking up.

"Karimi," he said. He set the envelope on the counter. "It's a funeral notice. For Karimi."

She did look up then. Karimi was fifty-eight and played squash twice a week and had the blood pressure of a much younger man. "What? What happened?"

"That's all it says. Party at the hall on Friday." He rubbed his eyes. "I've known the man eleven years. He trained me when I transferred in."

Briana picked up the envelope. The paper was cheap and the print was crooked. She read it once. Then she read it again and started to laugh.

"What?"

"Mort. Read the middle paragraph."

He read it. His face did something complicated. "It's a retirement party."

"It's a retirement party," she said, and now she was laughing hard enough to set down the peeler. "Somebody in the print shop is going to be in so much trouble. Who sends a funeral notice for a retirement? Look, it says right here, refreshments and a gift table."

"A gift table." He sat down hard on the kitchen chair. "Karimi's going to be so confused when half the precinct shows up in black ties with flowers."

"In black ties with flowers," she repeated, wheezing now. "Can you imagine. Everybody crying. And he's just standing there with a cake."

"Nobody cries at his parties. He does an impression of the chief. It's terrible. It's so terrible."

They laughed for a long time. Longer than the joke deserved, probably. But something eased in the room while they did it, some stiff thing that had been sitting between the two of them for years, and when she finally wiped her eyes she saw he was watching her with an expression she hadn't seen since before she was thirty.

"What?" she said again.

"Nothing. I forgot you laugh like that."

"I always laugh like that."

"No," he said. "You haven't. Not in a while."

She didn't have an answer for that. So she said nothing, which was also a habit now, and he let the silence sit for a second before he spoke again.

"You know the old teahouse? On the stilts, over the river. Bakhtiari's place."

"The one with the holes in the floor. You could look down and see the water." She did remember. They used to go there when they were first married, before the place shut down. She'd dropped a coin through a gap once and they'd both watched it fall and vanish into the river and she'd said, well, there goes our fortune, and he'd laughed the way he was almost laughing now.

"It's still Bakhtiari's. He just stopped running it. He told me years ago, if you ever want the key, it's yours. I've been meaning to take you." He turned the envelope over in his hands. "I think tonight we should go. Before we get old and forget how."

"Now?"

"Now. It's Friday eve. We'll take the lamp. We'll drink the good tea."

She looked at the potatoes. Half peeled, sitting in their brown water. She'd spent nine years not leaving half-peeled potatoes on the counter. "All right," she said. "All right, let's go."

The teahouse stood at the end of a rotted boardwalk, up on thick stilts, the river running dark and quick underneath. Mortimer unlocked the padlock with a key he'd had in his pocket so long the teeth were worn smooth. Inside it smelled of old smoke and cardamom, like the place had been holding its breath and keeping the smell for them.

He lit a single oil lamp on the stove. That was all the light there was. The stove was cold but the lamp threw long shadows up the walls, and near the stove sat the thing she'd come to see.

The wheelbarrow wheel. It was sandstone, big as a wagon wheel, and someone long ago had set iron shards around the rim, hammered in like teeth. She didn't know why it was there. Nobody ever knew why it was there. It had just always been part of the teahouse, the way the gaps in the floor were part of it.

She crossed the room and put her hand flat on the stone. It was cold and gritty. The iron shards caught the lamplight and glittered, little dull sparks of orange, one for every gap in the floor below. She ran her fingers around the rim and felt the old tool marks in the stone.

"Still here," she said.

"Stone doesn't go anywhere," Mortimer said. "That's sort of its whole job."

She smiled at that. She was still facing the wheel when she felt him come up behind her. She didn't hear the floor creak, which was strange, because every board in that place creaked. But he was there, close, not touching her yet, and she could feel the heat of him through her shirt like the stove had been lit after all.

"Briana."

Just her name. She waited.

"Tell me to stop if you want me to stop."

"Okay," she said, and her voice came out lower than she meant it to.

He lifted his hand and slid his fingers into her hair. Slow. He gathered it off her neck the way he used to when she was twenty-five and they were