The Time Capsule Date

I drove up the gravel road to the cave at six, already composing the speech I was going to give my aunt. She'd sworn it wasn't a setup. "Just come to the cave, Chantal, bring a bottle back for me," she'd said, which should have been my first clue. Aunt Brooke does not send anybody to the cheese cave alone with a shovel.

The lantern light was already on when I parked. Somebody had been there a while. I came around the stone wall and there was a man standing in the middle of the aisle between the shelves, holding a bottle of wine in one hand and a shovel in the other, like he was about to fight a burglar or dig a grave.

"Okay," I said. "So it's a setup."

He turned around and grinned at me. He was younger than me, no question, maybe late twenties, with a jaw that looked like it had been punched a couple times and still won.

"You must be Chantal. I'm Cyrus. Your aunt told me five o'clock." He checked a watch. "She told me five o'clock specifically, and I'm now thinking she told you six so I'd get here first and be stuck waiting."

"I'm forty-four, not stupid," I said. "I called her on the drive. She said, and I quote, 'just go, stop fighting it.' So. Hi. Cyrus. You're the grandson."

"I'm the grandson." He put the shovel down and held out the wine instead. "She told me you liked red. Then she told me to dig."

"That's the part I don't get. Dig what?"

"There's a time capsule. She and my grandmother buried one down here, like, thirty-some years ago, before I was born. They made a whole thing of it. Grandmaman always said if they ever got around to setting up grandchildren, this is where the first date happens."

"Setting up grandchildren," I repeated. "That's what they call it. Like we're livestock."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, not a polite one. "Your aunt's been on my case for two years. Every phone call. Cyrus, there's a nice woman, Cyrus, you work with criminals all day, can't you sit through one dinner. I finally said fine, thinking it'd be dinner. Instead I get a shovel and coordinates."

"Coordinates. She gave you coordinates?"

"She gave me a map drawn on a napkin. It's terrible. I've been out here twenty minutes guessing."

I should have turned around and driven home right then. Instead I set my purse on the tasting table and took my jacket off. The cave stays cool year round, all that stone and earth, and I was glad of it because I'd worn a dress that was maybe a mistake for a cheese cave. I'd worn it because I'd spent forty minutes arguing with myself in front of my closet, which I hadn't done for a date in five years, and that alone annoyed me more than the setup did.

"Okay," I said. "Show me the napkin."

The napkin was, as advertised, terrible. There was a drawing of the tasting table, an arrow, and the word HERE in my aunt's looping hand, and the arrow pointed at basically the entire floor. We walked the aisle together, and Cyrus knocked on the flagstones with the shovel handle like a doctor tapping a knee, listening for something hollow.

"Your grandmother sounds like a character," he said. "My grandmaman used to say they came down here at night after the tourists left and drink half the inventory."

"That tracks. Brooke has stories. I never know which ones are true."

"She said you're a dentist."

"She said you catch people who skip bail. Which one of us has the worse job?"

"Me, easy. You put people to sleep. I have to wake them up." He knelt down by a flagstone near the back corner and tapped twice. The sound changed. He looked up at me, and there was dirt on his knees already and he didn't care at all. "Got it."

He pried the stone up with the flat of the shovel and dug with his hands after that, fast and careless, and in about four minutes there was a tin box coming up out of the earth, rusted at the corners, wrapped in what had once been a plastic bag.

"Thirty years in the ground," he said, holding it up.

"Thirty-two. My aunt did the math for me twice." I took it from him and his hands stayed on it a beat longer than they needed to, so that for a second we were both holding this filthy box and not quite touching. He didn't pull away fast or make a joke of it. He just looked at me, and I felt it in my chest, that specific stupid feeling I'd decided I was done with.

"Sorry," he said, and let go. "Here."

"It's fine," I said, too quick. I set the box on the tasting table and got a knife from the drawer, because Brooke keeps a full tasting set down there like people are going to hold business meetings in a hole in a hill. The lid fought me. Rust had welded it shut in places, and Cyrus reached over and worked one corner loose with his thumbnail without saying anything, close enough that I could smell wine and sweat and dug-up earth on him.

"You go," he said. "Your aunt's box."

"Our aunts' box. Equal ownership. That's the whole premise of this, apparently." I got the lid up. Inside, under a film of grit, was a bottle cap, a photograph, two folded papers, and a small brass key that meant nothing to either of us.

He picked up the photograph and turned it toward the lantern. Two women, maybe thirty each, arms around each other's shoulders, standing exactly where we were standing, giving the camera the same look of people who've had half the inventory.

"Okay, that's wild," he said. "That's literally this room. That's them right there."

"They thought they were funny." I picked up one of the papers and unfolded it carefully, because thirty-two-year-old paper does not forgive you. It was written in my aunt's hand. I read it and then I stopped and read it again.

"What?" Cyrus said. "What does it say?"

"It says, 'If you two are reading this, the plan worked. Do not overthink. Signed, Brooke and Odile, who knew what they were doing.'"

"That's not what they buried in 1992."

"No, they added a page later. There's a date on the back. They came back and added it, maybe ten years ago. They've been running this con for a decade." I set the paper down on the table. My hands weren't quite steady and I hated that.

Cyrus picked up the second paper, read it, and laughed. "Mine says the same thing but with more swearing. Grandmaman wrote 'stop being an idiot' underlined twice."

"So we're already here. The plan worked. We're reading it." I pulled out a chair and sat, because my legs wanted to make a decision without me. "You don't have to stay. I know she guilted you into this."

He pulled out the other chair and sat down across from me and opened the wine on the second try. "She did guilt me into it. But I'm also not leaving. So pour yourself a glass and tell me why a dentist looks like she's about to bolt."

"I don't look like I'm about to bolt."

"You've looked at the door three times since you sat down."

He was right, and I told him so, and that was the moment the evening stopped being Brooke's con and started being something else.

"What does yours say? The whole thing, not just the punchline."

Cyrus smoothed the paper out on the table and held it closer to the lantern. "It's short. She didn't waste words. Want me to read it?"

"Go ahead. Fair's fair, I made you listen to my aunt's whole manifesto."

He cleared his throat, a little theatrical about it, and read. "To whoever digs this up, probably Cyrus, probably with a woman I bullied Brooke into inviting. I have two things to say. One, the key opens something, and I'm not telling you what, a woman is allowed one secret. Two, find someone who makes you feel lucky. Not someone who looks right in pictures. Someone who makes you feel lucky when they laugh at your dumb jokes. If you find her, stop being an idiot." He looked up. "Underlined twice, remember."

"She knew what she was doing," I said. "That's the part that gets me. They both knew."

"She's been dead five years." He said it plain, no drama in it. "I keep forgetting she's still running plays from the grave."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Yeah. Well. She'd have liked you. She had a thing for women who could out-stubborn her." He folded the letter along its old creases and set it down gentle, like it might fall apart. Then he looked at me across the table, and I braced, because I knew what was coming. Guys always got there eventually. "Okay. Your turn. Why do you keep looking at the door?"

"Because I'm forty-four and you're twenty-eight, and at some point tonight you're going to do the math out loud and I'd like to be gone before it happens."

He didn't laugh. I wished he'd laughed. "That's it? That's the big secret?"

"That's not nothing, Cyrus. I've got grey coming in at the roots and I haven't been on a date in five years because the last one spent the whole dinner telling me about his ex-wife. And now my aunt digs up a box from 1992 and drops a twenty-eight-year-old man with forearms in front of me like I'm supposed to know what to do with him."

"First of all, these forearms are from chasing a guy through a drainage ditch on Tuesday, so show some respect. Second." He leaned back and rubbed his jaw, thinking, and I noticed he had a watch on that was too nice for the rest of him. "Second, I've been into older women since I was twenty-one. That's not a line. That's seven years of data."

"Seven years of data," I repeated.

"There was a woman named Polly who ran the diner near the courthouse, she was fifty and she ate lunch with me twice a week and I hung on every word. There was a bondsman in Nîmes, Dianna, forty-six, and I made an idiot of myself at her retirement party. This isn't new for me. What's new is two old women sending me to a cheese cave to meet a woman who immediately started planning her exit."

"It's not about what you're into. It's about what I look like next to you."

"Okay, so let's talk about that honestly." He put both elbows on the table. "You walked in tonight in that dress and I forgot what Brooke sent me here for. Genuinely forgot. I stood there like an idiot while you took your coat off. And it's not in spite of anything. It's not, oh, she's good for forty-four. You're just a woman I can't stop looking at, and the grey and the lines and all of it, that's the part that does it. That's confidence, and confidence is the sexiest thing there is. I mean that."

I sat there with my wine glass halfway to my mouth and nothing coming out of it.

"Say something," he said, "because that was a lot of talking from me and I need a break."

"You really mean that."

"You've looked at the door again."

"That's a nervous habit. I do it at work when the anesthetic isn't taking."