The Timer Arrives

Bo had the timer's chair by the back wall, same as every year. Sixty-four years old, retired electrician, bad knee, good attitude about both. The hall smelled like salt and floor wax. Windows open. The strait doing its usual flat blue thing out there.

The registration table in front of him held clipboards, a stack of entry slips, a ball of twine, and one pitted brake caliper piston from a Toyota he'd scrapped in the nineties. It had been doing a fine job as a paperweight for twenty-nine years.

A woman came in through the side door. Fifty-something, he guessed. Gray threading through black hair, pulled back. Sandals. Canvas tote bag with a laptop case in it. She walked straight to the table like she'd been told exactly where to walk, which she probably had.

"You're the timer?" she asked.

"I'm the timer."

Her eyes went to the piston. They stayed there a second longer than eyes usually do.

"That's a brake caliper piston."

Bo looked down at it. Pitted chrome, a bit of green corrosion along the lip. "It is, yeah."

"On the registration table. As a paperweight."

"Also an anchor," Bo said. "This hall gets a crosswind off the water around two o'clock. Paper goes everywhere without it. The piston solved that."

"Ten years I've been coming to this island for work," she said. "Nobody mentioned the race documents were held down by Japanese auto parts."

"Nobody writes that stuff down."

She set her tote on the table's corner, careful not to disturb the piston. "Asha. I'm doing the projection display. The results clock. Somebody at the committee decided the egg-and-spoon race needs a big digital countdown this year, and the countdown needs calibrating, and I am the calibration person."

"Projection mapping calibration technician," Bo said.

"That's the job title. You can just say I align clocks on walls."

"Bo. Electrician. Retired. I align breaker panels on walls, so we're practically the same trade."

She laughed at that. A real laugh, short, surprised out of her. Bo noticed her hands first, then her sandals, then made himself stop noticing the sandals.

The hall was filling up slow. Kids too old to be kids and too young to be running the thing were taping a start line to the floor. A man with a whistle tested the whistle, which was unnecessary but traditional. Asha unrolled her laptop case on the far end of the table and started muttering at resolution settings.

"Where's the projector pointed?" Bo asked.

"Back wall, above the bench. The bench stays. They told me the timer's bench is load-bear... is important. Bolted down and everything."

"It is important. I sit on it."

"Then the clock goes above your head. You'll be framed by your own countdown all afternoon. Very dramatic."

"I've had worse framing."

She got the image up around noon. A big white clock face on the whitewashed wall, slightly crooked, then less crooked, then perfect. She stood back with her head tilted like a painter.

"There," she said. "Calibrated. If that clock drifts more than a second over six hours, I'll eat my sandals."

"Those look hard to eat."

"Keen observation."

Then came the lull. The lull always comes. Registration was done, the race wasn't for an hour, and the man with the whistle had gone off to argue about spoon sizes. Asha packed up slowly, looked at the clock she'd just hung, and then walked over to the park bench near the back wall and sat down on it. Not next to Bo. Just on it. The bench is bolted to a concrete slab and holds two people at a squeeze.

She reached down and undid the strap of one sandal. Then the other. She pulled both off and set them side by side on the slab, neat, toes pointing the same direction.

"Sorry," she said. "I've been standing since seven calibrating this thing. My feet are complaining."

"No apology needed. It's your island too today."

She flexed her toes against the cool concrete. Her feet were bare, medium, high arches, a callus on each big toe that spoke of real walking. Bo looked once, properly, then looked at the wall clock as a man with manners would.

Asha caught it anyway. Fifty-seven years of being looked at teaches a woman where eyes go.

"You can look," she said. "I said it out loud so you don't have to pretend you're reading the clock."

"Well," Bo said. His ears went warm. "I'll admit the clock wasn't holding my interest."

"Bo the retired electrician. Are you telling me you're a foot man?"

"I'm telling you I have spent an embarrassing amount of my adult life noticing feet, yes. Since I was in my twenties. It's not a phase. It's a whole thing." He said it plain. He'd learned, late, that plain was better. "I don't expect anything from saying it. I just don't like lying about it."

Asha was quiet a moment. She wiggled her toes again, maybe on purpose this time.

"Huh," she said. "I've wondered about that. For a long time, actually. Whether I'd like it. Nobody's ever offered, so the wondering just sat there."

"Sat there for ten years?" Bo asked, because the committee gossip had mentioned she hadn't dated since the last decade started, and he'd remembered it longer than he should have.

"Rude of you to know that. But yes. Ten years. And the wondering sat through all of them." She turned on the bench to face him a little. "So. Is there an offer in the room, or are we just having a nice chat about my feet?"

Bo rubbed his palms on his trousers. "The offer is, your feet ache from standing. I've got two hands and an hour to kill. I'd like to rub them. That's all it has to be. A rub for tired feet, end of story, if that's as far as it goes."

"That's all?"

"That's all. The rest of the thing I like, well. That can stay a thing I like for today."

Asha looked at her own feet on the slab. Then at him.

"You can rub them," she said. "Yes. Do it before I overthink it!"

Bo shifted on the bench and took her right foot in both hands. Warm. Light. He started with the heel, thumbs digging in slow, working up along the arch in long presses. He knew what he was doing. Forty years of wiring and a couple of long relationships teach a man's thumbs things.

Asha made a noise. Low, from the back, unplanned.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's... hold on. That's good!"

"You said your feet complain. I'm negotiating with them."

"Keep negotiating."

He worked the arch in circles. Pressed the ball of the foot flat with his palm and rolled his thumb across it. Found the spot under the second toe where the day's standing pools up and stayed there a while. Asha's head tipped back against the wall behind the bench. Her eyes were closed.

"Nobody's ever done this," she said, half to the ceiling. "Twelve years with the same man, back when, and nobody ever just... sat and did this. You're doing it like it matters."

"It matters," Bo said. "I'm enjoying it, if we're being honest. Probably more than is polite."

She opened one eye and looked at him. The corner of her mouth went up.

"Polite went out the window when you admitted to a whole thing," she said. "Keep going. The left one's worse. It carried the laptop bag."

He took the left foot and gave it the same treatment, longer, because it had earned it. Somewhere behind them the kids finished taping the start line. The man with the whistle had lost his argument, apparently, because there was shouting about spoon sizes resolved in favor of regular spoons.

Asha's breathing had gone slow and even. Her foot relaxed in his hands, weight giving up to him.

"You've got strong thumbs for a retired guy," she said.

"Bad knee, good thumbs. Every body pays its taxes somewhere."

She laughed again, that same short surprised laugh, and Bo decided he'd like to keep earning it.

The clock over their heads ticked down toward the race. Neither of them watched it.

"Bo," Asha said, after a while.

"Yeah."

"I don't want you to stop. But the race starts soon and I'm going to need my feet back under me, and after that..." She paused. Opened both eyes. "After that maybe we talk about the rest of the thing you like. If you still want to."

"I'll still want to," Bo said. "I'll still want to at my funeral, probably."

"Don't make me laugh, my feet are having a moment."

He pressed one last slow line up her arch and let go. She slid her sandals back on, tied the straps, and stood. Then she looked down at him sitting on his important bolted bench and something in her face said the afternoon had gotten interesting.

"Timer's chair," she said. "Do your job. I'll do mine. We'll talk at two o'clock."

"Two o'clock," Bo agreed. "When the crosswind comes."

"When the crosswind comes," she said, and went back to her laptop.

The race went the way races go. A boy in a green shirt dropped his egg at the ten-meter mark and cried about it. A girl in yellow walked the whole course slow and careful and won by not being in a hurry. The crowd clapped. The man with the whistle blew it more than necessary.

Bo timed it all from the bolted bench. Thumb on the button. Numbers on the wall. The white clock face did its job, and Asha's calibration held perfect through every heat.

She worked at the laptop table through all of it. Cables. A folded tripod. Twice she looked over at him and looked away fast, like a person catching themselves staring.

At ten past two the hall started emptying. Parents herded kids out through the doors on the open-windows side. The whistle man packed his spoons into a biscuit tin. By half past it was just the two of them, the smell of salt and floor wax, and the strait flat blue outside.

Asha unplugged her last cable and came over. She sat on the bench. Closer than before.

"So," she said. "The rest of the thing you like."

Bo set the stopwatch down. "Yes. That!"

"Say it plainly. I've been standing in rooms with men for thirty-odd years and they never say anything plainly."

"It's a foot thing," Bo said. "A fetish, if you want the word. I've known since my twenties. I notice feet. I think about them. I've never done anything about it, not really. Rubbed a few. Wanted more and never asked."

"Never asked? Sixty-four years old and never asked?"

"Didn't want to be the weird one." He shrugged. "Retirement makes you brave. Bad knee, nothing left to prove."

Asha looked out the window at the water. "Huh," she said. Then, "Can I ask it straight? Do you want to worship them? My feet. Is that the shape of it?"

The word landed on the concrete between them. Bo picked it up.

"Yes. Kisses, mostly. Maybe sucking toes, if it got there. Holding them. It's the... giving of it, I think. That's the part I've been curious about my whole life."

"And you never tried it."

"Never tried it."