The Torch Tip

The truffle bazaar smells like dirt and machine oil this early. Stacy July, twenty-eight, six years in this town, and I still take the long way through the main hall just to look at the lamps. They hang low over the stone counters, and the lumps under them catch the light like something buried and found.

The gift box rides in my jacket pocket. It's small, about as big as a soap bar, and I have checked on it maybe nine times since I left the house.

I am supposed to be meeting Christopher at the noon bell for our anniversary lunch. Six years today since I moved here at twenty-two and he showed me where the good bread was. But I got a note from Abbey at the front desk of the bazaar saying come early, come to the back workshop, he's here, he's been here all night.

So here I am, walking past the iron racks with nobody in them yet, following the sound of a machine that is not happy.

The workshop is an alcove at the rear, half carved out of the wall, and Christopher is inside it on his knees in front of a machine the size of a stove. He is twenty-nine, he is built as a man carrying wet sand up ladders for money would be, and he has plaster dust in his hair even though he has been here since dawn and not at work. He is hunched over an open console, a screwdriver in his teeth, a wire in each hand.

"Hey," I say.

He does not turn around. He takes the screwdriver out of his mouth. "Stacy. Hey. Don't come in, the floor's got coolant on it."

I come in anyway, stepping around the dark patch. "Abbey said you've been here all night."

"Since about five yesterday evening." He leans into the console. "Maybe I should say don't come in for another reason. This thing is winning."

The centrifuge sits there humming at a frequency that makes my back teeth itch. There is a vibration sensor mounted on its side, a little black cylinder, and a cable running from it to the console where Christopher's hands are.

"What's it doing?" I ask.

"Crying. Which is my fault, sort of. I told Vano the mount was fine six months ago and the mount was not fine. The sensor's been rattling loose and now it's throwing garbage readings and the whole machine shuts itself down every forty minutes." He wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist and leaves a gray smear. "Vano loses a full day of processing every time it trips. He's got buyers coming Friday. Real money, Stacy. This isn't a hobby machine."

"You said you'd meet me at noon."

"I know."

"We have lunch booked."

"I know." He finally looks at me. His eyes are red at the rims. "I'm sorry. I truly am. But if I leave and it trips again while I'm eating soup, Vano eats that loss, not me. And he's the one who lent me his truck when mine died in March."

I want to be mad. I try to be mad. I stand there holding it like a plate I might set down or throw.

"Sit," he says. "Not there, there's a stool by the bench. Talk to me while I work. That's almost as good as lunch."

I drag the stool over and sit where I can see his hands. I put the gift box in my pocket out of mind, or I try to.

"How long has it been tripping?" I ask.

"Since Tuesday. Twice yesterday, once at midnight, once at four." He unseats a connector and peers into it. "The sensor itself is probably okay. It's the mount and the cable gland. Corrosion. Everything in this building is corrosion."

"Everything in this town is corrosion."

"True." He laughs a little, then stops laughing when the machine's hum wobbles. "No, no, come on. Stay up."

"Want me to hold anything?"

"Actually, yes. There's a small wrench on the bench, the open-end one. Hand it here."

I get up and find it among the clutter on the tool bench. I am very aware of the small box against my hip while I look. I had meant to wrap it better. I had meant a lot of things.

I hand Christopher the wrench. He takes it without looking, which is a thing he does, and I kneel down next to him instead of going back to the stool, because from down here I can hold the cable gland steady while he works the fitting. My knees find the cold stone. My irritation is going somewhere. It is not going fast, but it is going.

"Left a quarter turn," he says.

"Which way is left from down here?"

"Your left. Clockwise is right, so..."

I turn it. He watches the fitting, not me, and I watch his hands, which are nicked and stained and very good at what they do. He holds the wire like it is a bird. Two years ago we did a side job together, resurfacing the walls at the winery, and I spent three weeks watching him hold things like that and pretending I wasn't.

"Okay," he says. "Sensor's seated. Now we see if it believes us."

He powers the machine back up. The hum climbs, wobbles once, and steadies. A needle on the console settles into the green.

"Ha," he says. "Ha. Okay. Okay, that might be it. Give it ten minutes. If it trips in ten minutes I am going to lie down on this floor and stay here."

"You've basically done that already."

"Rude." But he's smiling, tired, sitting back on his heels. He looks at me properly then, from a foot away, and something goes out of his shoulders. "You came early. You didn't have to do that."

"Abbey bribed me with a story about you dying in a coolant accident."

"I would never die in a coolant accident. Coolant is my friend."

Then the torch tip falls out of my pocket.

It makes a small metallic sound on the stone, rolls once, and stops against his knee. The green corroded fitting catches the lamplight. The box lid must have come loose in the wrong pocket, the pocket with the hole, the pocket I have been meaning to fix for a year.

We both look at it.

"That's a jeweler's torch tip," he says.

"Yep."

"You found one?"

"I didn't find one." My face is hot. "I bought it. In Rustavi, three weeks ago. It's the right fitting for your little brazing rig, the one you use for the anchors when you're doing decorative stucco, the thing you complain about because the tip on it is garbage and you've been saying so since spring."

He picks it up. He turns it over in his fingers, careful, the way he holds wires.

"This is the tip from Khachidze's shop."

"It is."

"These are like ninety lari."

"It was eighty. He gave me a discount because I trimmed his mother's hair for free for a year." I shrug like it is nothing, which is a lie, because I carried that thing around for three weeks waiting for today. "Happy six years. You standing me up for lunch was going to be the funny part of the story."

He doesn't say anything for a second. His face does something I don't have a word for. It softens, all at once, like a knot coming out.

"Stacy."

"What."

"Come here."

I come there. He pulls me into a hug right there on the workshop floor, on our knees