The Torero's Last Spin

Friday is my favorite shift of the month, and I'll tell you why. Nothing happens. The roasting is done, the beans are resting, and the whole collective goes quiet by four o'clock. I was wiping down the drum when I heard that sound from next door, the one everybody in Fraserburg knows by heart.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The laundromat shares a wall with our building, and one of their dryers has been unbalanced since roughly the invention of fire. When it runs empty, it rocks on its legs like a boat in weather. Normally that means some poor soul overloaded it. Tonight it meant Derek Buchanan was in there alone, and Derek alone meant one thing.

He was running it empty on purpose. Again.

I pushed through the connecting door and there he was, forty-eight years old, sleeves rolled, leaning against the shaking machine with his eyes closed like he was listening to a symphony. His whole body was moving with the rhythm, hips sort of swaying, shoulders rolling. The man was dancing with a dryer.

"You still run that dryer empty just to watch it dance?" I called out.

He jumped about a foot. "Lydia! Lord, you scared the spit out of me!"

"Sorry. I heard the percussion through the wall and thought somebody was being murdered by laundry."

He laughed and patted the machine like it was a horse. "This old girl runs best empty. Balanced load, nothing tumbling, and she just rocks. Four beats to the bar. I timed it once."

"You timed it."

"I timed it! Stop by any Friday after close and she'll do it for you. It's the most reliable thing in this building and that includes me."

I could say I went in there just to be neighborly, but that's not quite true. I've known Derek for about five years, ever since he started renting workshop space from the arborist collective next door. I'm fifty-two, he's forty-eight, and in all that time I have watched this man walk past my roastery window twice a day looking as though he carries a secret he's never once offered to share.

Well. Almost never.

"What are you even doing here this late?" I asked. "Market day. Shouldn't you be home resting your feet?"

"I could ask you the same. You're the one still in an apron."

"I'm closing up. You're... what, slow dancing with an appliance?"

He grinned, and this is the part I like, the part that always gets me. When Derek grins, his whole face reorganizes itself. "Actually, I'm glad you came through that door. I've been meaning to ask you something all week and kept chickening out."

"Oh no. Is this a favor? Because I already lent my truck to Pete and I regret it daily."

"No favor. Okay, so. You know the collective runs tours? Treehouse tours, after hours, when the light does that thing through the canopy?"

"I know you've mentioned it. I've also noticed you mention it only to me and only when I'm covered in chaff."

"That's because you're the only one who asks follow-up questions," he said, and then he rubbed his hands on his jeans, which he does when he's nervous, and I've catalogued that habit too, not that I was keeping records or anything. "Look, we do a private evening thing. No crowd, no kids, no clipboard lady. Just me walking you through the main deck and showing you what we actually make up there. It takes about an hour. I'd like to show you. Tonight, if you're free."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight. The light's best right before sundown and sundown is in forty minutes, so I'm kind of on a clock here."

Now, here's what you need to know about Derek Buchanan. In five years I have heard him enthusiastic exactly twice. Once about a rosewood mold he was carving, and once about the dryer. The rest of the time he talks as if he is reading his own grocery list in his head. So when I heard actual enthusiasm in his voice, actual spring in it, my curiosity beat my comfort like a drum.

"Is this the bubble thing? The giant bubble thing you do?"

"It's the lens thing. They're not bubbles exactly, but yes. Everyone calls it the bubble thing and I've stopped fighting it."

I looked at the clock on the laundromat wall. My shift was technically over. My plans were a frozen burrito and a mystery novel with a cracked spine. Honestly, the competition was not fierce.

"Fine. Yes. Show me your bubbles," I said, and he laughed so hard the dryer nearly threw him off balance.

* * *

The entrance to the workshop is behind the laundromat, up a spiral staircase wrapped around a live oak that's older than the town. I climbed it behind Derek, who kept glancing back like he was afraid I'd changed my mind on step nine. The stairs creaked in a friendly way. The whole structure creaks in a friendly way, honestly. It's built out of platforms and railings and rope bridges, all of it lashed to the branches of three big trees, and every piece of it sways a little when you move.

"Is this safe?" I asked, gripping a rope rail.

"Safer than my last relationship," he said, and then looked startled at himself. "Sorry. That was an odd sentence."

"It was, but I'll allow it."

The main deck opened up in front of us and I stopped walking. I stopped dead. I'm not going to be poetic about it because that's not how I talk, but picture this. Six giant wooden molds hanging from the branches like chandeliers, each one the size of a kiddie pool, each one holding a film of soap that catches the light and throws it back in bands of pink and green and gold. The whole deck glowed. The late sun came through the leaves, hit the films, and painted the floor with slow-moving color.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, wow. You were right to be smug about this."

"I'm never smug. I'm quietly proud at best." He walked over and touched the edge of one mold, and the film inside shivered and swirled. "Each one is a lens. We grind the molds by hand, all of us, and when we float a film we can project through it. Wedding photos, star maps, one time a guy projected his dog's face about nine feet tall and cried."

"I would also cry. That dog sounds tremendous."

The last light was coming through gold and rose, and Derek stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets looking, well, looking like he belonged there. Like the molds hung there for him specifically.

"Five years," I said, before my brain could stop my mouth. "Five years you've worked up here and I've never seen any of it."

"You never asked."

"You never offered."

"I'm offering now," he said, and something in his voice made me look at him properly. But he turned away before I could read it, and pointed at the far railing. "Come here. There's something else."

Draped over that railing was a bolero jacket, magenta, satin, the kind of thing nobody wears to work in a treehouse. I touched it before I could stop myself. The fabric was cool and slippery under my fingers.

"Whose is this?"

"Mine," he said, and had the decency to look a little sheepish. "Don't laugh."

"Why would I laugh? It's gorgeous. Why is it here?"

"I wear it when we finish a big lens. It's a tradition I invented because I needed one. You float a film, the light hits it right, and you put on the bolero and take a bow. Nobody else is up here. It's just for me." He shrugged. "It started as a joke and then it wasn't a joke anymore."

I held it up against myself. It was magenta and ridiculous and I loved it immediately.

"Does it suit me?" I asked, spinning once, which is not something I do, but the deck was swaying anyway so it felt rude not to join in.

"It suits you," he said, and his voice did that thing again, the quiet drop, and this time he didn't turn away. Up here there was just wind in the leaves and color sliding across the floor between us, and Derek Buchanan looking at me like he'd finally worked up to something.

"Worked up to what?" I asked, because apparently I was going to be that person tonight.

"Can I tell you a story first? About the bolero?"

"That is exactly how you should answer a question with another thing. Go."

He took the jacket off the railing and smoothed the satin down with one hand, the way you'd smooth down fabric you'd owned for a while.

"My grandfather was a torero," he said. "In Spain, before he emigrated. A real one, cape and everything. There are photographs, and in every single one he looks like he's posing for a poster, which my mother says was accurate."

"Wait, wait. Torero as in bullfighting?"

"Torero as in bullfighting. The real deal. He came over here in his twenties and never fought again. He kept the jacket, though. This one." He held it up so the last light caught the satin. "It was never used in a fight. Not once. He bought it for his first corrida and then the family left, and he wore it to weddings and New Year's and one memorable Halloween, and that's it."

"So it's an unused lucky jacket."

"It's an unused everything jacket." He laughed. "He gave it to me before he died. I was forty-two. He was ninety-one and still sharp as a tack. He said, 'Derek, wear it when you finish something beautiful.' And then he winked, which at ninety-one looks alarming, and told me he'd never finished his own beautiful thing, the big fight, so the jacket still had work to do."

I sat down on the railing, carefully, because the railing was rope and I am fifty-two and not made of rubber. "And you finish beautiful things for a living. The lenses."

"I finish lenses," he said. "Whether they're beautiful is up for debate."

"Have you seen them? From in here? I have. They're beautiful. Verdict's in."

He put the bolero around my shoulders without asking, which I'll note was a jacket, not a grab, and I let him, because the sun was going down and the deck was going gold and the satin was warm from hanging in it all day. He stepped back and looked at me.

"My grandfather would have liked you," he said. "You spin in the jacket. That's the correct use."

"I'm doing it correctly," I said, and did another spin, and the color from the nearest lens slid across the floor and up my legs and I swear I laughed out loud, actual out-loud laughing, alone in a tree with a man I'd spent five years buying coffee from.

Then I stopped, because I remembered something, and my mouth once again got ahead of my brain.

"I have a confession," I said.

"Is it serious?"

"Medium serious. You know how I work late at the roastery some Fridays? After close?"

"I know you work late Fridays, yes."

"Well. Sometimes I'm not working. Sometimes I sit in the back room by the shared wall, and I listen to the dryers. And there's one that runs empty."

Derek went very still. Not bad still. Still as if he's been handed a present early.

"It rocks," I went on, because I was committed now. "The empty one. It walks on its little feet, thump, thump, thump, thump, four beats, like it's keeping time to something only it can hear. And I find it so soothing I could cry. I've sat there with tea watching the wall like it's a fireplace. For years. I've never told a soul because it's completely insane."

"Lydia."

"I know."

"Lydia, that's my dryer. I run it empty on purpose. Friday nights, after close, I start it before I go up here, because I like knowing it's going. It's my bow, sort of. The bow music. And I knew, by the way."

I stared at him. "You knew?"

"I knew." He was grinning now, this slow spreading grin like the sun through a soap film. "Year two, I came down early one night to fold my towels, and there was a light under the wall, and I heard a chair scrape, and I thought, someone's back there listening to my dryer. And I knew it was you, because who else would be in the roastery at eleven on a Friday? And I didn't say anything, because it felt like a secret we were sharing, and then it kept being a secret, and it's been five years and it's the best secret I've ever had."

"You absolute menace. You've been running a dryer at me for five years on purpose?"

"I've been keeping time for you for five years," he said, and then went pink to the ears, which frankly was the most charming thing I'd seen since the dog projection. "Four beats to the bar. I timed it."

"You timed it. Of course you timed it. You time everything, you're a mold maker."

"I'm a mold maker," he agreed. "We time things. It's the whole job."

I stood there in his grandfather's unworn torero jacket, in a tree, at sundown, feeling something I hadn't felt in a long while. Not the comfortable peace of being alone, which I genuinely love, don't get me wrong. The other thing. The fluttery inconvenient thing.

Five years ago there'd been a visiting farmer, a lovely brief few months of warm letters and one perfect weekend, and we'd ended