The Trolley Barn Mix-Up

The trolley barn sits on the edge of Larkwood like an old man at a party, and I've been trimming the hedges along its north wall every other week since Fern took the place over. My name's Gino, I'm forty-four, and I've been married to Jenn for sixteen years, which around here counts as a golden anniversary, practically. She's forty-three, she sweeps chimneys, and she still swears the only reason she said yes to me is that I let her win an argument about mulch in the summer of 2008. I say it was the mulch argument plus my car. She says the car was falling apart. This is the kind of thing we do at dinner.

Anyway. It was a Tuesday in June and I was halfway down the hedge with the gas trimmer going, when Fern came out the side door of the barn at a pace I can only call storming.

"Gino! Gino, stop, stop the machine," she yelled, and I killed the engine and the sudden quiet rang in my ears.

"What, what's wrong?"

"You are throwing clippings into the fountain again. The fountain, Gino. The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary is Friday and that fountain is going to be relit and you have green sludge drifting into the basin like a pond died in there."

Fern is forty-four, she owns the barn, and she is the town historian in the sense that she has personally memorized every fact about Larkwood and will deploy them against you. She was standing on the cobblestones in her good work boots with her hands on her hips and her gray streak showing where she'd pushed her hair back, and I could see she was fully wound up, which, honestly, is a pleasure to watch.

"That's the wind, Fern. Wind moves leaves."

"The wind does not operate a gas trimmer along a hedge line twenty feet from my fountain."

"Okay, that's a fair point, I'll blow it back off the wall after."

"Please do, and please also don't stand there planning whatever it is you're planning, because I can see your face doing it."

She knows my face too well, which goes back to when we were both twenty-four and dated for about four months before deciding we were better as the kind of friends who insult each other at community meetings. It ended fine, she moved to town at twenty-two and I already lived here, we watched the trolley barn rot for a decade and then she bought it and saved it, and now it's got a restored 1912 trolley in the middle of it and fairy lights strung everywhere for the gala. Miguel, her boyfriend, forty, did most of the mechanical work on the trolley and half the wiring, and he's so patient it makes my teeth itch.

So of course I did not blow the clippings off the wall right away. I stood there in the quiet and thought, this woman has told me what to do with my trimmer at least once every other week for three years, and small-town life has gotten so predictable that the highlight of my May was a fight about whether the diner's hot dog bun count was down. The highlight of my May. And I thought, what if Fern walked out Friday night to relight the fountain in front of the whole town, reached into the copper bucket where everyone tosses lucky coins, and pulled out a fistful of rusted washers?

I will be honest with you the way I was honest with myself that afternoon; I laughed out loud standing alone by a hedge like a lunatic. Washers. I had a whole five-gallon pail of rusted washers in the truck bed from rebuilding the trailer hitch. They were even sort of coin-shaped. Coin-adjacent.

"Whatever you're thinking, don't," Fern said, from the door, where she had apparently lingered.

"I'm thinking about blowers," I said.

"Liar," she said, and went inside, satisfied, and I spent the rest of the trim thinking about how I'd get into the barn after hours. Miguel keeps the side door locked with a keypad code. He set it to Fern's birthday. He told me that himself, proud of it, back in April, because Miguel is the kind of man who tells you keypad codes as a conversation. So that was not going to be a problem, which is maybe a thing I should have felt worse about.

Meanwhile, up on a roof across town, my wife was also up to something, and I didn't find out about that until later, but she told me enough afterward that I can give it to you in order.

Jenn was doing the Farnsworth chimney that Tuesday, the big stone house on Mill Road with the firebox the size of a sedan, and she'd brought her new hire, a new hire named Laura, twenty-six, up on the roof to hold the brush rope. Laura's fine, Laura is currently afraid of shingles, Jenn is training that out of her.

"So what's the big secret," Laura asked her, according to Jenn, because Jenn had been grinning at her phone on the drive over and wouldn't say why.

"It's our anniversary Friday," Jenn said. "Sixteen years. I'm doing something for Gino at the barn. Something big. Something we've never done."

"Like what?"

"Just something I've been meaning to do for years and never had the nerve."

"Is it legal?"

"Sort of," Jenn said, which was her being cute, and it was actually true, which is the part that ruined everything.

Because what Jenn had been meaning to do for years, and told Laura, was renew her vows. She wanted to surprise Gino with a vow renewal at the trolley barn, the same place we met, back when we both worked summers there, me at twenty-one hauling brush and her at twenty sweeping the platforms. Fern was already getting the barn ready for the gala, so Jenn had called Fern the week before and asked for the courtyard after hours, Friday night, and Fern had said yes, and Miguel was going to set up the lights and keep it all quiet. It was a genuinely good plan. It was a beautiful plan. It required nobody to tell anybody anything extra, which is where it went sideways, because Jenn had asked Miguel for one more thing and Fern had overheard a different part of a phone call, and none of us knew any of that yet.

What I knew Tuesday night was only washers.

I waited until ten, after the gala planning meeting let out and Fern's Buick rumbled off down Route 9, and drove back to the barn with the pail of washers riding shotgun like a hostage. The parking lot was dark except the security light over the side door. The keypad glowed green and I punched in Fern's birthday, month and day, the way Miguel had told me over beers in April, and the lock clicked and I said out loud, alone, in the dark, "This man needs to be more careful," and went in.

The barn at night is a whole different animal. The trolley sat in its track lane looking like a glowing yellow ghost, because Fern leaves it lit, which she says is for security and I say is because she loves it more than most people. The courtyard doors were open to let the evening air through, and out past them the fountain was running in the dark, the pump going, fairy light strands coiled on a spool next to it waiting for Miguel to hang them. The copper coin bucket sat on the fountain rim where it always sits, the one where tourists and kids and drunks at the Oktoberfest thing toss pennies for luck, and it had a good weight to it when I picked it up. Maybe forty bucks in mixed change, plus a few foreign coins Fern refuses to identify.

I set it on the cobblestones and, I will admit, hesitated for maybe four seconds, holding a rusted washer up against the moonlight to admire the concept. Then I poured the washers in, all of them, they clanked down into the copper like a drawer of tools falling off a truck, and put the coins in the pail, and carried my ill-gotten fortune out to the truck.

Here is the thing I did not know, and could not have known, standing there feeling like a criminal mastermind: Jenn had told Miguel, on the phone, in the fragment Fern overheard, "get everything ready at the fountain Friday, I want to blow his mind." And Fern, who was walking past Miguel's open shop door with a clipboard, heard only "at the fountain" and "blow his mind" and drew her own conclusion about what kind of mind-blowing her ex-boyfriend from two decades ago and his wife had in mind, and did not ask Miguel about it, because Fern does not ask about things she thinks she's already understood. Instead she called Jenn the next morning and said, in a voice Jenn later described to me as being like a nurse delivering lab results, "I've spoken with Miguel, and everything will be arranged for Friday, and nobody will disturb you, and I want you to know Miguel and I are, well, open to certain modern arrangements ourselves."

And Jenn, who thought Fern was talking about the vow renewal and maybe some interfaith ceremony nonsense, said, "Oh my gosh, Fern, that's so generous of you," and hung up, and told Laura on the roof Wednesday that Fern had blessed the whole thing, and I stood in my dark driveway with a pail of other people's luck and no idea that I had just lit the fuse on the stupidest weekend of my life.

I put the coins in the truck bed under a tarp, and later moved them to a coffee can under the seat, because even a criminal mastermind respects evidence. Jenn was up when I got home, reading in bed.

"Good night?" she asked.

"Productive," I said.

Wednesday morning I was up at six like always, loading the trailer with the mower and the trimmers, when my phone buzzed and it was Miguel, which was early for Miguel, who does not believe mornings exist until the coffee has fully deployed. "You left something in the fountain," he said, and there was a grin in his voice you could hear from space. "A donation. Of washers."

"Is that right," I said, pouring coffee into a thermos with one hand and trying to sound as though I had no idea what I was talking about.

"Forty-some washers, Gino. Rusty ones. Fern fished out the coin bucket to count it for the gala float and got a hardware store." He laughed, a real belly laugh, and I heard Fern in the background saying something sharp about security footage, because there is no security footage, there is a camera that points at the ceiling and one that points at the trolley's front bumper, and both of us knew that. "She wants you to know she's got your license plate memorized anyway. She says hello. She says it in a less friendly way than that, but she says it."

"Tell her the fountain accepted my offering and luck will now flow to whoever fishes those out," I said, and he wheezed, and for a second it was just the way it used to be, before Fern and I dated those four months and figured out we were better as adversaries, before I married Jenn and he moved to town and ended up with Fern anyway, which Fern says was coincidence and I say the universe has a sense of humor.

Then his voice dropped a register, and he got serious in the way Miguel does, which is rare and always means something. "Look, though. Fern's kind of wound up about the gala. She was yelling at the electrician yesterday, the whole courtyard heard it, and now she thinks you're mad at her about the yelling, that this is some payback thing. That you're, what did she say, escalating." He paused. "Are you mad about the yelling?"

"I'm not mad about the yelling," I said, which was true. Fern yells at tradespeople the way other people breathe, and after three years of trimming her hedges every other week I mostly find it soothing, like weather. "It's a prank. It's a prank war. Tell her the coins are safe and unspent and she can ransom them back for a plate of those little sandwiches she makes."

"Those little sandwiches," Miguel repeated, reverent. "Okay. I'll tell her that. She's gonna pretend to be furious and then make the sandwiches, watch." He was quiet a second, and then he said, "You know she loves this, right? She's been telling everybody at the diner about the washers like it's the best thing that happened to her since the trolley's brass poles came in. She just can't say so because she's Fern."

That made me feel warmer than I expected, and I told him so, and he said something about how small towns need entertainment and we were providing a public service, and we hung up, and I drove to a commercial job out past the middle school feeling pretty good about the whole arrangement.

What I did not know was that Wednesday afternoon Jenn came by the barn, because Jenn is smart and Jenn is sneaky and Jenn had decided that if the vow renewal was going to work she needed hands, and Miguel's were the closest ones. She found him under the trolley with his legs sticking out, which is where Miguel lives most days, and she squatted down and said, "Hey, I need a favor, and it's a secret one, so Fern can't know, okay?"

Miguel slid out on the creeper with his eyebrows already up, because a secret favor from Jenn is not a sentence that gets said every day. "Okay," he said slowly. "What kind of secret."

"The romantic kind." Jenn sat down on the trolley step, all business, the way she is when she's got a chimney job quoted in her head. "Friday, after the gala wraps and everybody clears out. I'm doing a surprise for Gino, our anniversary thing, sixteen years. I want the courtyard set up, the fairy lights, candles on the fountain rim, that champagne Fern keeps in the office fridge for board members, the good stuff. And I need somebody to keep the doors locked and the lights low and make sure Fern doesn't come wandering out with a clipboard. You, basically. You're the bouncer of romance."

"Right," Miguel said, and here is where the whole thing detonated, because Miguel, crouched under a 1912 trolley, freshly briefed on a secret Friday-night arrangement involving candles, champagne, locked doors, privacy, and making sure nobody walked in on anything, put all those pieces together in the most generous and entirely wrong way possible. He thought he was being asked to help stage a foursome. He thought Jenn and Gino wanted the courtyard, after the gala, for a thing, and that Fern, who had already made her mysterious open-to-modern-arrangements phone call, was in on it, and that his job was to keep the perimeter while four adults who all knew something he only half-knew did whatever it was people did at fountains with candles.

And because Miguel is a polite man and a careful one, he did not say any of that out loud. He said, "Candles. Champagne. Locked doors. Nobody disturbs you." Repeating it back as if confirming a parts order, which in his head it sort of was.

"Exactly," Jenn said, delighted, because he was repeating it back correctly. "You're a saint. Gino's gonna lose his mind."

"Blow his mind," Miguel said, mostly to himself, and Jenn said, "That's the goal," and shook his hand over the trolley step like they'd closed a real estate deal, and drove off to pick up an order of champagne glasses from the party store in