The View From the Booth

Tracey Farrell was thirty-four years old and she had been married long enough to know her husband's tells. Darius had three of them. The low hum when he was proud of himself. The higher, jittery hum when he was nervous. And the worst one, the whistling, which he only did when he was sitting on a secret and thought he was being so smooth about it.

He had been whistling for weeks.

"Five years, baby!" he'd say at dinner, waving his fork around like the number itself was a gift. "Five whole years! Can you believe it?"

And Tracey would say, "Nope, can't believe it," and eat her food, and Darius would whistle.

She loved him. God, she loved him. He was thirty-six, he was good at his job, he remembered her mom's birthday and he'd never once complained about her gallery schedule, which was basically a crime against normal husbands everywhere. But five years in, the man was predictable in a way that was almost impressive. Same coffee order every Saturday. Same seat on the couch, left cushion, always. And every year for their anniversary, the same routine: he planned something "big," he kept it secret, he nearly burst trying to hint at it, and then he revealed it and it was sweet and lovely and exactly what she guessed.

Year one, dinner at the rooftop place. Year two, the pottery class she'd mentioned exactly once. Year three, the weekend trip. Year four, the custom necklace with the little gallery charm on it. All good! All great! All guessable!

This year he'd been hinting about it for weeks. "Clear your Friday night," he said in September. "All of it. Don't ask questions." Then at breakfast: "Do you own anything you'd call festival-appropriate?" Then in the car: "You like music, right? And art? Hypothetically?"

Tracey was a curator. She liked music and art the way fish liked water. So yeah, she'd figured it out by Tuesday. The Sunstone Festival was the only thing in the state that fall that combined desert, stages, and art installations, and their anniversary was that weekend. She'd even guessed the VIP part, because Darius had been "hypothetically" asking about booth upgrades at his office for a month and thought she didn't hear him on the phone with the festival office.

She hadn't told him she knew. That was the fun part, honestly. Letting him keep his little secret, watching him whistle around the house the way a man who'd hidden a pony in the garage might. It was cute. It was their whole marriage in miniature, really. Predictable, sweet, a little silly, and she wouldn't trade it.

Then came Friday.

Tracey was at the gallery, arguing with a shipping company about a crate that had supposedly left Denver in July, when her phone buzzed.

**Darius:** Babe. Don't hate me.

Tracey stared at it. In her experience, nobody opened with "don't hate me" unless they deserved hate.

**Darius:** Flight out of Denver is delayed. Then delayed again. Now they're saying indefinitely. Weather or mechanical or who knows. I'm stuck in the terminal and they won't give me a straight answer.

**Darius:** The booth is still booked under our name. Confirmation code is SUN-4417. VIP entrance is the east gate. Go without me!!

**Darius:** I'll get there when I can, I swear. Please don't waste the night. It's our anniversary. Go have fun and I'll find you.

Tracey read the texts four times. Then she put the phone face-down on her desk and said a word that would've gotten her thrown out of her own gallery opening.

Indefinitely! Who even says indefinitely! That's not a real answer, that's a shrug with a lanyard on it! She thought about the crate from Denver, because of course it was Denver ruining her whole week. She thought about the rooftop dinner they'd never had. She thought about Darius sitting in an airport chair somewhere, whistling at nobody.

And then, somewhere between the second coffee and the fourth text reread, something shifted in her. Spite, maybe. Or anniversary stubbornness. Call it what you want, the thought arrived fully formed and it would not leave: *fine. FINE. I'll go alone. I'll enjoy every square foot of his surprise without him, and he can hear all about it.*

She texted back: "Going. East gate. Booth better have good chairs." Then she grabbed her jacket and told the shipping company to put their crate somewhere anatomically ambitious.

The drive out to the canyon took over an hour, and the whole way she cycled between mad and excited like a radio with a busted dial. Mad! Excited! Mad! Ooh, is that the turnoff? Mad!

The east gate was a whole different animal from the general entrance. No lines, no dust cloud of a thousand folding chairs. A woman with a clipboard checked the code, waved her through, and pointed up a lit path. "Booth twelve, up the stairs, second level. You've got the whole main stage from there. Enjoy!"

Booth twelve. Tracey climbed the stairs with the smug energy of a woman walking into a restaurant she didn't pay for, which technically she hadn't, her husband had, but the point stood.

Oh, it was nice. The booth sat back from the railing like a private little cave, all plush seats the color of wine, low warm lighting, a small fridge that had been stocked and everything. And the front wall, the whole front wall, was glass. Not regular glass. One-way glass, the kind you see in interrogation shows. From inside, the main stage spread out below like a painting hung just for her. From outside, she figured, the booth was just a dark rectangle. Nobody could see in. She could see everything.

Tracey sank into the corner seat with a cold drink from the fridge and let out a breath she'd been holding since Denver.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody. "This part's good. This part's very good."

Down below, the crowd was thick and happy, a sea of glowing wristbands and cowboy hats, and the sun was going down behind the canyon rim in that showy desert way, all orange and pink like it was getting paid for it. The main stage lights came up. A voice on the speakers announced the next act, a burlesque set, and the crowd roared like they'd been waiting all day for it.

Tracey leaned forward. She hadn't planned on caring. She cared.

The dancer who came out went by Vikki, according to the announcer, and Tracey clocked her right away as a professional. Young-ish, thirty-something, dark hair swept up, wearing a feathered robe that she shed within the first eight counts of the song like she was late for an appointment with it. But it wasn't the shedding that got the crowd going. It was the way she worked them. She'd point at some guy in the front row and he'd lose his mind. She'd twirl her cane over her head, catch it behind her back without looking, and the whole crowd would scream. She was playful and mean at the same time, like she was teasing five thousand people at once and enjoying every second of it.

She commanded that stage. That was the word for it. Commanded.

Tracey, alone in her dark booth with her cold drink, realized she hadn't looked away once. Her cheeks felt warm. She laughed at herself, alone, in a soundproofed booth where nobody could judge her, and took another sip.

"Ten years of dancing, the announcer said, and she started at twenty-two," she murmured, doing the math like the nerd she was. "So thirty-one, and nine years. Get it right, speaker guy."

Below, Vikki struck her last pose as the song crashed to an end, one arm flung out toward the crowd, feathers scattered everywhere, and the crowd came apart all over again. Tracey clapped too, up there in her hidden glass box, clapping for a woman who couldn't possibly see her.

Could she?

Tracey squinted. The dancer's head was tilted up, toward the VIP level, and she was smiling. Right at the booth? At the row of booths? At the moon? It was impossible to tell, and that was the entire trick of one-way glass, wasn't it. You watched them, and you'd never know if they were watching you back.

Vikki picked up her cane from the stage floor and started walking off, all lazy and unhurried, like she had nowhere to be and everyone could wait.

Then she stopped.

Right in the middle of the stage, she stopped, and tilted her head back up toward the second level.

Tracey sat very still in her wine-colored chair with her drink halfway to her mouth.

The dancer squinted into the dark. And then, impossibly, she winked. Not a maybe-wink. A full, slow, unmistakable wink, aimed at a row of booths where one of them had a person in it and the rest were empty. Tracey actually looked over her shoulder to check the other booths. Empty. Every one of them. It was just her up here.

"Oh, you're joking," Tracey whispered. "You cannot see me. There's glass."

Vikki raised one hand and pointed. Straight at booth twelve. Then she pressed a finger to her lips and mouthed something, and even from this distance Tracey could read it.

*You.*

Tracey's drink nearly went down the wrong pipe. She coughed, set it down, and gaped at the stage the way a woman who'd just been picked out of a lineup would. Below, Vikki grinned like she'd won something, and gestured with her cane. A little swoop of it. Stay. Then she turned back to the band and nodded, and the music kicked up again.

She wasn't done. That had been the end of her set, apparently, except now it wasn't, because Vikki had