The Vinyl Lesson

Sarah pulls her Honda into the gravel lot at the Rustic Relic Antique Mall at 10:40 on a Saturday morning, and she sits there a minute before she gets out. She's twenty-eight years old, she's a dentist, and she's been single for six months as of Tuesday. Six months! Half a year of eating dinner over the sink like some kind of raccoon.

"Get it together," she tells her rearview mirror.

The mirror doesn't answer, which is probably for the best. She grabs her purse and heads in.

The mall smells like old wood and someone's candle collection, that big two-story barn of a place with booths themed by decade. Sarah has been coming here since she was twenty-one, back when she met Julio in a college study group and he dragged her here on a Saturday instead of studying for the stats final. Seven years! Seven years of this dusty, wonderful dump.

She finds him in the back room, which is really more of a back wing, floor to ceiling with crates of vinyl records nobody has bought in years. Julio is twenty-nine now, turning thirty in four days, and he is flipping through a stack of albums with the meanest scowl Sarah has ever seen on his square face.

"Who died?" she asks.

"You're here!" He doesn't look up. "Nobody died. I'm sorting. Flo wants dead stock sorted by genre before the weekend, and I'm on crate four hundred of a thousand, apparently."

"That's a normal number of crates. Totally reasonable workload for a part-timer."

"Right?" He finally looks up, and his face does that thing it does, that softening he does when he sees her, like she's a cup of coffee he forgot he poured. "You look terrible, by the way. In a loving way."

"Gee, thanks!"

"You know what I mean. You've got the breakup face. The six-months-out breakup face. I know that face."

Sarah folds her arms. "My breakup face is none of your business, Julio Horton."

"It's entirely my business. I'm your best friend. I've got a whole filing cabinet on your faces." He pulls out an album, squints at it, puts it back. "Come on, I need help sorting anyway. Talking makes it go faster."

She's about to answer when Flo comes barreling down the aisle between the crates, and Flo at fifty-two does not barrel anywhere, she moves like someone who owns a two-story building and knows exactly which floorboards will cave. She's barreling anyway.

"Oh thank God, Sarah, you're here!" Flo grabs Sarah's sleeve. "Disaster. Total disaster. Are you good at disasters?"

"I do root canals for a living, so yes?"

"Okay, so. Listen." Flo takes a breath and lets it out all at once, which is very Flo. "The party for Julio's birthday is today. It was supposed to be a surprise, but he found out Tuesday, so that part's fine. The problem is my car keys are locked in my car, the cake is on the floor, and Clarence is already in here picking through the good records like a vulture."

Sarah blinks. "Run that by me again, but slower."

"The cake fell. Off the counter in the break room. It's face down, frosting side to the tile, and it was a good cake, Sarah, it was a Motown cake with a record drawn on it in icing." Flo's voice climbs. "And my keys are in the lockbox in my car, which is locked, because I locked it, like a responsible adult, and the spare is at my house, and Clarence showed up twenty minutes early because of course he did."

"He's already buying records?" Julio calls from the crate he's kneeling at. "This is my party. He's at my party, buying my birthday present out from under me."

"He found the Blue Note," Flo admits.

Julio stands up so fast he cracks his head on a low shelf, which is honestly the most Julio thing that has happened all week. "He found the what? The Art Blakey? That was in the hold pile. I had a hold pile. Hold piles are sacred."

"He's offering me two hundred dollars for it as we speak," Flo says. "Maybe more by now. He knows your birthday party is today and he brought his wallet on purpose. That man is a shark in a cardigan."

"Why is he even here before the party?" Sarah asks.

"Because I told him to come at eleven and he heard ten. Or he ignored me. With Clarence it's honestly a coin flip." Flo pinches the bridge of her nose. "I have to call a locksmith, deal with the cake situation, and stop Clarence from strip-mining my back room, and I cannot do all three, so somebody distract Julio before he sees the cake situation, because he will take it personally, cake is very personal to him."

"Cake is very personal to me," Julio says. "It has my name on it. Had. Had my name on it."

"Right. Distract him." Flo points at Sarah, then hurries off down the aisle, and you can hear her already starting to yell at Clarence somewhere near the front, something about hold piles and the meaning of the word hold.

Sarah turns to Julio. He's staring at the crate like the crate owes him money.

"Hey. Birthday boy. Look at me."

"I'm turning thirty in four days and my party is already ruined and Clarence is going to own the Blakey." He kicks the crate. Not hard, just a frustrated little kick, but it's so stiff and angular that Sarah bursts out laughing before she can stop herself.

"What? What."

"Nothing. Nothing, it's just..." She's still laughing. "You move like a robot, Julio. A sad, birthday-ruined robot. Like if someone gave a forklift feelings."

"I do not move like a robot."

"You just kicked a crate like you were running a diagnostic. I've seen parking meters with more rhythm."

Julio straightens up, and now he's got that look, the competitive look, the one that once ended in an arm-wrestling match over a Beatles bootleg that he still brings up. "Oh yeah? You think you could do better?"

"Sarah is a great dancer, first of all. Second of all, I could teach you. Third of all, yes, obviously."

"Prove it." He gestures at the whole room, the crates, the mismatched sound system on the folding table that Flo uses for store announcements. "Right here. Show me how it's done, forklift hater."

Sarah looks at the sound system. She looks at the crates marked FUNK SOUL DISCO in Flo's handwriting. She looks at Julio, who is thirty in four days and scowling like the world is ending, and she thinks, you know what, this is exactly the kind of dumb fun