The Wrong Porch Package

Monty found the package on a Tuesday, which was fitting, because Tuesdays were always the day something went wrong at the flat above the bookstore. The radiator leaked on a Tuesday. The neighbor's terrier got loose on a Tuesday. And now this, a brown paper parcel the size of a shoebox, sitting on the step between the doormat and the milk bottles like it had always lived there.

He was twenty-nine, a brewer at the Crooked Stave up the street, and he had a morning off because the fermentation tanks were doing their own thing and nobody needed him until the evening shift. So there he stood, in his socks, holding a parcel addressed in handwriting he almost recognized.

Almost. That was the trouble with almost.

The label said FLOYD REIMER, REIMER'S RELICS, and then an address that was not his address. It was the antique mall's address, two doors down, minus a digit. Somebody's courier had done a very lazy day's work.

He should have walked it over. He knew that even as he carried it inside, past the cluttered little hallway, into the kitchen where Helga had left her cereal bowl drying upside down on the rack. Helga was thirty-one and did the breakfast show at the local station, which meant she was out of the flat by five forty-five every morning and home by two, smelling faintly of studio coffee and talking at a pace nobody off-air could match. They had been married four years. They had met six years ago at a brewery open day when he was twenty-three and she had laughed at his terrible pun about lager and that had been that, more or less.

Less, lately. A lot less. He worked evenings, she worked mornings, and their overlapping hours had shrunk to about forty minutes of shared sofa time, most of which was spent on their phones. He could not remember the last time she had touched him on purpose.

So maybe that is the excuse he would have given later, if anyone asked, for why he opened a parcel that was clearly not his. He got the scissors from the drawer. The paper came away. Inside, packed in shredded newspaper, was a tape recorder, an actual tape recorder, a chunky silver thing with a handle, and tucked under it a folded letter.

The letter was from Karin.

Monty sat down on a kitchen chair so fast it scraped the floor.

Karin. Karin, who had worked the bottling line with him at the old brewery in Chicago five years ago, when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-four. Karin, who used to steal sips from his hydrometer sample jar and call it quality control. Karin, who he had once almost kissed in the walk-in cooler and then not kissed, because he had just got engaged to Helga and was trying, in his own shaky way, to be decent. He had not heard from her in three years. And now she was sending tape recorders to his street, apparently, because she had not even gotten the address right, which somehow made it worse and also funnier.

The letter was short. *Monty. Traveling through your corner of the world for a job. Heard you ended up in the Highlands, small brewing world. I leave this with Floyd at the mall, he's an old friend. Play the tape or don't. Either way I'll be at the mall through Saturday. K.*

He looked at the tape recorder for a long time. Then he looked at the clock. Helga would be home in an hour and a half.

He pressed play.

"Hi, Monty." Her voice came out slightly warped, warm, the way old tape always sounds like it is remembering something for you. "God, this is ridiculous, I know. I found this thing in a junk shop in Inverness and I thought, well, that's very us, isn't it? Remember when we recorded the yeast pitch counts on your phone and you did the weatherman voice? You did a terrible weatherman voice. I hope it's still terrible."

Monty laughed out loud, alone in his kitchen, in his socks, at nine in the morning.

"Here's the honest part," the tape went on. "I thought about you a lot over the years. I don't mean that as a bomb I'm dropping on you, I mean it as, I don't know, a fact. We had a thing that never happened. I used to think it never happened because of timing. Then I wondered if it never happened because one of us was a coward, and honestly it was probably both of us. Anyway. I'm doing a collab at a brewery in Inverness for a month, then I'm off to Rotterdam. If you want to see me, come by Reimer's Relics, Floyd will point you at me, I'll be haunting his tea room most days. If you don't want to, that's fine too, and I mean that. Delete the tape. Marry your life. But I'm here until Saturday, and I'd like to see your terrible weatherman voice one more time. That's all. Bye, Monty."

Click. Silence. The kettle made a small ticking noise as it cooled.

Monty sat there with his heart pounding like a bodhran at a wedding, a comparison a Scottish brewer is allowed to make. What was he supposed to do with this? He was a married man. A mildly unhappy married man, granted, married to a woman who had fallen asleep before him on a Thursday and woken up before him on a Friday for four straight years, but still. Married. He had a ring on his finger and a wife he loved in the way you love a house you have not repainted.

He put the tape recorder in the cupboard under the sink, where guilty objects go, and he went to work early, and he mashed in a batch of porter, and he thought about nothing but Karin the entire time, meaning he thought about her so hard he overshot his strike temperature by six degrees and had to write it off as a learning experience.

Helga came home at two and knew within four minutes.

That is not a criticism of her. Four minutes is generous, actually, given how hard Monty was trying to act normal, which consisted of chopping an onion with enormous concentration and asking her, "How was the show?" in a voice like a hostage reading a statement.

"Fine. Martin did the sports again and mispronounced Aviemore again." She hung up her coat. She looked at him. She looked at the onion. "Are you making soup?"

"Thought I might."

"You hate making soup. You say it's just crying with extra steps." She dropped her bag on the counter and folded her arms. "Monty. What is going on with you today? You've got the face you had when you dented Valeria's car and didn't tell me for a week."

"I don't have a face."

"You absolutely have a face, and it's a guilty one, and now I'm going to find out why, because I'm nosy and I married you." She was already opening the cupboard under the sink, because Helga knew his hiding spots better than he did, which is a thing about long marriages nobody warns you about. She pulled out the tape recorder and held it up like evidence at a trial. "And what is this?"

"It's a tape recorder."

"I can see that, Monty! Whose is it?"

He could have lied. He thought about lying. Then he looked at his wife, thirty-one years old, still in her studio headphones around her neck, a woman he had once made laugh so hard at a beer festival that she snorted into her pint, and he thought, you know what, we are in this state partly because we have stopped telling each other true things.

"It's from Karin," he said. "Karin from Chicago. She's in Inverness. There's a tape."

Helga went very still. Then, in a voice that was almost frighteningly calm, she said, "Play it."

Helga played the whole tape standing up. She did not sit, not even when Karin got to the part about the thing that never happened, and Monty watched his wife's face go through about six different expressions the way weather comes off the loch, one system after another, no gaps between them.

When it clicked off she stood there holding the recorder in both hands like it might lay eggs.

"Well," she said.

"Well," Monty agreed.

"Chicago Karin. Weatherman voice Karin."

"Is there another Karin?"

"There could be! I don't know every Karin you've ever met, Monty, you worked in brewing for nine years, the world is crawling with Karins!" She put the recorder down on the counter very gently, which was somehow worse than slamming it. "You opened a package addressed to somebody else."

"The porch is one porch. It looked like ours."

"You opened it."

"It said Reimer's Relics on it. I thought it was a misdelivery of our stuff, there's a whole story about that, it's not a good story, but the point is I opened it before I read the label properly and then there was a letter and I read the letter because it was open by then, which is not an excuse, I know it's not an excuse."

Helga picked up the letter, which was still sitting by the fruit bowl, and read it in maybe forty seconds. Then she read it again. Monty stood by the onion and sweated.

"You kept the letter out," she said. "On the counter. Like a salad."

"I didn't know what to do with it."

"And the tape? You hid the tape under the sink and left the letter out in the open? Monty, that is the most you thing I have ever heard. You hid the guilty half and displayed the innocent half and hoped the two halves wouldn't meet."

He opened his mouth and closed it again, because that was exactly what had happened, and they both knew it, and saying so out loud would only make it worse. Or better. It was hard to tell which way this conversation was pointed.

"So," Helga said. "You've not seen her in what, three years?"

"Three years. Yes."

"And she's in Inverness for a month."

"A month, yes. Then Rotterdam."

"And she'll be at Reimer's Relics until Saturday." Helga looked at the clock on the wall, which said twenty past two, and then at the window, and Monty realized with a lurch that Reimer's Relics was visible from their kitchen window, the big crooked sign of it, forty feet of gravel and one badly parked delivery van away. He had been carrying this around all day like a man with a stone in his boot and the stone's owner had been next door the entire time. "Huh," said Helga. "She's forty feet away right now."

"Presumably. If she's there. She said most days."

Helga was quiet for a bit. She made tea, which in this house is not a gesture of calm, it is a gesture of thinking, and Monty knew better than to interrupt a thinking tea. She stirred it longer than tea requires. Then she turned around and said the thing he had not predicted, out of all the things she could have said, including several that involved his suitcase.

"We're going together."

"Together?"

"To the mall. Now. To return the package, because it's Floyd's, and it's sitting on our porch like a lost sheep, and because I am not letting you walk into that building alone with a tape in your pocket and a face like yours." She pointed the spoon at him. "Also I want to meet her. I've heard about Karin for five years and I've never once met Karin, which seems mad when you say it out loud."

"You've heard about Karin?"

"Monty. Every couple tells each other about their old almosts eventually. You told me about Karin on the bus home from Aviemore, the week we got engaged. You said, and I quote, she's the one I almost asked out and didn't. I've been carrying that around since I was twenty-six."

"I said that?"

"You said that."

He had no memory of saying it, but he had no memory of not saying it either, and Helga had never once in four years misquoted anybody, it was practically her superpower, she did radio, she remembered words for a living. He looked at his wife, who was putting on her outdoor coat at half two in the afternoon to walk forty feet and hand a parcel to a retired mechanic, and he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time, which was that she was choosing to be in the room with him on purpose.

"Okay," he said. "Together."

"Together. And Monty? We talk about the rest after. The unhappy rest. But we're doing it after, in that order, because if we do it before I'll say things I mean and you'll say things you mean and nobody will be fit to be seen in public." She picked up the package, tucked the letter inside it, and left the tape recorder on the counter. "The tape stays here. It's not ours to return and it's not hers to want back. It stays under the sink where guilty objects go, apparently."

They crossed the gravel at twenty to three, which is a strange hour in a small town, everything shut and nothing yet awake for the evening, and Monty felt like a man being walked into the headmaster's office by a woman who had already read his file. Helga was humming. That was the unnerving part. She was actually humming.

The bell over the door of Reimer's Relics did its usual clang and the smell of dust and old polish rolled out, and there was Floyd, fifty-five years