Thorn and Oyster

The spine of that notebook went with a crack I felt in my wrist, a loud electric snap that rang off the teak ceiling of the old fish depot and made the cactus vendor three feet away flinch like I'd pulled a gun on him. The fair was loud anyway, a hundred fluorescent bulbs humming over rows of barrel cactus and flowering agave, kids too young to drink running around with fried dough, some guy on a PA announcing the spiniest succulent competition like it was the world series, and still that little green spine popping was the loudest thing in the room. I held the two halves of the notebook and stared at them like they'd insulted my mother.

"Sorry," the vendor said, though I have no idea why it was his apology to make. He was maybe sixty, sunburned, wearing a shirt with a saguaro on it that had nothing to do with our island.

"It's fine, it was already cracked," I said, which was a lie, because it was brand new and neon green and I'd bought it yesterday because it made me laugh at the stationery stall near the brewery. I'm Juanita, I'm forty-four, I brew beer at a little bar on Pulau Sinyinyi, and three months ago I ended a nine-year relationship with a man named Leo who left quietly the way he did everything, and since then I have been hiding behind my brew kettles like they're a force field.

Rafe appeared at my elbow the way he always does, forty-seven years old, tall in a stooped way, carrying two plastic cups of the fair's terrible lager because he never lets me pay for anything at these things. "What did the notebook ever do to you?" he asked, looking at the halves in my hands.

"It snapped. Out of nowhere. I barely touched it."

"Okay, put it down, I'll find you a replacement before we leave. There was a guy two aisles back selling stationery next to the air plants." He took the halves out of my hands with that calm bossy manner he's had for the whole six years I've known him, and I let him, the same way I always let him, and I didn't think about why until much later that night.

Here's the part I should get out of the way early, since this is the kind of story where it matters: Rafe and I have been friends for six years, we met over a pitcher of my experimental stout at the bar, he narrates videos for a leadership training company which means he has the most annoyingly beautiful speaking voice on the island, and nothing has ever happened between us. Nothing. Nine years I was with Leo, and Rafe was just the guy who came in on Thursdays and argued with me about hop schedules, and now Leo is gone and Rafe is standing next to me at a cactus fair holding my broken notebook, and something in my chest is doing a thing I don't have a name for.

He did find the replacement notebook, except it wasn't a replacement, it was worse and better. He came back from the curiosity stall at the far end of the courtyard grinning like someone who'd won something, carrying a pale green notebook that, like everything else that weekend, already had a cracked spine, and, separately, a knife.

"Juanita," he said, setting both on the table in front of me with ceremony, "I have acquired treasures."

"That's an oyster knife," I said.

"It is. Horn handle, and look, the tip is chipped." He turned it so the little broken point caught the fluorescent light. "The vendor told me it belonged to a fish packer who worked in this actual building in the fifties, which is obviously a lie he tells everyone, and I don't care, because I have decided this is the exact knife our friendship needs."

"Our friendship needs a knife."

"Every long friendship needs a knife. Something with a chipped tip and a story attached that probably isn't true." He pushed it toward me. "It's yours. I paid eight dollars, don't argue, the money is spent and settled and it's not a favor, it's a gift with no strings, I'm saying that out loud so you don't get weird about it."

I did get a little weird about it, briefly, because three months out of a long relationship you get weird about everything, every dollar anyone spends on you feels like a debt with teeth. But he'd already moved on to flipping through the cracked notebook, so I wrapped my hand around the horn handle, which was worn smooth and cool, and put the knife in my bag, and felt stupidly pleased about an eight-dollar piece of junk. We're two adults in our forties and a chipped oyster knife made my whole afternoon. That's where I was at, that spring.

We settled at the bar in the food tent around four, the plastic chairs with the woven seats, a ceiling fan turning slow enough to be decorative rather than functional. The fair was winding down outside, vendors stacking crates, the spiniest succulent winner already dethroned by some appeals process I didn't fully understand. Rafe got us actual beers from an actual cooler, cold and decent, and we sat with our elbows on the sticky table the way we've sat a thousand times.

"So," he said, and I knew that tone, that's his NPR tone, the one he uses before he says something careful. "How are you actually doing? Not the answer you give customers."

I turned my bottle around on the table a few times. "I'm forty-four, Rafe. I've got a beer gut coming in soft and my knees sound like the creaky gate at the depot, and I've been somebody's girlfriend for so long that being single feels like walking around without pants. I'm too old and too soft for anything new. Anything new would take energy I don't have, and I'd just be awkward and sweaty and explaining myself to some stranger who was expecting somebody glossier."

"That is the dumbest thing you've said all year, and you once told me with total confidence that hops grow on trees."

"They do in some contexts."

"Farms, Juanita. Farms are the context." He picked a seed out of the lime wedge in his bottle and flicked it at me, and it bounced off my collarbone and into my cleavage, and we both looked at where it landed, and then we both looked very hard at the table. "You're not soft," he said, quieter, to the table. "Or you are, but it's not the problem you think it is."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Write it down," he said, and slid the cracked notebook across the table to me, open to the first page, where he'd already scribbled something in his narrator's handwriting, all careful loops, like he'd rehearsed it. The note said: What if we watched each other not being watched?

I read it twice. My face got hot, which it never does, I'm the woman who talks about brettanomyces to strangers without blushing. "That's a paradox, idiot," I wrote underneath it, because my mouth and my pen have the same problem, they go defensive before anything else gets a vote.

"Read it again," he said.

I read it again. Watched, not being watched. The fair noise came back into my ears all at once, the PA guy, the crates, the fan, and I realized my hand was still on the pen and I hadn't written anything else because I didn't trust what it would write. "Rafe."

"Yeah."

"How long have you been carrying this idea around waiting to hand it to me?"

"Since yesterday," he said, "when you bought the green one and I got jealous of a notebook, which was a new low even for me."

We walked out the back of the depot when the fair started dying down for real, past the stacked crates and the forklift nobody had moved in a decade, and Rafe knew the way like he'd been planning this route for six years, which knowing Rafe he probably had. The loading dock behind the building was empty, cracked concrete and a rusted rail and one stubborn floodlight over the door that threw a wedge of yellow across the boards, and past the rail was just dark water and the smell of salt, which I will note is the smell of every important conversation on this island. He set his bottle down on the dock edge and sat on it, that stooped tall way of his, knees cracked apart like a folding chair, and I sat next to him and the concrete was cold through my shorts and for a minute neither of us said anything useful.

"So," I said finally. "Watched each other not being watched. Explain it to me like I'm a customer who asked about brettanomyces."

"I don't think I can explain it," he said, looking out at the water instead of at me, which was smart of him. "I think it's one of those things where explaining it kills it. I think we just sit here and let each other exist without performing, and it's the most naked I've felt in years, and I've been narrating videos about vulnerability all week, so I should know."

"That's the saddest sentence ever spoken on a loading dock."