Trammel Point

Six years. That's how long it had been since I last saw Chad Poole, and of course the first thing I heard when I walked into the green room of the Ness City Municipal Auditorium was him swearing at a piece of wood.

I'm Sue Park, I'm forty-one, and I'm the events coordinator for this auditorium, which means every visiting craftsman, musician, and demonstrations coordinator is my problem. Chad is forty-four now. He was thirty-eight the year we dated, I was thirty-five, and for one whole year I let that man talk me into believing he might actually stay put. He had other ideas. He moved to a workshop two states over and told me commitment was a box he couldn't build. His words. The man builds boxes for a living, fiddles and violas and the occasional cello, and he couldn't manage one for us.

So when our director booked a visiting luthier for the morning craft demonstration, I didn't look at the paperwork closely. Maybe I didn't want to. Maybe part of me knew exactly what I'd find down in that basement, and part of me wanted to find it anyway.

The green room is nothing special. Painted cinderblock, a scarred oak table somebody spilled coffee on in 1987, a bank of lighting control panels along one wall. One window, and that morning after the hoarfrost it was frosted solid white, so the room had that underwater glow. The heating vents clanked like a junkyard settling. I stood in the doorway with my clipboard and watched Chad bend over the table, cursing under his breath at a wooden trammel point he had clamped in a little vise.

"Language," I said. "There are children in this building. Somewhere. Probably."

He straightened up slow, the way he always did, like his spine needed a warning first. He turned. Six years had put some gray in his beard and a few more lines around his eyes, and otherwise he looked exactly like the man who had broken my heart over a plate of noodles in a diner, which was a rude thing for my chest to remember.

"Sue." He said it flat, like reading a shipping label. "They gave me the short-haired woman at the desk, and she said the coordinator would be down. I didn't figure it'd be you."

"Well, it's me. It's always me. I deal with every mess in this building, including the ones you made before my time." I set my clipboard on the table. "What's cracked?"

"Trammel point. For a viola bow I'm demonstrating with. The oak split when I was fitting it, and of course I brought no spare, because I'm a genius."

"You are your own advertisement," I said. "Some things don't change."

"Neither do you," he said, and picked his files back up. "You're still keeping lists of everyone's failures."

"That's not a list, that's a career."

He worked. I stood there pretending to check the lighting panel. His hands were still beautiful, I'll admit that here where nobody who knows me reads. Long fingers, sure and quick, and they used to do things to me that made it very hard to argue with him. The vents clanked. Frost sat on the window, a held breath.

"You could have called," I said, and then hated myself for it.

"You could have answered," he said. "Last time I did, you lectured me for forty minutes about how I wasted my best years."

"I was thirty-five and you were moving to another state, Chad. What was I supposed to say? Congratulations on your freedom?"

"You were supposed to say goodbye like a person. Instead you gave me a settlement."

"That's what happens when you owe somebody. You settle."

He set the file down and looked at the trammel point instead of at me. "You always needed to control the ending, Sue. Every conversation, every plan, every single thing. It's exhausting being managed."

"And you always needed to float away the second anything got real. It's exhausting being nobody's anything."

The silence after that sat between us, a third person at the table. I busied myself with the coffee urn, which was empty, which figured. Then there was a small dry snap, loud in that dead room, and I looked over and the trammel point had broken clean in half in his hand. One piece dropped to the table. He was holding the other like it had insulted his mother.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. Six years of that man's stubbornness, of that cracked, splintering, unfixable thing between us, and there it was in miniature, snapped right in his fist.

"It's not funny," he said.

"It's a little funny. It's extremely funny. It's the funniest thing I've seen since the mime festival."

He crossed the room in three steps. Before I could put the urn down he had my wrist, not hard, but firm, and he pulled me around to face him, and we were close enough that I could smell the pine of his wood shop and the coffee on his breath. My pulse was going somewhere unprofessional.

"You think that's funny," he said, low.

"I think everything about you is funny, Chad. Six years later and you're still breaking things in my building."

His jaw worked. Then he said, "Tell me to let go."

I looked at his hand on my wrist. I looked at his mouth. I thought about forty minutes of lecture I'd prepared for a phone call he never made.

"Don't let go," I said.

"You sure?"

"I'm forty-one years old and I'm standing in a basement. Yes, I'm sure. Kiss me before I remember all the reasons I hate you."

He kissed me, and it was rough and angry, the way every fight we ever had should have ended instead. His hand slid up from my wrist to my jaw and I grabbed the front of his jacket and hauled him in. We kissed like we were settling the whole six years, teeth and breath and the coffee urn digging into my hip. The vents clanked somewhere overhead like applause from a cheap seat.

Then we broke apart, both breathing hard, and he had that look, the one he got right before he