Tuxedo Rehearsal

The winter had gone on so long I'd stopped keeping track of the weeks. Up at Aurora-1 the sun hadn't shown its face since October, and by February I was doing my baking at odd hours just to feel the ovens warm the kitchen. I'm Peggy, I'm twenty-eight, and I've been the chef here for over a year. Somewhere in that stretch I'd stopped feeling like a woman and started feeling like a pair of hands that made bread for forty scientists.

My libido hadn't exactly died, but it had gone into hibernation with everything else. Months since I'd touched anything but my own skin, and even that had turned perfunctory, like brushing snow off a coat. When the email came announcing the merger celebration, that two of the stations were being folded together and someone from the south was coming up for the announcement, my first thought was menu, my second thought was that I'd have to dig out a dress.

I dug out the dress anyway. Dark green, bought over a year ago for a wedding I attended alone. It still fit. I looked at myself in the little mirror over my bunk's desk and thought, well, at least the bread will be good.

The plane came in on a Tuesday, resupply run with one extra passenger. I was in the galley when I heard the voice, and my hands stopped on the mixing bowl before my brain caught up.

"Tell me you've got coffee that isn't the freeze-dried stuff, because the man who owns this tux has robbed me twice already."

Enrique. He stood in the doorway of the galley with a garment bag over one arm and a duffel over the other, twenty-nine years old and grinning like we'd seen each other last week instead of over a year ago. He'd filled out some. The rest of him was the same, the quick eyes, the habit of talking with his chin up like he was expecting a bull to charge.

"Enrique. What in the world are you doing here?"

"Rodeo season's over, my knee needed a break, and my cousin's boss needed a warm body for the merger logistics. Apparently I qualify." He held up the garment bag. "Also, I own exactly one suit and it's tragic, so I rented this. It smells like mothballs and regret."

I laughed, an actual laugh, the first one in weeks. He came in, set the bag on my flour shelf without asking, which should have annoyed me and didn't, and hugged me. It was a regular hug. It lasted a regular amount of time. I noticed all of it anyway.

The party was Friday. I did a whole poached salmon and three kinds of pie, and by eight the common room was full, the mismatched donated couches pushed to the walls, the ping-pong table serving as a buffet. The station chief gave a speech. Everyone clapped. Somebody's speaker played music that skipped.

Enrique found me by the coffee urn around ten, already without his tux jacket, sleeves rolled.

"This is the wildest party I've ever attended," he said. "I saw a man fall asleep standing up."

"We're a lively bunch."

"Listen, do you want to get out of here for a minute? Not out out. The alcove by the coat rack. It's the closest thing to privacy on this rock."

The alcove was a two-foot gap between the coat rack and an old filing cabinet. We stood in it like two people hiding from a crowd, which is a funny thing to do when you are both well into adulthood. We talked about the Halloween party, over a year back. He'd been a scarecrow. I'd been a witch, the lazy kind, black dress and a hat.

"I spent that whole night trying to get you to bob for apples," he said. "You wouldn't do it."

"Because everyone was watching."

"You were the only person there I wanted watching." He said it lightly, and then it sat there between us in the dark of the alcove. I looked at the filing cabinet for a while.

"That party was a long time ago," I said.

"Yeah. I've regretted not saying something about a hundred times since."

The party thinned out around one. The chief went to bed. The scientists drifted off in twos. I was stacking cups when Enrique came over with his garment bag and a look on his face that I remembered from the rodeo stories, the look of a man about to do something foolish on purpose.

"Peggy. I dare you to try on the tux jacket."

"Over my dress?"

"Over your dress. It's a good jacket. You'll look like someone who runs a bank."

"Why would I want to look like that?"

"Because it's funny and it's one in the morning and there's nobody here to judge us."

A couple of people were still lingering, all of them pretending not to look. I took the jacket anyway. It smelled like dry cleaner and old wool, and it hung past my hips, and the sleeves were too long, and I rolled them the way he'd rolled his earlier and pushed them up. Something happened in my chest when I did that. A small tick of the old machinery, a turn of a key I'd assumed was rusted shut. I looked down at the black lapels over the green dress and felt, absurdly, handsome.

"Well?" I said, holding my arms out.

"You look better in it than I do," he said. "That's