Vow in Neon

The vow renewal was being held in a parking lot, which was the kind of thing Levi Hansen should have expected from his cousin Garret. Garret was thirty-nine and had decided somewhere around his thirty-fifth birthday that hotels were fake, restaurants were fake, and apparently chapels were fake too, so the whole thing was folding chairs and a rented arch and a DJ who kept calling the couple "the happy couple" like he was being paid by the word. Levi was forty-five, a sommelier from Madrid, and he had been in Buenos Aires for three days and had already developed a low-grade headache from the humidity.

He watched Garret say his vows again, seven years after the first wedding, and the man cried, which was fine, that was fine, but Levi felt something in his chest that was not emotion so much as arithmetic. Six months with Kristin, five years ago, ended because he was too sensible. That was the phrase she had used. Too sensible. He had thought about it on the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic, and he had thought about it again now, standing in a parking lot in Palermo while a man cried over a woman he had already legally married once.

Levi slipped out during the toast. Nobody noticed. That was the advantage of being the sensible cousin from overseas; you could evaporate and people assumed you had gone to fetch more ice.

He walked six blocks without a plan. The air was thick the way it only got in February, and his shirt had gone clingy against his back by the second block. He turned a corner and saw the sign first, a great pink and blue tube of glass bent into the words WILLOWS AND VARGAS, CUSTOM NEON, glowing over a shopfront with paper over the windows. Below it, on the side of the building, a fire escape climbed up into the dark.

He did not think about it. That was the point. He had spent forty-five years thinking about things, running the numbers, checking the vintage, asking if the cork smelled of damp cardboard, and it had gotten him a life that was safe and tidy and a breakup he still chewed on like a loose molar. So he took the railing and started up. The metal was warm from the day and rough under his palms where the paint had flaked.

The fire escape ended at a roof, and the roof was not a roof, exactly. It was a garden, crowded and half-wild, with planters made from old soda crates and a pergola strung with dead fairy lights that had clearly been replaced by living ones, actual vines, climbing through the slats. And in the middle of it sat a worktable, and on the worktable sat a city.

It took him a second to understand what he was looking at. A scale model of Buenos Aires, maybe two meters long, every block built up in cardboard and foam and wire, and every block lit. Tiny LEDs flickered in the windows of a tiny Congress. A miniature avenue glowed with a string of lights small as pinheads. Above the table, hanging from a frame of steel pipe, an unfinished neon sign curved through the dark, half of it pink, half of it blue, the bend where the two colors met still dark glass, unbent, waiting.

And kneeling at the edge of the model, one hand resting on a tiny lit replica of the Obelisco, was Kristin Willows.

She looked up at the sound of his shoe on the gravel and did not seem surprised, which annoyed him a little, because he had surprised himself plenty.

"Levi Hansen," she said. "In my garden."

"Kristin." His voice came out flatter than he wanted. "You own the sign shop."

"Co-own. Ten years now." She stood, brushing gravel off her knee. She was fifty-two and she looked it in the good way, lines around her eyes and the same strong forearms he remembered, scarred a little now, a burn mark near one wrist. "You're here for Garret's thing. The parking lot thing."

"The parking lot thing. Yes."

"I was invited. I left before the vows, I know my limits. Did he cry?"

"He cried."

"He always cries." She picked up a rag from the table and wiped her hands, and he saw she had been working, solder or flux or whatever it was that went into bending glass, the tips of her fingers stained faintly gray. "Sit down if you're going to stand there sweating. There's beer in the cooler and it's only sort of warm."

He sat. The chair was plastic and wobbled on the uneven gravel and he found he did not care. She cracked two beers and handed him one and sat on the edge of the worktable, which he supposed she was allowed to do, since it was her table and her city, and her heel tapped against the table leg in a slow rhythm.

"How long has it been," he said, and immediately heard how stupid the question was, because he knew exactly, five years, they had met at a wine-tasting class at the community center and dated for six months and she had ended it with a sentence he could still recite.

"Five years," she said. "You're a sommelier now. Full time!"

"Full time. Madrid. There's a restaurant, it has a star, the star is both a blessing and a kind of disease." He drank. The beer was in fact only sort of warm and it was the best thing he had tasted in days. "You bent glass for ten years."

"Bent glass for ten years." She tipped her head back toward the hanging sign. "That's the Vargas commission. Big hotel on the avenue, they want their name in two colors and they want it in six weeks and they want it cheap, which is the trinity of impossible." She picked at the label on her bottle. "You look good, Levi. Hot and miserable, but good."

"It's the humidity. My shirt has been clinging to me since the second block. I climbed your fire escape like a man escaping a fire."

"Escaping the vows."

"Escaping the vows," he admitted. There was no point denying it, she had met the family, she knew Garret, she knew the particular quality of a vow renewal held in a parking lot. "I sat through forty minutes and somewhere around the part where Garret compared marriage to a good malbec I realized I had stopped listening and started doing math."

"What kind of math?"

"Life math. The kind where you add up what you've done and it comes out to a number you're not proud of." He looked at the tiny city. The little Obelisco still glowed where her hand had been, a white spike the length of her forearm. "You built all this?"

"Me and Andres Vargas, my partner in the shop. He does the electrical, I do the glass." She swung her foot. "It started as a practice piece and got out of hand. Every year I add a block. It's stupid. It's the most sensible kind of stupid, the kind that takes ten years."

He laughed and it surprised him coming out.

"Here's what I remember about you," she said, and her voice changed, got level, the way it used to get level when she was about to say the true thing. "I remember you always took the safe exit. Not just with me. With everything. You'd stand in front of two doors and pick the one where you knew what was behind it, every time, and you'd call it taste." She drank. "I hated that. I hated it because I do the same thing and watching you do it was like looking in a mirror I hadn't asked for."

"You broke up with me for being like you."

"I broke up with you for making it look easy." She set the bottle down on the table between a miniature train station and a miniature park. "So. Garret's vows. What was the math you did up there in your folding chair?"

"I did the math," Levi said, "and I came out to a man who flies eleven hours to sit in a parking lot and drink warm beer on a stranger's roof, except you're not a stranger, and the beer is actually fine, and I am so tired of being sensible that I climbed a fire escape without checking if it would hold my weight."

She looked at him and something moved behind her face, not surprise exactly, more like recognition, the mirror thing again, both of them standing in front of the same glass.

"It holds," she said. "The fire escape. I have it inspected. Old habit."

"Of course you do."

"Old habit." She picked her bottle back up and clinked it gently against his. "Then here's to being tired of it."

Kristin reached under the worktable and came up with a bottle that had no label worth reading, just a shrink-wrapped cap and the tired look of a wine that had been bought by the case for a parking lot ceremony. "Confiscated," she said. "I stole three bottles on my way out. Garret owes me for the sign I fixed at his bar and never billed him for, so I consider this interest."

"You stole wine from a vow renewal."

"I liberated wine from a vow renewal. There's a difference and the difference is I'm not going back." She poured some into his empty beer bottle, which was a crime against glassware he would have once refused to commit, and held it out. "Go on. You're the expert. Tell me what's wrong with it."

He could have done it properly. He could have swirled and sniffed and named the fault, the hot fermentation, the shortened finish, all the vocabulary he had spent fifteen years polishing. Instead he drank a full swallow of wine that tasted mostly of cold, gone, and a faint suggestion of a rumor of fruit, and he looked at her, and he laughed.

"That bad?" she said.

"It's honest," he managed. "It tastes like it was made by people who had a deadline and a budget and no illusions about art."

"So it's the wine version of the hotel commission." She drank from her own bottle and made a face and drank again. "God. Okay.