Wax and Heart

I'm Sherrie, I'm twenty-two, and I moved up to the Mao Mountains seven months ago with one duffel bag and a job tightening the caps on perfume atomizers at a little retail shop down in the valley. I came up here after a big fight with my parents, the kind where you say things you can't take back, and I swore I would prove I could run my own life without anybody's help. That promise has cost me sleep more than once.

The beeswax shed sits up a switchback trail from my rented room, a low tin-roof thing wedged between bamboo groves with limestone peaks standing around it like nosy neighbors. Zach runs the wax rendering there. He's thirty, eight years older than me and exactly the kind of calm that used to annoy me before I got used to it, and he's been at the shed for three years now, pouring frames of golden wax and, on the side, building these strange twig-and-vine sculptures he never lets anyone photograph.

We made a deal back in spring, a plain business deal, settled and shook on before anything else ever came up: I critique his sculptures, he gives me wax samples for my side hobby, which is making custom perfume bottles I sell at the weekend market. Money and goods, settled separately, clean. That was all it was. Mostly.

So on a Tuesday night in June I'm lying on my bed and I'm scrolling back through old texts, and I find the photo I took of his laptop last month, the one with the dried water streak across the keyboard from when the tin roof leaked. The streak runs gray and branching across the black keys, and the longer I look at it the more it looks like a map, like a river system, like a drawing of two roads that keep splitting apart and finding each other again. I send it to him before I can think better of it.

*found this in my camera roll. The leak on your laptop. Honestly it looks like a map of our friendship, all these little branches that keep almost touching and then not*

He doesn't reply that night, which is normal, because Zach answers texts the way he does everything, slow and thorough, like the message is a wax frame that needs to set. I fall asleep a little disappointed in myself for sending it at all.

Wednesday brings a letter, an actual paper letter, because Zach is the sort of person who owns stationery. It's waiting for me at the shop when I get off shift, my name on the front in careful block letters, and I read it standing behind the counter between customers.

*Sherrie, the sculpture is nearly done. It's the big one, the one with the grape vine wound through the waxed twigs, and I've been working on it since February. I want you to see it before I decide it's finished. Come up to the shed Saturday if you're free. I value your eye even when it stings. Bring nothing, owe nothing, this one is just for showing. Zach.*

Bring nothing, owe nothing. He wrote that on purpose, I know he did, because he knows how I get about owing people. I read that line four times and each time it landed differently.

That night I write him an email, because I'm too impatient for paper, and I keep it clipped and professional, or professional the way I understand the word, which mostly means I don't say anything warm until the very end and then I delete the warm part.

*Zach, re: the sculpture. From the photos you sent last month, the left side is carrying more visual weight than the right. The grape vine thickens as it climbs and by the top third it dominates, so the whole thing leans. Two options. One, thin the upper vine. Two, and this is the better fix in my opinion, widen the base. If you made the clay base broader, maybe asymmetric, the lean would read as intentional instead of accidental. I can help with the clay if you want a second pair of hands. Saturday works. Sherrie.*

I hit send and then I sit there feeling like I've said too much and not enough at the same time, which is apparently my permanent condition now.

Friday is when the voicemail transcript arrives, because Zach's phone does that thing where it transcribes his messages and sends them to me as text, and his phone is old and mangles words constantly. The transcript reads like a ransom note written by a poet.

*Sherrie, it's Zach. The clay idea is good, asymmetric base, I like it. Also, and my phone will probably butcher this, you can keep saying you're just helping with wax and clay all you want, but I've watched you stand in front of that grape vine thing for ten straight minutes with your arms crossed, and nobody looks at a lump of twigs that way unless it matters to them. You're allowed to like my work. You might even be allowed to like, well. Anyway. Saturday. Bring gloves.*

I read it three times in the shop stockroom and my face goes hot. Liking his work is one thing. I will defend to the grave that I genuinely like his work, the twig sculptures are honestly good even when they lean. But that pause in the middle, that *you might even be allowed to like, well,* hanging there where his voice dropped and the phone just printed an ellipsis, that is a different animal entirely and he doesn't get to put it in writing and then hang up.

I type back: *very funny. I like the work because the work is good. Saturday. Gloves. Don't flatter yourself.*

He sends back a single thumbs up, which somehow is worse than anything he could have written.

That night I can't sleep, so I open my diary, the paper one, the one nobody will ever read unless my future self gets sentimental. I write:

*The problem, if I'm honest in here because nobody reads this, is that I came up here to need exactly no one, and I've been doing a bad job of it. Zach asks nothing from me. The whole trick of him is that he never asks, he just leaves doors open and waits, and then I walk through them and pretend I was passing by anyway. I want his approval like I want water and I hate that I want it, because wanting someone's approval feels like being back at my parents' table waiting to be told if I measured up.*

*But here is what I keep circling around. His opinion of my eye, my critique, my judgment, that I can accept, that's professional, that's earned. It's the other thing, the thing his phone printed as a dangling "well," that I can't pick up without feeling like I'm admitting my whole independence thing was a stage set. If I want him, really want him, then the falling out with my parents stops being the story. I stop being the girl who left. I become the girl who arrived somewhere. And I don't know yet if I can stand that much change in one year.*