Vince Palladino had spent thirty-one years as a forensic accountant, and he trusted numbers the way other men trusted dogs. They didn’t lie. They didn’t flirt. They sat still and told you exactly what they were. At sixty-two, divorced eight years, he liked that arrangement fine. His life ran on spreadsheets and a Tuesday poker game at the VFW hall.
Then the Hendersons hired him to untangle their late father’s estate, and the ledger pointed him toward a storage unit on the edge of town. The manager there was a woman named Darla Kessinger, sixty-something, silver hair pinned up with a pencil, arms like she still bucked hay. She wore a work shirt with the sleeves rolled and a wedding band on a chain around her neck.
“Unit fourteen,” she said, walking him down the corrugated corridor. Her boots made a hollow sound on the concrete. “Your Hendersons paid cash for eleven years and never once came by. I always wondered.”
She unlocked the door and stood close enough that he caught the smell of machine oil and faint lilac. The unit was packed with boxes, and somewhere in the back, a grandfather clock stood under a sheet. Darla pulled the sheet off with a magician’s flick. The clock face was gorgeous, hand-painted, the pendulum still swinging from some old nudge.
“Shame to leave a thing like that to rot,” she said. Her shoulder brushed his as she stepped past. He felt it through his jacket like a struck match.
Over the next three weeks, Vince came back four times, and each time Darla found a reason to walk him back. She’d stand in the doorway with her hip against the frame, arms folded, asking questions that had nothing to do with inventory. What did he do before he retired? Did he fish? Why did a number man carry a pocket watch? He told her it was his father’s. She said her father had one too, and she’d never met a man who understood why a clock mattered.
That was the trouble. He understood exactly why. A clock was order made visible. Darla was the opposite, all warmth and disorder, and the part of him that craved neat columns recoiled. She was too much. Too loud a laugh. Too quick to touch his forearm when she made a joke. He told himself he found it unseemly, a widow of her age carrying on in a storage lot.
He was lying, and the numbers in his own chest didn’t add up.
The climax came on a Thursday. She asked him to help her move the clock—it was blocking a water stain she needed to photograph. They got on either side of it, and the thing was heavier than it looked. She counted three, and they lifted. Halfway up, her pencil slipped from her hair, and the silver fell loose around her face. She laughed, breathless, and their eyes caught and held. The clock eased down between them. Her hands stayed on the wood, close to his.
“You know,” she said, quiet now, “I’ve been finding reasons to walk you back here for three weeks.”
He should have stepped away. Instead he looked at her mouth, at the fine lines around it, and the disgust he’d been nursing flipped over like a coin. What he felt wasn’t disgust at all. It was fear of wanting something this badly at his age.
“I’m not good at this,” he said.
“Neither am I.” She reached up and straightened his collar, her knuckles grazing his neck. “But I’m willing to be bad at it with you.”
He kissed her there among the boxes, and the pendulum swung behind them, ticking off the seconds like it had all the time in the world.
The estate closed in April. Vince filed the last of the paperwork and drove to the storage lot with a box of donuts and no excuse. Darla was out front, pencil back in her hair, and she waved him over like she’d been expecting him. The clock stood in her office now, restored and ticking. He set the donuts on her desk and pulled up a chair.
