Wendell Prasky had spent thirty-one years measuring the rise and fall of other people’s money, and he could tell you to the dime what a man was worth before the man finished his first drink. He was fifty-eight, a forensic accountant with soft hands and a hard eye, and his flaw was that he trusted arithmetic more than people. Numbers never leaned in too close. Numbers never smelled like rain and cigarettes and something warm underneath.
The VFW hall on Route 9 held a fundraiser every October for the volunteer fire company, and Wendell went because his late wife had run the bake table and because the bartender poured an honest two fingers. He stood near the coatrack with a plastic cup, cataloguing the room out of habit, when a woman in a red canvas jacket set a folding chair down beside his and said, “You’re the one who does the books for the Kelleher estate.”
Her name was Dolores Vann, she was sixty-one, she restored antique clocks out of a workshop behind her garage, and she had a laugh that arrived a half second before it was earned. She smelled of lemon oil and wintergreen. When she leaned over to point at the raffle board, her shoulder brushed his forearm and stayed there one beat too long, and Wendell felt the hair on his arm rise like a field going electric.
He told himself it was the bourbon. He told himself she was a client’s cousin and therefore a complication, and complications were for men who didn’t keep ledgers. But the following Thursday she appeared at the library book sale in a gray sweater with her glasses pushed up into her hair, and she asked him to reach a box off the top shelf, and when he handed it down their fingers tangled on the cardboard and neither of them let go right away. Her eyes were the color of weak tea, and they held his with a frankness that made his neck hot.
“You count things,” she said. “I fix things that count time. We’re practically in the same racket.”
It went on like that for three weeks—small collisions, shared tables, a hand at the small of his back guiding him through a crowded diner. Wendell ran the numbers in his head at two in the morning and the numbers came back wrong, or rather they came back right and he didn’t like the answer. She was too much. Too loud, too sudden, too willing to sit close enough that he could count the freckles on her wrist. His wife had been quiet water. Dolores was a struck bell.
The conflict arrived at the fire company’s pig roast, of all places, when Dolores’s ex-husband, a bull of a man named Curtis, planted himself at their table and said, loud enough for the next table, “Dolly, you’re gonna embarrass yourself with the pencil pusher.” Wendell’s ears rang. Every instinct told him to fold his napkin, settle his share, and walk to the truck. He was a man who reconciled accounts, not one who made scenes. But Dolores set her fork down and said, calm as a closing drawer, “Curtis, go find your own supper,” and then she turned to Wendell and put her hand flat on his chest, right over the pocket where he kept his pens, and left it there.
The whole hall seemed to tilt. He could feel the heat of her palm through his shirt, the slight tremor in her fingers, the way her thumbnail pressed a small crescent into the fabric. Her eyes never left his. “You going to run?” she asked, and it wasn’t teasing exactly. It was an invitation and a dare and a test all at once.
Wendell thought about the ledger. He thought about how a man can balance every account in his life and still come up short. Then he covered her hand with his own, and the noise of the hall fell away to a low hum, and he said, “I’ve run the figures. I’m staying.”
She smiled slow, and it reached her eyes before her mouth. “Good,” she said. “Because I already told Curtis you’d be driving me home.”
He walked her out past the picnic tables and the string lights, her arm hooked through his, and the night air was cold and clean and smelled of woodsmoke. At her gate she turned and straightened his collar with both hands, taking her time, and kissed his cheek close enough to his mouth that it was a question. He answered it in the dark of her porch, and the answer was not arithmetic at all.
Six months later he sold his condo and moved his ledgers into the spare room above her workshop, where the clocks ticked out of step until she tuned them, and Wendell found he didn’t mind the noise. He sat at her kitchen table one Sunday and watched her oil a brass movement with a tiny brush, her tongue between her teeth, and he closed the folder he’d been pretending to read. “Dolores,” he said. “What time is it?”
She didn’t look up. “Time,” she said, “for you to put that paperwork away and hand me the small screwdriver.”
