Page 35 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

Scent emergency. F-2 smells haunted in a good way for exactly one hour and then the dry-down goes church basement. I need a second nose.

What I wouldn’t give to have the biggest emergency in my life be scent-related.

To be clear, the second nose is you. You smell things honestly. Cherry flatters me and Mike says everything smells great, which is sweet and useless.

Me?

Hairy abstained. Cowardice.

I read all three twice. They’re equally silly and equally innocuous, and I don’t want to stop reading them.

There is a board meeting brief on the seat beside me, papers to review, names in my pocket, and a feud to choreograph. The full freight of an ordinary Tuesday. But I look at the second nose is you, a method to be useful to her in a way that has nothing to do with what I am and everything to do with who, and the freight loses by knockout in the first round.

I’ll be there at seven,I type. Tell the fish the abstention is noted in his file.

The shop at seven has its sign flipped but its lights warm, and through the glass I watch her cross the floor to let me in, wearing an apron with wax on it. There’s a pencil in her hair, and thesmile she opens the door with is unstaged and uncalculated. The smile of a woman whose second nose has arrived.

No one has ever looked at me that way in a doorway. Or anywhere else.

I’ve been received with respect, with fear, with hunger, with terror that the trouble has come in person. Never with uncomplicated gladness. I don’t know what to think of that.

“Okay.” She steers me to the worktable by the sleeve, where a battlefield is laid out, numbered jars, blotter strips in ranks, her notebook dense with cramped verdicts. “F-2. Smell it cold first, then lit. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. That defeats the entire enterprise.”

I smell it cold. I smell it lit. She watches my face with the focus of an auditor at year-end. I clear my throat, because this is clearly serious for her, and I want to be heard well. “Cold, it’s good. Smoke, old wood, something underneath—” I stop, reroute around the lazy comparison, and give her the exact one. “The inside of a violin case.”

Her pencil stops moving. “I like that.”

I continue the report. “Lit, the scent holds at first. Then something goes wrong. Wet cardboard, or?—”

“Church basement,” she says, vindicated, stabbing the air with her pencil. “I knew it, it’s the sandalwood base, it’s cheap. My supplier swore it was the good batch, and it’s not the good batch.” She writes a sentence with violence in it, and then looks up.

“Violin case. That’s the heart of it, that’s exactly the heart of it. You have a real nose, Big Guy. You could have been a perfumerif you weren’t, you know, whatever the technical term is for your job.”

“Logistics.”

“Logistics,” she agrees, gravely, and snorts, and hands me the next jar, and I realize I have just been complimented more sincerely than at any board meeting in a decade.

We work through six of them. That’s my entire evening, the whole itinerary, six jars and her pencil and the radiator clanking its commentary.

No fistfights, no missing inventory. No one threatening to crash my organization, no stepbrother trying to thwart my work.

Is this what a normal life is like?

At some point, she puts a sandwich in front of me, half of hers, cut on her cutting board with her one good knife, and I eat it standing at her worktable in a suit that costs more than her quarterly rent. It’s the best meal of my week by a distance that should embarrass the casino’s chef.

Later, Hairy is fed, and she hands me the flake canister, an investiture I receive with appropriate ceremony. “I’m honored.”

“It’s fish flakes.”

I sprinkle some in, and the fish takes the flakes from my side of the tank. “See? He trusts me.”

She smiles up at me. “Yeah, I think he does.”

“Thus, honored.”

She giggles under her breath, then leans into me, and it’s the greatest moment I’ve had in days. There’s a thing I keep turning over while she relabels F-2 for reformulation.

I have been included in many things. Transactions, ceremonies, wars in miniature, the grave deliberations of serious men. People include me when the matter is large. I fix things. I end things that need endings.