I’d always been mildly obsessed with it. It seemed a black spot in our otherwise well-kept line of beach bungalows overlooking the Pacific. The other houses were shades of aqua, or butter yellow, or pristine white — but the Vault was a dark, mottled red. Dead weeds and brambles obscured any walkway that might have led to the front door. A rusted chain-link fence surrounded the property, hardly comparable aesthetically to the white pickets or simple low concrete walls of the other houses.

Other addresses on the block had begun mansionizing, taking up every square foot of their plot to build an ostentatious manor at the expense of a yard. But the Vault, untouched for so many years, was still small. What was most unusual about it was its brick and mortar architecture. In a part of the country regularly rocked by earthquakes, brick buildings were rare. And yet the Vault remained intact, nary a crack in the wall.

The name “the Vault” was my own invention. Nobody else seemed as intrigued as I was, at least past the first few minutes of sighting it. Of course I wasn’t the only one to try to pry open the rough wooden door or peer through the windowpanes. Usually, when people considered the Vault, the first pull of curiosity was soon overpowered by disbelief. “An abandoned house? On oceanfront property? That view must be worth at least two million! How strange.”

Yes, strange. My mother, who commented on it every time she visited me, would cluck her tongue. “What an eyesore. Have you tried complaining to county about it? This is why you need an HOA, sweets. But you’ll never live in a gated community, will you.” She would sigh then and change the topic. But I would still think about it, quietly.

She came over for dinner every Thursday night, worrying that I was lonesome. I tried to cook but somehow she brought “leftovers” every time. This Thursday, as I shopped at Vons for pasta sauce, she had just called my cell phone to inform me she happened to have leftover enchiladas.

I pursed my lips and glared at the wall of sauce jars. Well, I would make pasta for myself for tomorrow’s dinner. I was trying to remember what brand I liked best when someone called my name.

“Chloe?”

I turned to see a young man staring at me. He was tall, taller than I remembered, but skinnier, too, as though he’d been stretched. He wore a T-shirt with black jeans and wingtip shoes. In his hand was a jar of Barilla sauce, and in that instant I remembered that I liked that brand, particularly the Bolognese kind. I tried to make out what kind he was getting.

“Remember me? James? Jesus, it’s been a while.” He grinned at me, confident I’d remember him, and of course I did.

“Hey, James,” I said casually. He’d picked up Napoletana, I saw. I hadn’t tried that yet.

“How’ve you been?” I was surprised to see how genuinely interested he was to hear my response: eyebrows raised, smile still holding up.

I shrugged. “Not bad,” I said and felt my standard reply coming out. “I dropped out of art school and now I work as a typesetter.”

“A what?”

“A printer’s apprentice.” I appraised him a second time. He certainly had grown older since we’d graduated three years ago. His eyes looked like they were set a bit deeper in his face. Altogether he was even better looking than I’d remembered and this unbalanced me temporarily. “How have you been, James?”

He dropped the jar of sauce into his basket and scratched his neck. “I’m a college drop-out too,” he confessed with a wan smile.

“Didn’t you go Ivy League?”

“Columbia. But I couldn’t stand it, I had to get out.” His eyes slid out of focus momentarily before he realized how vulnerable he’d sounded. “But now I’m doing all right. I just moved back here last month. You know what’s funny? You’re the first person from high school I’ve seen since I came back.”

I smiled then. There was something in the way he blinked and in the shape of his bottom lip that attracted me. “What about your other friends? I thought they were still around here.”

He shrugged. “They’re all away at school. You and me, we were the bad seeds, I guess.” His eyes returned to the wall of sauces. “Ironic, the valedictorian and the art superstar.”

His voice sounded like an echo in a well. He was sad about this, about how we had to meet at Vons in the pasta aisle, both of us returned perhaps shamefully to the place we’d thought we’d left for good.

“Do you have any plans for the weekend?” I asked before I could reconsider.

He looked back at me, surprised, taking in the changes that had had three years to steep in me. “Not yet,” he said, and I sensed hope beneath his ironic tone.

I knew how to play this one. I looked down, smiled, then let my eyes catch his again. “Since we’re both obviously in the mood for pasta, why don’t we meet sometime at Rozzi’s?”

He blinked. “Y-yeah,” he replied. “Around the corner from that surf shop, right?”

“That’s the one,” I rejoined. “How about Saturday? I get off of work at five, so perhaps I’ll see you at six thirty.”

“Sounds good.” He was trying to match me in downplaying eagerness to sound casual and normal. This was fun; I wish I’d discovered tricks like these in high school. Back then, James had been in control of every situation, and I was always trying to catch up to him. It appeared I finally had and maybe I had even overtaken him.

“Why don’t you give me your number,” I said, “just in case?”

We exchanged cell phone numbers, and then goodbyes. He walked quickly to the dairy section, and I went to the registers in order to avoid any awkward re-meetings. Thinking ahead like that was something I’d learned to do, one of the tricks of socially adept people I hadn’t picked up on until college.

In the car, I thought about James. He had indeed been the valedictorian, but he was so theoretical he was never like the other smart kids in our class who would later be engineering majors. James was an intellectual, truly unchallenged by our school curriculum. I had pined for him for a year before we’d had a real conversation. On a whim, still thinking of him, I drove home along the beach and stopped in a sandy parking lot. Empty Jeeps and pickup trucks littered the lot, and between them I stared at the black spindly figures of surfers floating on the glassy sea. When I looked out at the ocean it seemed suddenly as though one of the waves broke past the rock barrier and into my body: I was overcome, debilitated, by déjà vu. In this selfsame car, in this very spot —

My phone ran and broke the paralysis. I thought at first it was James calling too soon, but in fact it was Jesse Toyoma.

“Jesse, hello,” I said, glad for the reprieve.

“Oh my God Chloe!” he shouted. “What are you doing tonight? Let’s go out. I just landed a huge job! Like an enormous gigantic one.”

“Really?” I said. “Whose?”

“Uh — Rappaport? Ring a bell? He’s the son of some vodka tycoon, I dunno. Anyway this is huge for both of us. Because their wedding will be fucking enormous. So are you free tonight?” He sounded out of breath. I guessed he was biking and using his in-helmet headset, which he’d made himself with a hot glue gun.

“No, Thursdays are Mom nights, you know that. I could do tomorrow though.” A seagull swooped close to my windshield. “Pub?”

“Pub,” he agreed. “I’ll call Chelsea too. Dude, Chloe, we’re on our way to major disposable income. World cruise level.”

“We’ll see,” I replied. “Goodbye, Jesse. Congrats to us again.” I shut my phone. Jesse could be a bit much sometimes. What he lacked in height he made up for in enthusiasm. Subconsciously, I probably wanted his joie de vivre to lessen the irrational bitterness that always seemed just below the surface of my mind. He was a good friend, and generous too — half of the prints on my walls were his.

I’d always wondered how adults managed to make friends after the comfortably intimate coexistence in schools. Were workplaces quite the same? Now that I’d dropped out of design school, I knew — friends happened by chance, but you had to work harder for them. It was lucky that Jesse and I already had a connection at Hardpressed. He designed most of the wedding invites that Soren and I printed. And seeing him so often in and out of the press shop became seeing him often in and out of other areas of my life, too. I liked him.

Mom knocked on my door after sunset. She was holding a full casserole dish, clearly not leftovers as no bites had been taken, but I was not surprised.

“Chloé, your lawn is out of control,” she said upon crossing my threshold. She was the only person in the world who pronounced my name with the accent mark she’d intended. She slid the lasagna into the oven and then looked at me. “On second thought, your hair is quite out of control, as well.”

I stared at myself in the slightly reflective microwave door. My albino-blonde hair had grown longer than I’d thought and the dead ends had worked themselves into soft tangles. “I’ll cut it tonight,” I said, more to myself than to her, but her head snapped up.

“You cut your own hair? But — I thought you went to a salon. Goodness, no wonder it was at an angle last time.” She frowned. “Let me take you to Delia. She’s good — my treat — she’ll make you look—”

“No, Mom, it’s okay,” I soothed. “I can afford a salon but frankly it’s so easy to just cut straight across, why spend the $60? You never noticed before, anyway.” I set the table while she cut a loaf of fresh bread. I didn’t always look forward to her visits, but they comforted me nonetheless. It was harder living alone than I’d imagined and I knew she knew it. Someone once told me that church on Sunday was the anchor in his week, the day from which he measured time for the next six days. For me, church was Mom bustling in my kitchen, giving me advice, washing dishes I’d already washed. She hadn’t missed a Thursday since I’d moved back.

“Did I tell you about the young man at the bank today?” she said, emerging from the kitchen with a cutting board of bread. She worked at the bank, some kind of manager or director position. “You’ll probably be interested to hear this. He was asking Martin something about 218 Calle Fresca—”

I coughed. “The Vault?”

“Yes, yes, that’s what I’m telling you! I didn’t realize it was that horrible house until I drove past it on the way here. Can you believe?”

“What was his name? What was he asking about?”

She shrugged. “I can ask Martin later, but he said there was no account at the bank anyway, so the boy probably won’t come back.” The oven timer went off and she disappeared to fetch the lasagna.

Situations invented themselves in my head. The Vault property obviously still belonged to someone, or the city would have cleaned it up by now and maybe auctioned it off. Whoever owned it was living elsewhere and probably didn’t care much for it, which was odd, considering its prime location. Nobody would pass up the opportunity to make a million.

“What did the guy look like?” I asked Mom as she cut into the steaming lasagna.

“Oh, about your age,” she answered. “I didn’t get a great look. I was helping someone else, this old man who couldn’t hear anything I said. Pass me your plate? Well, he had darkish hair, and he was dressed very nicely. Usually the men around here only wear ratty old T-shirts and torn-up jeans.” James appeared in my head in his wingtips. “But he was wearing an Oxford shirt. Everyone looks good in an Oxford shirt, you know. All I can say is, I hope to God Almighty that that house gets cleaned up.” She silenced herself with a bite of bread, then told me about the people who lived across the street from her and how they’d filled her trash cans with empty wine bottles after they ran out of room in their own.

At Hardpressed the next morning, Soren filled me in on the details Jesse hadn’t imparted.

“Two thousand guests,” he said gleefully, donning his apron. “Can you imagine? I don’t think I know two thousand people, even.”

“Who is this family?” I asked. “Jesse said something about vodka.”

“Yes, yes, the Rappaports,” he corroborated. “They smuggled alcohol during the Prohibition and made a fortune, and now their grandson is running the business and apparently getting married to some Colombian actress. Hand me that jobber, will you? It’s going to be a pretty light day today, all we have to do is Elliots job and those business cards for that Christian plumber company, the ones who wear extra long shirts.”

I nodded and began setting up the Vandercook. It was an old one, as all letterpresses were. They weren’t manufactured anymore; you could only buy them vintage. Soren had collected four and made a business out of an antique trade that was luckily back in vogue. I was his assistant, setting up the presses, inking them, cleaning them, setting type, cutting paper. More and more often I became his flexible shadow and reached things he couldn’t — he was spry but becoming less so every month. In the evenings, Soren would take off his apron (by that time covered in sticky ink) and toss me the keys, and I would continue working on my book.

He was in a good mood today, no doubt buoyed by the extra cash that would soon be flowing into all of our pockets. It was expensive to print two thousand sets of wedding invitations, which included a panoply of little pieces of paper like the RSVP card, three different envelopes, the menu, place settings, the actual invitation, and, before anything else was sent out, the “save the date” card, which we called the STD.

Soren was an efficient worker. One had to be, to be a respected master printer. Everything had to be perfect, aligned to the nearest point and pica. Our customers never realized what kind of work went into their baby announcements or business cards, or why it consequently cost so much. Everything — everything — was done by hand, from cutting the paper to setting the type, which seems easy to us now that we have word processors. But it is tedious work. Using miniature lead type, letter by letter, working backwards, you build the words. And that isn’t enough — you must bear in mind the delicate balances of typography, including even the spaces between each line of text, between each word, between each letterform. When it looks natural, when it can be read effortlessly and the text design forgotten as soon as it is seen — that is the mark of a good typesetter. That was what I was working toward. To be like Soren.

The world of printing is an insular one. Like any discipline, it has its own vocabulary: the quoin key, the leading, the make-ready. When I took my first letterpress class, I was overwhelmed, but as I worked more and more in the studio it became homelike to me. People who weren’t printing or type design majors didn’t know what I was talking about when I talked about wood type and x-height. I’ll be honest, it made me feel special. I belonged someplace. Everything about this almost-lost craft felt like a treasure. And when I dropped out of college, disillusioned like James had been evidently, I returned to Santa Veronica, the little town where I grew up not half an hour from the border, and there I found employment at Hardpressed.

Jesse called the shop after lunch. Soren was using the guillotine to cut through a stack of paper six inches thick, so I answered for him.

“I’ve got the Rappaports on the docket for next Monday,” he said. “I told them they could see the shop between three and four — does that work for you guys?”

“Wait, what? Why do they need to come here?”

“Mother of the bride asked. She was so-so about my paper samples and she wanted to see what you have. You have some, right?”

I hated this about Jesse, how he built his schedule and his life around assumptions. But of course he was right. “Yeah, sure. We just got some good pearly cardstock in for another job. She probably wants to take home a bunch of samples anyway.”

“Oh, she took loads of mine. Rich people love free stuff.”

“How many people are coming on Monday?”

“Uh... Mother of the bride, bride, and groom, I think. The bride is hot, by the way. Adriana Lima hot.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” I muttered. “So what are they looking at? Let me guess, yellow and grey? Or will it be light ink on dark paper? Blind-embossing? Is glitter involved?” These were the latest trends in printing, excepting glitter.

He laughed at me. “God! You’re so right, all the time, Chloe. They’re interested in all of the above. In fact they want me to customize one of my designs for them, which means more dough for me and you and Soren and the plate guys.” He was referring to one of our business partners who made polymer or copper plates, essentially large stamps of illustrations and text, which made my job as a typesetter easier. Instead of hundreds of letters to arrange, I only had to lock up one large plate, thanks to the magic of computers and chemicals.

Jesse added, “And they’re looking at around four colors.”

“Four?” I exclaimed. Two was run of the mill, and three was pushing it. Jesse had never sent us a client who wanted four colors. That meant four print runs for each part of the invitation suite. “What, do they think we do halftones here?”
“That would actually be awesome as letterpress,” he mused, and I actually agreed. “But no, like greens and golds and black. Whatever, more money for us. Shit, it’s three? I have to go to cycling. See you tonight, sister.”

I smiled and hung up. Even just discussing mundane things, Jesse cheered my spirits. His reminder of our pub outing tonight reminded me in turn of tomorrow night’s date with James. It wasn’t a date, it was just dinner, I knew, but I could read his emotions on his face when he looked at me in the store the other day. Since high school, my skin had cleared up, my hair had grown lighter and longer, and I had overcome my nervous stuttering impediment. And of course college had taught me how to deal with boys. They loved me when I was cruel to them. It worked both ways, though, and those two years of alternating love and bitterness had made me much shrewder in my appraisals of human relationships.

It could have been that James didn’t know about the correlation between cruelty and love in high school. It could have been that way. But the more he hadn’t talked to me, the more I had longed for him. And every time he had talked to me, it had given me that much more hope to get me through the subsequent arid deserts of specific loneliness for his company. No one ever knew what I’d felt for him, except maybe the object of my affections himself. If he had been that astute, he had never let on. He’d had girlfriends, and surely he’d paid no attention to how much more I seemed to stutter around him than the other boys.

I told Soren I was taking off at five.

“You’re not working on your project tonight?” he asked, surprised. Black ink had settled into the wrinkles of his hands, forming an intricate lacelike pattern.

“Soren, it’s a Friday night,” I said. “A girl’s got to have fun.” I’d heard the phrase somewhere and it sounded appropriately youthful.

His white brows knit together. “You will be careful?”

“Of course,” I smiled lightly. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Until then.” He waved and I left.

Santa Veronica didn’t know winter like other parts of the world did. January and February had been slightly colder, and I had actually donned a scarf for a week or two. But March blew apart the mare’s tail clouds and let the sunshine back onto our sidewalks. I biked to and from work when it was nice like this. On the way home, I cycled past the Vault, then doubled back. It still looked ominous even in the springtime sunshine that flowed straight through the house window to window. There was no sign that anyone had returned, though. The man in Mom’s bank hadn’t left my thoughts. I’d hoped I might find a real estate agent’s sign on the fence, or even a team of landscapers weeding the yard. But the house was the same as before, just as deserted and untouched.

I was about to leave when I noticed something unusual. The red flag of the mailbox was up in the air. I made sure the mailbox belonged to the Vault — 218 Calle Fresca, the same. The street was mercifully quiet and empty, so I quickly opened the mailbox and saw a single envelope inside.

It was addressed to Mr. Isaiah Dass, who lived in Los Angeles. The sender was O. Paroles of 218 Calle Fresca, Santa Veronica.

I could feel excited adrenaline in my veins and a smile curled my lips unsolicited. Quickly, I put the letter back and closed the mailbox and biked home, my thoughts seemingly propelled by my pedals. O. Paroles, O. Paroles, I repeated endlessly to myself, intent upon searching the name on the internet.

But when I turned on my computer and typed in “O. Paroles”, the results were only French and Spanish song lyrics websites. I tried Oliver Paroles and got the lyrics to songs by men named Oliver. It was the same for Oscar, Orion, and Omar, and I quickly ran out of O names. I was sure they would only turn up as lyrics to rap songs anyway.

I ran a search for Isaiah Dass, too, and found mostly German websites. But when I restricted the search to English results only, I found a lawyer based in LA. The information listed was pretty sparse, but there was a picture of a serious-looking man in glasses and a bow tie, which I promptly printed out and labeled “Isaiah Dass, Los Angeles Lawyer.” I kept a folder of items of current interest to me on my desk, and I slipped Mr. Dass inside.

It was surely tempting to return to that mailbox during the night, slit the envelope, read its contents, and reseal it. It couldn’t hurt anyone, and I stood to gain nothing except satiation of my curiosity. But it was a federal crime, and the Vault was surrounded by houses full of families who all knew me by sight. They were all friends of Beatriz, my landlady. The thought of committing a federal crime was unappealing. Still, opened or unopened by my hands, the letter most certainly foreshadowed more goings-on at the Vault. Someone had come back to it. Someone, O. Paroles, had returned.