Eternal Bondage

The first thing I ever glued was my mother's wedding ring back onto her finger.

She was crying at the kitchen table, drunk on the cheap gin she kept hidden behind the flour, and the ring had slipped off her thin hand and rolled under the stove. I was seven. I crawled back there through the dust and the dead roaches and I found it, and when I brought it to her she couldn't hold it, her hands were shaking so bad, so I did what any kid would do. I got the tube of Super Glue from the junk drawer and I put a bead of it around the band and I pressed it onto her finger and I held it there until it stuck.

She stopped crying. She looked at her hand like it was somebody else's. Then she looked at me and said, "You're a fixer, Max. That's what you are."

She wore that ring until the day she died. They had to cut her finger off to get it back. I'm not exaggerating. The coroner told me. The glue had bonded to the skin, to the bone almost, and the ring had to come off with the finger or not at all.

That was the first time I understood what I could do.

My name is Maxim. I'm forty-three years old and I run a shop in a part of the city where the streetlights don't work and nobody bothers to report it. The sign above the door says REPAIRS in letters I painted myself. Watches. Lamps. Ceramics. Books. Anything that's come apart and needs to go back together. I'm good with my hands. I've always been good with my hands.

But that's not what people come to me for.

They come for the other thing. The thing I don't advertise. The thing that has a waiting list three months long and a price that would make you sick if I told you, so I won't. Not yet.

I was closing up on a Tuesday when she walked in.

The bell above the door gave its usual dying-animal sound, and I looked up from the watch I was dismantling, and there she was. Tall. Black coat down to her knees. Hair the color of wet bark. She had that look people get when they've been walking in the rain without an umbrella and decided somewhere along the way that they didn't care anymore.

"I need your help," she said.

"Everybody needs my help."

"You don't know what I need yet."

"I know the shape of it."

She stood there dripping on my floor and didn't say anything for a long moment. I went back to the watch. A 1968 Omega, water damage, the movement rusted solid. The owner had cried when he brought it in. His father's watch. His dead father's watch. I told him I'd see what I could do. I always tell them that.

"I heard you can fix things that can't be fixed," she said.

"Who told you that?"

"A woman in a bar. She said you glued her husband back together."

I set down the tweezers. "Her husband was a teacup. A Meissen, eighteenth century, cracked in eleven places. I glued the teacup. The husband I never met."

"She said it was the same thing."

"She was drunk."

"She was grateful."

I looked at her then, really looked. She was younger than I'd thought at first, maybe late twenties, and there was something wrong with the way she held her left arm. Not injured exactly. Held. Like it belonged to someone else and she was just keeping it close until the owner came back.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Does it matter?"

"Not really. But I like to know who I'm talking to."

"Eve."

"Of course it is."

She almost smiled. Almost.

"I need you to glue something for me," she said. "Something that isn't an object."

"Everything's an object."

"This isn't."

I leaned back on my stool and crossed my arms. The shop smelled like solder and old paper and the rain she'd tracked in. Outside, a car went by with a bad muffler, and the sound rattled the windows.

"Say what you mean," I told her.

"I have a man," she said. "He's leaving me. He doesn't want to, but he is. There are reasons. His family. His work. Things I can't change and neither can he. And I thought, if I could just make him stay, if I could just make him see that we belong together, that nothing else matters, that the world can go to hell and we'd still have each other, then maybe..."

"Maybe what?"

"Maybe I could be happy."

She said it like a confession. Like something she'd been holding in her mouth for years and finally had to spit out.

"You want me to glue a man to you," I said.

"I want you to make it so he can't leave."

"Same thing."

She didn't argue. She just stood there, dripping, her wrong arm held tight against her body, and I felt the old pull. The thing that made me crawl under the stove when I was seven. The thing that made me hold my mother's hand while the glue set and the skin blistered and she didn't even flinch because she was so far gone she couldn't feel it.

I could fix this. I knew I could fix this. That was the problem.

"There's a price," I said.

"I'll pay it."

"You don't know what it is."

"I don't care."

I stood up. The stool scraped against the floor. I walked around the counter and stood close to her, close enough to smell the rain in her hair and something underneath it, something floral and old, like a drawer that hadn't been opened in years. She didn't step back. She looked up at me with eyes the color of a bruise and waited.

"The price is that he'll stay," I said. "But he won't love you. Not the way you want. He'll be there, in the room, in the bed, in your life. He'll never leave. But he'll never be yours either. He'll be a thing you own. A chair. A lamp. Something you keep because you can't bear to throw it out. Is that what you want?"

"Yes," she said.

No hesitation. Not even a flicker.

That's when I should have shown her the door. That's when I should have said no, I don't do that, I fix watches and teacups and broken things that don't have feelings. But I didn't. I looked at her standing there in her wet coat with her wrong arm and her bruise-colored eyes, and I thought about my mother's finger in a jar on a coroner's shelf, and I said, "Come back tomorrow. Bring him. And bring cash."

She nodded once. Then she turned and walked out, and the bell did its dying-animal thing, and I stood in the middle of my shop listening to the rain and wondering what I'd just agreed to.

I didn't sleep that night. I sat at my workbench with the Omega in pieces in front of me and I thought about Eve and her man and the thing she wanted me to do. I thought about the tube of glue in my drawer, the special one, the one I make myself from a recipe my grandmother left me, the one that bonds to anything, skin and bone and soul and memory, the one that doesn't let go.

Not ever.

That's the thing about permanent adhesive. It doesn't care what it's holding together. It just holds.