“No,” Ruth said.
Celia had been halfway through explaining what time she would be back. She stopped beside the bucket of copper-colored chrysanthemums and looked at her sister, who was stripping the lower leaves from a stem with unnecessary force.
“I haven’t told you which night.”
“You said Saturday.”
“Tomorrow. Only until Sunday morning. I thought—”
“Yes. That’s the part.”
Ruth’s shop smelled of cold water and cut stems. It was Friday, October thirtieth, and the back room looked as if autumn had been delivered in boxes that nobody had time to unpack. A pair of muddy boots stood underneath the workbench. Beside them lay a rolled plan tied with string.
“I thought you said you weren’t doing the market this weekend,” Celia finished.
“I’m not doing the market.”
“Then why are you cross?”
Ruth looked at the stem in her hand, then set it down very carefully.
“Because you have turned not doing a market into being available for your baby. There’s quite a distance between those things, and you seem to have walked across it without me.”
Nell stirred in the stroller. Celia pulled the hood a little farther up, buying herself time. She had come in with coffee and a cake, meaning to make an ordinary favor feel pleasant. Now the bag on the bench seemed embarrassingly transparent.
“You said you liked having her.”
“I do like having her.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
Ruth stared at her. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make it about loving Nell. It’s a horrible way to win.”
The words hit hard enough that Celia felt them in her face. She had not thought she was trying to win. She had thought of Adrian’s kitchen, his hand waiting for hers across the table, the spare toothbrush in his bathroom. She had imagined bringing an overnight bag without the rest of her life hanging from it, and Ruth had been the bridge between that imagining and making it happen.
“I wasn’t trying to—”
“I have a bid due. The planting work. The one I’ve mentioned, I don’t know, four times.”
Celia looked at the rolled paper. “I remembered.”
“You remembered that I had a thing. You didn’t remember when.”
Outside, somebody rattled the shop door and read the sign saying CLOSED FOR DELIVERIES. Ruth pressed her palms to the workbench.
“I lost two evenings last week. One because a wholesaler sent the wrong stock, one because I said yes to you. I need this weekend. If I get the contract, it’s winter work that doesn’t depend on somebody getting married or dying at the right time.”
“You could have told me it was a problem.”
“I just did.”
Celia bent over the stroller, although Nell was asleep again. Her daughter’s cheeks were soft with warmth. The idea of taking offense on her behalf had been so immediate that Celia had scarcely seen herself do it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Ruth didn’t answer at once. A delivery van passed, throwing a stripe of moving light across the back wall.
“I don’t want a very sad apology,” she said finally. “I want Saturday.”
“You can have Saturday.”
“It was already mine.”
That was sharp. Celia wanted to say so. Instead she took the cake out of the bag and put it between them.
“Can I at least leave this?”
Ruth looked at the box. “What kind?”
“Lemon.”
“All right. But you can’t buy a baby night for one lemon cake.”
Celia laughed unwillingly. “It was a large one.”
“I have become very expensive.”
She called Adrian from the parked car after feeding Nell, before resentment had time to improve her version of events.
“I can’t stay tomorrow,” she said. “I assumed Ruth could help. She can’t.”
“Bring Nell.”
“I know I can. That wasn’t what I was trying to arrange.”
He was quiet, and she could hear voices beyond him. He moved somewhere quieter.
“All right. Another night?”
“I’m going to ask Mara about next week. Properly. Before I assume your house is free.”
“My house is free.”
“Is the man who comes with it?”
“Friday. Yes.”
She wrote the date on the corner of an envelope: November sixth. A week could look like a very long time when she wrote it down.
“I’m disappointed,” she said.
“So am I.”
“You don’t have to sound quite so pleased about it.”
“I like knowing you wanted to come.”
She leaned her head against the seat. The windshield was fogging at the edges. “I wanted to come very much.”
His breathing changed, a small quiet thing she would not have heard in the restaurant.
“Then I will wait very resentfully until Friday.”
“Good.”
“What’s Ruth bidding for?”
“The municipal planters. The smaller contract, not all of downtown. She can do the work. She needs to make the figures make sense.”
“I could put her in touch with a couple of property managers. They’re always—”
“No.”
It came out faster than she intended. She could hear him stop.
“I mean, don’t call anybody. She wants this job. Her job. I nearly did it again.”
“Did what?”
“Found something to offer instead of listening to what she asked for.”
He made a low sound. “Now I feel rather helpful.”
“You asked. You haven’t done anything.”
“An unusually good day for me.”
She smiled. When the call ended she sat a moment longer, looking at the shop window. Ruth was back at the counter with a customer, holding up two ribbons and smiling with the familiar practiced patience that people mistook for an inexhaustible supply.
Celia texted her: Can I come tomorrow afternoon and do your photographs and typing? Paid care for Nell. No favor expected back.
The reply took twelve minutes.
Yes. Two. Bring lunch. Not cake.
On Saturday Celia took photographs of winter planting arrangements in the alley behind the shop while Ruth moved pots in and out of a patch of thin light. A tray of small evergreens stood on the ground, their needles dark with rain. Celia crouched to get the paving out of the background and nearly sat in a bucket.
“Stop making that face,” Ruth said.
“I’m concentrating.”
“You look like Dad when he tried to read the gas meter.”
“Then don’t put my face in the bid.”
They ate sandwiches over the keyboard and argued about whether copper was a color anyone could budget for. Ruth knew the plants, their sizes and where she could buy them. Celia knew how to make a document stop changing its layout when someone inserted a photograph. By three thirty there was a bid that looked like the work Ruth could do instead of a collection of notes she was ashamed to show anyone.
Then Celia found a line that didn’t add up. Ruth took the calculator, entered the figures twice and swore.
“That’s why I needed the weekend,” she said.
Celia didn’t defend herself. She crossed out the total and waited while her sister worked out what the contract would actually cost. A smaller, less glorious number remained at the end. Ruth stared at it, then nodded.
“Still worth it.”
“Yes.”
“Not going to make me a garden empire.”
“Your stationery would be unbearable.”
Ruth smiled. They worked until the submission was ready to send, then read it aloud in turns, catching a missing word and one sentence that had gone on so long Celia ran out of breath.
“You’re the librarian,” Ruth said.
“You’re the person who thinks a sentence needs six kinds of grass.”
At five, Celia left to collect Nell from Mara, who had looked after her for the afternoon. Paying for help so Celia could help someone else had felt extravagant when she arranged it. Now she was glad she had done it. Ruth stood at the shop door as Celia backed away, raising one hand before going inside to finish the last page.
Adrian came to Celia’s apartment that evening with takeout. It was not the night either had planned. Nell was awake, refusing to be put down for long, and the couch was covered with folded laundry that Celia hadn’t found drawers for. Adrian balanced a paper carton on one knee and ate with a baby sock stuck to his sleeve.
“That’s yours now,” she told him.
“I wondered when you’d give me something expensive.”
She laughed, then took it off him. His face was tired. When she asked about the day, he told her he had been in a meeting that should have been an email and had then turned the email into another meeting. He sounded cross with himself rather than entertaining, and she liked him for telling her anyway.
“I was nearly a garden ornament today,” she said.
“Professionally?”
“In a bucket. It brought back something appalling.”
He waited while she shifted Nell into a more comfortable position.
“Ruth and I used to run a museum in the shed. I was nine. She was fourteen, so old enough to know better. We charged people to look at a bone she found in the park.”
“What kind of bone?”
“We said dinosaur.”
“Was it?”
“Probably chicken.”
He began smiling. Celia felt a mischievous pleasure in having this whole foolish version of herself to give him.
“Our mother found out when a neighbor asked if we were raising money for something. Ruth said yes. I said archaeology. It was our first mistake.”
“What happened?”
“We had to give the money back. Except I’d already bought glitter pens, so I went to three houses with apologies and a pen each. Nobody wanted the orange.”
Adrian laughed, properly, head tipped back. Nell startled, then settled again, unimpressed by the history of her family.
“I can’t believe you’ve never told me this.”
“It’s a complicated criminal past.”
“Were there other exhibits?”
“A stone shaped like an egg, a dead beetle and a photograph of our aunt holding an enormous zucchini.”
He put down his carton. “I would have paid.”
She was laughing now too, helplessly, tears coming for no sad reason at all. He reached out and wiped one from beneath her eye with the side of his thumb. The touch stilled them both.
“Keep telling me things,” he said.
“About vegetables?”
“About you.”
She looked at his hand resting on the couch beside her. It would have been easy to fill the next minutes with something difficult and important. There were plenty of things he did not know, and she could hear them waiting. Instead she told him about the year she had tried to teach herself the clarinet from a book, and how her father had asked whether the sound was a problem with the book or the instrument. Adrian described the disastrous model boat he had built with his dad, which had sunk after moving six inches and had then been retrieved with a garden rake.
“Did you ever learn to sail?” she asked.
“No. I still look at boats as though I might.”
She stored that away without deciding what to do with it. He had gone quiet, remembering the failed boat with an expression that made her wish she could have known him at ten.
Later, when Nell was down and the cartons were cleared, Celia sat beside him and put his hand at her waist. He turned toward her immediately.
“This is a terrible idea,” he murmured after the first kiss.
“Very.”
“I have to go home.”
“Eventually.”
He stayed another half hour, enough to leave her warm and impatient for Friday. At the door she straightened his collar because she had bent it out of shape. He watched her fingers, then caught them and kissed them, one quick unpolished gesture that sent pleasure all the way through her.
“Seven o’clock?” he asked.
“Friday. Seven.”
“I’m going to make dinner.”
“You don’t have to impress me.”
“I’m not sure I can. You’ve been to a dinosaur museum in a shed.”
She was still laughing when she closed the door.