The plumber closed the shop’s water for a Tuesday repair and gave Nadia three hours she had not planned to have. He had to replace a length of pipe beneath the workroom sink; the cutter and mounting press were covered against dust, and no customer could come in without stepping over his tools. Pilar was at the print shop. Bea was at school. Nadia had intended to use the time for accounts, but the plumber took one look at the ledger on her knees and told her the pipe would be loud.
Oliver answered on the third ring. “Is the shop under water?”
“Not yet. That’s what the man with the wrench says he’s preventing.”
“My afternoon meeting was canceled. I could come look at the pipes.”
“You are forbidden to give me advice about pipes.”
“I was going to look impressed by the wrench.”
“Can you be at the corner in twenty minutes?”
“Yes.”
She put a note on the door with the pickup number and walked out into a surprisingly warm April day. Oliver arrived on foot in an open coat. He had a crease across one cheek as though he’d been sleeping on a folder, and he kissed her before he explained it. Nadia liked that an interrupted workday could begin this way.
“I was reading reports in bed,” he said when she touched the mark.
“That’s a poor use of a bed.”
“You should advise me on the better ones.”
“I already did.” She caught his hand and drew him away from the shop. “We have three hours before somebody may need me to approve a pipe.”
They went to the market without deciding to. At the first stall Nadia bought a peach so early in the season it was probably not worth its price. At the second Oliver found a record of an old Cuban orchestra because he recognized the cover from a room in one of his grandmother’s hotels. Nadia knew the singer and none of the songs. He bought it for himself, then let her carry it while they walked because she would not stop examining the liner notes.
“Did your grandmother actually listen to this?” she asked.
“She liked the trumpet. She complained the singer hurried.”
“He does.”
“Then I finally have proof she was right.”
They ate sandwiches on a bench where the sun moved in and out of a tree’s new leaves. Oliver told her about the first hotel room he’d ever redesigned. He had chosen a green carpet he now regarded as an act of vandalism. His grandmother had allowed it to stay for a season so he would hear every complaint. Nadia told him about the crooked letters on her shop sign, painted while pregnant, and how she had left them because correcting them would erase a version of herself who had kept going.
“You’ve told me about the sign,” he said. “You hadn’t told me you were pregnant when you painted it.”
“I was thirteen years younger and convinced I could open a business before a baby arrived.”
“You did.”
“I slept on a sofa behind the curtain some nights. Rosa threatened to take the ladder away so I couldn’t reach the sign.”
“Did she?”
“She brought dinner instead.” Nadia bit into the peach. It was better than it had any right to be. Juice ran onto her wrist, and Oliver passed her his napkin without making a joke about how she’d chosen it. She wished he had; then she could have called him smug.
They went into a small record store to ask if its owner would play the album. He said he would after the current side ended. They waited among shelves of old covers, touching sleeves and arguing about which photographs had aged well. The owner played the first track and turned the volume up when Oliver recognized the trumpet. Nadia danced a few steps between the jazz and folk bins. Oliver joined her with such solemn concentration that the owner looked over the counter and laughed.
“If I pay you for the trouble, do we get to keep dancing?” Oliver asked.
“Only until closing,” the man said.
“He’s never seen our schedule,” Nadia whispered.
Oliver thanked the owner for playing it. Outside, he held the door for a woman carrying two heavy bags and then stood with Nadia as the music continued faintly through the glass. The afternoon had used up only half of its three hours. She wanted the rest without calculating what it meant.
“Come to my apartment,” he said. “I have a player.”
“You also have five windows.”
“You can complain about each one.”
His apartment had more color than she expected. The theater-marquee picture hung near a shelf of books, still tilted a fraction as if Lucia had placed it quickly and intended to return. The photograph had gone home from Nadia’s shop and looked at ease here. She stopped in front of it.
“Lucia chose the spot,” he said. “I was going to put it in the hall.”
“She was right.”
“You’ll be pleased to know I haven’t told her.”
He put on the record while Nadia opened one of the five windows. The room smelled faintly of coffee, paper and the lemon cleaner used on the floor. No hotel employee had arranged the cushions; one had fallen behind the sofa. She retrieved it and threw it at him. He caught it, dropped it and said the apartment had been waiting for her judgment.
“It’s yours,” she said. “That is what I like.”
They danced more slowly than in the store. He knew one turn she didn’t and missed another she offered. She taught him by moving his hand at her back, pleased to be the one with an answer he could feel. When the side ended, they did not put on another immediately. Nadia stood in the middle of his room, barefoot because her shoes had begun to pinch, looking at a clock that said she had twenty minutes before she needed to return.
“I don’t want to date other people,” she said. It came out almost casually, which was how she knew she meant it. “I haven’t been, but I want you to know I’m choosing that.”
Oliver let the record sleeve rest on the table. “I’m not seeing anyone else.”
“That’s an account of the present.”
“Then I choose it too. You and me. Serious, exclusive—whichever word lets you know I won’t describe this as a collection of dinners.” He came closer. “I want you here on days we planned and days we didn’t.”
She smiled at the awkward precision. “Serious works.”
“It does.”
“You look surprised.”
“I thought I would have a prepared speech.”
“You can give it next week if you still like it.”
“I already like you more.”
He reached for the record and turned it over. The first notes on the second side were slower. Nadia sat on the arm of his sofa and watched him lower the needle with a care he had not shown the expensive glassware. “Where will you be next week?” she asked.
“Here, mostly. Baltimore for a hotel walk-through on Friday. Back by dinner if the train behaves.”
“You don’t have to account for every hour.”
“I want to tell you where I’ll be. My work has a habit of moving the answer.” He sat beside her. “I’d like to know when you want me in your apartment, and when you want the evening to belong to you and Bea. Sometimes I’ll guess wrong.”
“She likes you in the way a person likes a visitor who brings noodles. That’s not an invitation to move into her life.”
“I know.”
“I also want you in mine.” Nadia touched the back of his hand. “We’ll have to learn the difference between those things as we go.”
Oliver leaned his head against hers. “I’m excellent at learning from mistakes. Lucia has kept a record since 1992.”
“And how many have you repeated?”
“All my favorite ones.”
She laughed and let the music fill the room. He did not make a promise to know the right thing every time; she did not ask for one. They had spoken a word that could change the shape of their weeks, and the sofa still had a cushion behind it and a dish in the sink. She liked the ordinary evidence that they had somewhere to begin.
He kissed her with the record silent and the open window admitting street noise. She liked the word serious because it did not require either of them to become grave. He touched her waist, and she told him she had to get back before the plumber left the sink in pieces. He walked her to the shop. The new pipe was in place; the plumber made a point of running the tap while they watched. Oliver complimented the wrench, finally earning the man’s approval.
Bea arrived an hour later with two friends who wanted to see the shop’s cutter. Nadia demonstrated it on scrap board with the guard in place. Oliver had gone to a hotel meeting. The afternoon belonged to both parts of her life without a collision. When the friends left, Bea asked what Nadia had been humming while she cut the scrap board.
“Oliver found a record at the market,” Nadia said. “We danced in a shop until the owner asked for customers.”
“Did you buy it?”
“He did. It lives at his place.”
“Can I hear it?”
“I can ask him to bring it here.”
Bea took that in without asking whether serious was a word Nadia had used today. Nadia had not decided when to tell her. She wanted Bea to hear what had changed between her and Oliver from her, when the time was right. Today’s simple pleasure could still be simple.
The next evening Oliver had dinner with Eric. Nadia knew about it because Oliver told her when they made their Wednesday plan. “He asked if we could eat after his shift,” Oliver said. “Just us. We used to do that when he came through town.”
“Go.” Nadia was cleaning a glue brush. “He’s your friend.”
“I’ll see you Thursday?”
“If the pipes survive.”
“They will. I impressed the plumber.”
She laughed and went back to work. She did not wait by her phone for a report on the dinner. She helped Bea test a prop window whose painted glass had to survive being dropped from waist height. It broke on the first try, scattering clear sugar sheets across the kitchen floor.
“I said it wouldn’t survive,” Bea said, standing on a chair to avoid the pieces.
“You also said we had to test it.”
“Both were true. Don’t step there.”
They swept the floor twice, then tried thin paper painted with a shine. From the back of the room it looked like glass. Bea wanted the actor to pull a hidden thread so the paper would fold at the right moment. Nadia argued that the thread would show under stage lights. They made a third version with a crease behind the frame, then called Hana for a second opinion. Hana voted for the visible thread because the audience might enjoy watching the trick. Bea said an audience was not a jury; Hana said that was exactly why she liked them. The call ended without a winner.
“We could ask Eric,” Nadia said, then wished she’d let Bea bring him up herself.
“He builds real walls,” Bea said. “I want Hana to decide with me.”
Nadia agreed. She had been thinking of the stage carpenter as an available answer and missed that the scene belonged to the two girls making it. Bea put the three versions in a row on the table and photographed them for Hana. They ate leftovers around the experiment and argued over which actor had delivered a line on the wrong cue. Nadia went to bed with the record’s trumpet in her head and paper-glass shine on her fingers.
On Thursday Oliver came to the shop at closing. The street was full of people hurrying home in an April shower. He stood inside the door without taking off his coat. She had seen him tired, impatient, amused and hungry. This was a face she did not know yet.
“How was dinner?” she asked.
“I said something I need to tell you.”
She set down the mat she was measuring. “About Bea?”
“About us.” He came farther in but kept a distance between them. “Eric asked how serious we are. I told him it was casual.”
The workroom made a small, familiar sound as its radiator cooled. Nadia had used the word serious on Tuesday while they stood in his apartment with a record waiting to turn again. She could still feel where his hand had rested at her waist.
“Why?” she asked.
“He was talking about the tour, about Bea. He said he didn’t know where I fit in any of it. I wanted one ordinary hour with him. I thought if I said we weren’t making plans, he could breathe.”
“So you described me as something smaller.”
“I did.”
He did not ask her to admire that he had told her before someone else could. The fact that he had come straight here mattered; it did not make the word casual disappear from Eric’s hearing. She had spent a week refusing to turn her own errors into a story of good intentions. She would not do it for him either.
“What did he say?”
“He said I should be careful. I don’t think he believed me.”
“Did you correct it?”
“Not yet.”
“Then he still thinks that’s how you talk about me when I’m not there.”
Oliver pulled his coat open as if the room had grown hot. “I will call him. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”
“I have heard it.” Nadia turned the mat so the cut edge faced the light. It was straight. She needed it to be. “I want you to go now. I don’t know what I can say without making your choice easier to bear for you.”
He stood another moment. She could see the argument he might have made: Eric was hurt, friendship took work, she knew the stakes. None changed the fact that he had agreed with her in private and denied her in public to the one man whose knowledge mattered most. Oliver closed his mouth.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Talk to him because it’s the truth. Don’t make it a gift to me.”
“I know.”
When the door closed, Nadia put the mat away. She had been lonely after Martin left; Oliver had given her a kind of company she had not expected to want this fiercely. That was why casual hurt. She stayed until the rain thinned, then went upstairs and found Bea listening to a recording of the song Oliver had brought. The trumpet sounded bright through the small speaker. Bea asked if they could play it again. Nadia said yes and sat beside her without explaining why she could not yet bear to dance.
Bea had painted a new cardboard street while Nadia was downstairs. Each building had a different door, though the windows were all the same blue. She pointed to a narrow one with an awning. “This is where the kitchen wall goes after it turns.”
“I thought it became the kitchen.”
“It does. Then it has to go somewhere or the actors can’t get past it. Eric didn’t draw that part. Maybe he’s not allowed to tell me.”
Nadia looked at the stage with its impossible back wall. “You could ask.”
“Later.” Bea turned the record back to its start. “Do you have something for dinner? Not noodles. We keep having noodles.”
They made eggs with leftover vegetables. Nadia broke one yolk trying to turn it and nearly cried at the stupid yellow spill. Bea ate it without comment. After Bea went to her room, Nadia took out her phone and found Oliver’s name. She wanted to send a furious paragraph. She wanted to send the photograph of the crooked egg and pretend the rest of the night was fine. She sent neither.
Her old friend Tessa had written earlier to ask if Nadia wanted to see a film on Friday, one they had been laughing about since its trailer appeared. Nadia typed, Maybe. I might need to sit in the dark and dislike a fictional man for two hours. Tessa answered, That is why theaters were invented. She did not ask for the story in a message. Nadia liked her for knowing when to wait, and for the fact that their friendship had existed before Martin and Oliver were names she carried home.
In bed, Nadia remembered the ease of saying serious in Oliver’s apartment. She had not imagined their first test would come two days later. She was angry at the lie he had told Eric, and angrier still that she missed the man who had come into her shop to confess it. She turned off the light without deciding what the missing should mean.