The request came on a Thursday when Nadia had been thinking about a different kind of phone call. The supplier had sent six hanging hooks without their screws again, and Pilar had drawn a tiny furious face beside the invoice. Nadia had the receiver in her hand when Bea came down from the apartment and said, “I want to hear what Eric sounds like.”
Nadia set the receiver in its cradle. “All right.”
“I don’t mean a recording. I want to call him.”
“I understand.”
Bea looked at the hooks spread across the counter. “You could ask whether he has time. Not today, maybe. I don’t want to surprise him at work.”
“I can ask.”
“And when he says yes, you can connect it. But I want to be alone for the call.”
Pilar came from the workroom carrying the frame she’d been mounting. She took in Bea’s expression and silently turned back, giving them the shop. Nadia felt an impulse to say that Bea would need help if the conversation became hard. She kept her mouth closed long enough to notice that Bea had not said she wanted help. She’d specified exactly one part Nadia could do.
“You can use my phone upstairs,” Nadia said. “Or Grandma’s.”
“Yours. Then I can see who calls.”
“We’ll ask him for a time when you’re home.”
“And not listen.”
“I won’t.”
Bea nodded. She picked up a spare hook and turned it over. “Does Pilar know the screw company hates us?”
“She drew a portrait of our feelings.”
Bea inspected the face on the invoice and laughed. She had carried a large decision downstairs in a school sweatshirt with one cuff unraveling; then she walked out to meet Hana as if the decision could wait alongside the hook dispute. Nadia watched through the window until the girls turned the corner.
She drafted a short email to Eric. Bea would like a private voice call next week, she wrote. She will use my phone, and I will connect you, then leave her alone. Could you offer two times? She reread it for hints of a test and found none. Eric answered before lunch. He could do Monday at six or Wednesday at seven. He added that if Bea preferred a shorter first call, he would follow her lead. Nadia showed the reply to Bea after school. Bea chose Monday and asked if Eric always used so many words.
“I haven’t had enough emails from him to know,” Nadia said.
“He writes like the principal when she likes your project.”
“That may be how he sounds when he’s nervous.”
“I know he might be nervous.” Bea took the phone from Nadia to type her own answer. Monday. Six. No video, please. She added her name without help and handed the device back. “Can you send it?”
Nadia did. The transaction felt small enough to fit inside a phone and large enough to change the room around her.
On Sunday Rosa came for lunch with a bag of peaches that were too hard to eat. She said they’d ripen by Tuesday if Bea stopped squeezing each one. Bea said the fruit had no business being that stubborn. Rosa asked whether the cardboard sky was finished; Bea said one corner was still too dark. For most of the meal nobody mentioned Monday’s call.
After Bea went to find more blue paint, Rosa stayed at the table and broke the last piece of bread in half. “Are you sleeping?”
“Some.”
“That’s your answer when you want me to worry quietly.”
“I don’t want you to worry at all.”
“Unreasonable.” Rosa brushed crumbs from the table into her palm. “You can be afraid for yourself and still give her the phone.”
Nadia looked at the peaches. “I was prepared for her to ask me what to say. She hasn’t.”
“She may ask afterward.”
“She might ask you.”
“Then I’ll answer what she asks me. I won’t deliver a report.”
The familiar shape of Rosa’s loyalty made Nadia both grateful and irritated. At twelve, Nadia had told her mother everything about an argument with a friend, and Rosa had occasionally made it worse by knowing too much. At thirty-four she could recognize that Bea’s silence was a boundary, not an insult. Recognition did little for the part of her that wanted to know how her daughter would sound to a man who had missed every birthday.
“You’re allowed to come over after,” Rosa said. “If she asks me, I mean. I can take her home.”
“I won’t decide that before she does.”
“I know. These peaches are for the two of you regardless.”
They found Bea in the living room mixing white paint into the blue. Rosa approved of the new color and predicted the fruit would be ready to eat by Tuesday. The two of them argued about whether a painting could have a weather forecast. Nadia washed dishes and let the argument pass through the kitchen door. Monday had not arrived yet. The ordinary lunch deserved its own hours.
Oliver came to the shop Monday afternoon because he had found an old photograph of a hotel lobby whose ceiling had been painted to resemble a night sky. He had meant to show Nadia the detail in person, not send another crooked picture from his phone. She was at the work table repairing a carved frame. When she looked up, he stopped before he reached her.
“Bad time?”
“Not because of you.”
She told him Bea would call Eric at six. Oliver set the photograph down beside the frame. For a second Nadia could see him doing several calculations about his old friend and the child he didn’t know. He asked what Bea had requested from her.
“I connect them, then leave. Rosa may take her tonight if she wants.”
“Do you want me to come later?”
“I don’t know what I’ll want. I can call.”
“I’ll answer.”
He stayed only long enough for Nadia to look at the lobby ceiling. It had little silver stars set in paint. He admitted he had bought a reproduction once and installed it in a hotel suite, then discovered guests preferred to close the curtains and watch television. She laughed. He kissed the side of her face where a speck of gilding powder had stuck and left her to finish the frame. The visit had not calmed her entirely. It had reminded her there could be a Monday after six.
At five fifty-eight Bea sat at the kitchen table in front of the phone. She had drawn three questions on an index card and folded it so Nadia couldn’t read them. Nadia called Eric, told him Bea was ready and handed the phone across. She had never heard him say hello in this decade. His voice was lower than she remembered, and strained with the effort not to fill the first silence. Bea said, “Hi. It’s Bea,” and looked at Nadia until she went to the door.
Nadia left the apartment. She went down to the shop, closed its front door and walked past the counter. Pilar had finished for the day. The last of the afternoon light touched the corner of the frame she’d been repairing. She could sit there, where the phone couldn’t reach her. Instead she found herself standing at the workroom sink, running water to wash a brush that was already clean. She turned it off. The quiet was worse for a moment, then became simply quiet.
She tried to read the supplier’s email. She discovered she’d read the first line four times. No screws until Friday; no apology. She typed a reply and deleted a sentence that would have cost Pilar more time to explain than it was worth. By the time she sent it, twenty-two minutes had passed. She had no measure for whether that was long enough to tell a father his daughter existed as a person instead of a fact.
Nadia walked to the bakery. It was closing, and a boy behind the counter was stacking the unsold rolls. She bought one for herself and one for Bea, then went the long way back. The city offered her a bus with its doors open, a woman balancing a plant against her shoulder, a pair of children arguing over a plastic dinosaur. None of them knew that a call was happening a block away. She was relieved by their indifference and offended by it. She ate her roll too quickly and arrived outside the shop with crumbs on her coat.
Her phone was still upstairs. When she reached the landing, the apartment door was ajar. The call had ended. Bea was at the table with her index card open, drawing a heavy line through one question. She looked up.
“It was okay,” Bea said before Nadia asked.
“I’m glad.”
“He didn’t sound like I thought.”
“How did you think?”
“I don’t know. Like his emails. He sounded tired.”
Nadia set the bakery bag on the table. Bea took the roll, broke it in two and said she wanted Grandma tonight. She didn’t explain why. Nadia called Rosa and asked if Bea could come over. Rosa said she’d leave now. Bea took her overnight bag from the hall closet and packed it while Nadia put a clean sweatshirt in the dryer for ten minutes. They did not discuss the call. When Rosa arrived, Bea hugged Nadia a little longer than she usually did, then went down the stairs ahead of her grandmother.
“She asked for me,” Rosa said quietly.
“I know.”
“I can tell you tomorrow whether she sleeps.”
“Please do.”
Rosa went after Bea. Nadia stood in the apartment that had been too full of phone voices and was now too empty. On the table was the index card. She turned it face down without reading it. That was easy while she could see it. The harder part was how her mind invented what Eric might have said to make Bea leave, even after Bea had called the conversation okay. Nadia called Oliver.
“Can I come?” she asked when he answered.
“Yes. I can send a car.”
“I’ll take the train. I need the ride.”
“All right.”
Oliver opened his apartment door before she reached it. There was a plate on the table with two pieces of fruit and a knife. He said he’d bought pears but couldn’t tell when they were ready. Nadia picked up one. It gave beneath her thumb. “Now,” she said, and set it down.
“Then I’ve finally timed something.”
“Bea wanted Rosa after the call.” She took off her coat and hung it on the chair, missing the hook. “She said it was okay. I have no idea what she meant.”
Oliver recovered the coat, hung it properly and came back. “Did you ask?”
“Not for the transcript. I asked how she thought he would sound. She didn’t know.”
“You can ask her when she’s ready.”
“I know. Please don’t tell me I did the right thing.” The words came sharper than she intended. “I’m jealous of my mother. I’m jealous of Eric. I know how ugly that sounds. I’ve had her for twelve years and I’m angry that tonight she wanted someone else.”
Oliver’s face changed. He sat across from her without taking her hands. “It doesn’t sound pretty,” he said. “I can see why it hurts.”
The answer made her blink. She had expected a correction or a soft reassurance that would deny what she’d admitted. “I want to know what happened because I want to help her,” she said. “And because I hate not being the person who knows. Those two things are both there.”
“I believe you.”
“You miss Eric. I didn’t ask if you wanted to know how he sounded either.”
“I do want to know. I won’t ask Bea to tell me.”
She sat beside him. The apartment’s record player was quiet. The record they’d bought at the market lived in its sleeve near the window, and a foolish part of Nadia was grateful no music could compete with the sound of her own breathing. Oliver sliced a pear and offered her a piece. She took it. It was sweeter than she expected.
“I was going to ask whether you wanted supper,” he said.
“I want to be here. I don’t know whether I’m hungry.”
“There are eggs. I can make them if you decide.”
“You always have eggs.”
“A hotel breakfast habit.”
She leaned against him. He did not build an argument for how Eric might have felt on the call. She was glad; Eric had other people to imagine him. Oliver had been his friend long before he knew Nadia, and that friendship was a real loss, but tonight she had come for a different reason. She wanted the man whose hand was warm at her waist and whose silence didn’t require her to make her feelings presentable before she could stay.
After a while she asked for the eggs. He burned the first piece of toast, opened a window and blamed the toaster with an indignation she knew was staged. They ate at the counter. She told him how Bea had called Eric’s email style “the principal when she likes your project,” and Oliver laughed so hard he had to put down his fork.
“He’s going to hate that description,” he said.
“Don’t tell him.”
“I haven’t spoken to him. I wouldn’t use this as an opening.”
The mention of the missing friendship was brief and unsolved. Nadia stayed for the night. In bed she thought of Bea at Rosa’s, perhaps awake under the purple blanket she used there, perhaps sleeping. She could know tomorrow. She turned toward Oliver and placed his hand over hers. He was awake, but he didn’t ask for an update. They slept with the window still open a little, listening to a train far below.
Rosa called at eight. Bea had slept, eaten a peach for breakfast and wanted to stay through lunch. Nadia thanked her. Rosa said Bea would tell Nadia what she wanted when she came home. She had not asked Rosa to report the call either.
Nadia went to the shop. Pilar was sorting newly arrived screws that, against expectation, fit the hooks. She had already set aside the ones that did not. “Miracle,” she said, lifting one. Nadia tested it and found it firm. The work of ordinary accuracy steadied her. She called the customer whose frame was waiting, then told Pilar she would leave at noon to collect Bea.
The customer arrived early with her adult son. She had brought a small watercolor of a house neither of them lived in anymore. The son wanted the repaired frame to look new. His mother wanted the nick in the lower corner left visible because her father had made it carrying the picture up a staircase. Pilar held the frame so they could see the repair. Nadia watched the two of them look at each other instead of at the glass.
“You can replace the corner,” Nadia told the son, “but I’d have to take more of the old wood. I can stabilize it and leave the nick.”
The woman ran a finger near the mark, careful not to touch the paint. “That’s what I meant.”
Her son said, “I thought you were saying it couldn’t be fixed.”
“I said I wanted to recognize it.”
They chose the visible repair. Pilar wrote the decision on the order card without congratulating either of them. After they went, she examined the fitted screws. “People think a new-looking frame is always a compliment.”
“I thought so when I was younger,” Nadia said.
“You still do sometimes.”
“That’s why you’re here.”
Pilar took the point without pretending it was a grand promotion. She put the finished hooks in a tray and told Nadia to go at noon as planned. Having a second person at the counter had a practical use; it also meant Nadia could leave without making her absence a test of whether the shop loved her back.
“Take your time,” Pilar said. “I can finish these.”
At Rosa’s apartment Bea sat on the floor with a peach pit and a magazine open to a page about constellations. She was not devastated; she was not transformed. She asked whether they could stop at the library on the way home because the school had a book on stage lights due back. Nadia said yes. On the walk Bea slipped her hand into Nadia’s as they crossed a busy street. At the next corner she let go to point toward a bus with a painted advertisement.
At the library Bea put the stage-light book in the return slot, then changed her mind about going straight home. The librarian had arranged a small display of books on making miniature theaters. Bea lifted one with a painted proscenium on the cover and opened it on the floor. Nadia found a seat nearby. She tried the first page of a novel from the returns cart, then heard Bea call her over.
“Look. They make the horizon closer when the stage is small. It makes the whole thing seem deeper.”
“Will that help your sky?”
“Maybe. It might make it too crowded.”
Bea traced the diagram, considering her own cardboard city. Nadia watched her work the idea into something she had not yet made. Eric’s name did not appear in the book, though he might have known the trick. The difference mattered: Bea’s interest had a life of its own before the call and would go on after it.
They checked out two books. At home Bea put them beside the sky and asked whether there was any peach left. Nadia washed and cut the fruit. Bea took a slice, made a face at the sourness and ate another. The afternoon could be ordinary without meaning the call had meant nothing. Nadia did not ask for more than she’d been given. The hand at the crossing had been there. The new books had come home with them. For now, those were facts she could carry.