Nora slept until one on Thursday, then found Lucy at the kitchen table sorting debate cards into two piles. School had let out early for a teacher workday. One pile was marked QUESTIONS I WANT, the other QUESTIONS I’LL GET. Nora recognized the distinction from every difficult conversation she’d had that month.
“I haven’t called the water department,” she said. “I wanted you to see the listing again while we’re both awake.”
Lucy put down a card. “You said you could ask them to pass him a number without telling them about me.”
“I can try. I would say my name, that I knew Ryan years ago and that it’s a personal matter. If it’s him and he calls me, I’d first check that we knew each other. Then I would tell him about you only after I told you what I’d learned.”
“What if he calls while you’re at work?”
“I can let it ring and call back when I can speak privately.”
Lucy studied the listing, then pushed Nora’s notebook toward her. “Ask them to pass your number. Don’t send mine.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I know. I wanted to say it out loud.” She picked up one of her cards. “I don’t want to choose whether to meet him today.”
“You don’t have to.” Nora left it there. She made tea, waited until Lucy went upstairs to call Imani, then dialed the central office number.
A receptionist answered with the practiced speed of someone who had taken three calls at once. Nora asked whether Ryan Hale worked in municipal maintenance. The receptionist confirmed that a man by that name was on the team, but would not give a personal number. Nora was relieved by the refusal.
“Could you pass him a message?”
“I can put a note in his work queue.”
Nora gave her full name and her own phone number. “Please say it’s a personal matter about people he knew in 2013. I don’t need you to tell him anything else.”
The receptionist repeated the number correctly. She did not ask for a story. Nora thanked her and ended the call. She felt as though she’d moved a heavy object by an inch and could no longer pretend it had not moved at all.
She wrote the time and exact wording in her notebook. Lucy came back downstairs for water. “Did they say he was there?”
“They said a Ryan Hale works there. They wouldn’t give me his number. I left mine with a short note.”
“So now we wait.”
“Yes.”
Lucy put the glass in the sink. “That’s the worst part of your plan.”
“It is.” Nora turned the notebook so they could both see the number the receptionist had repeated. “If he calls, I can choose when we speak. You can be at Imani’s or here. I don’t want you waiting on the stairs to hear half a sentence.”
“Imani’s. She knows I’m finding out about him, not all the details.”
“You can tell her what you want.”
“I know. She keeps trying to find him with me.” Lucy gave a brief smile. “I need her to stop being a detective and just play cards while I wait.”
“I’ll tell you when the call is arranged. Afterward I’ll tell you what he says, including anything hard to hear.”
Lucy picked up her pencil. “You don’t have to turn his whole life into a speech the minute I get home. I might need to eat first.”
“That’s an excellent amendment.”
“It isn’t a debate amendment. It’s supper.” Lucy used her pencil to move one of the question cards from one pile to the other, leaving the new information on the table where she could return to it.
Nora couldn’t disagree. She asked about the debate piles instead. Lucy let her test three questions and objected when Nora chose one the opposing team would never ask. For twenty minutes they argued about a school library as if the name on the municipal listing had not entered the room. The argument helped because it was real, not because it made the other matter smaller.
Paul called at three while Nora was changing for an afternoon with Sam. She considered letting him leave a message, then answered. “Is Edith all right?”
“She’s fine. She’s signed up for the shuttle orientation. She asked me to go with her and then said she didn’t need me there.”
“She can want company and decide against it.”
“You don’t have to interpret my mother for me.” Paul sounded tired rather than sharp. “I called about Lucy. She still hasn’t answered the photograph.”
“She saw it.”
“I know. I thought maybe you’d tell her we’re both trying to work out what happens next.”
“We are. That doesn’t mean we both chose the breakup.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“You asked me to make it sound that way.”
There was a silence long enough for Nora to hear another voice at his end, a woman asking whether he wanted the receipt from a shop. He said he’d be there in a minute. Nora did not ask who she was. She had wanted an answer on Monday; she did not need to assemble his new life from overheard sentences.
“Lucy knows I left,” Paul said. “Do you want her to hate me forever?”
“I want her to be allowed to feel what she feels. Tell her you miss her if that’s true. Don’t ask her to say the decision was ours.”
“I do miss her. I found the deck with the ridiculous animals she made me learn. I almost sent her a photograph, but I remembered what you said about the room.”
Nora could see him sitting on the floor, trying to remember whether the purple otter beat the orange fox. Lucy had revised the rules every time Paul grew confident. There was a version of this conversation in which Nora offered to tell Lucy he still kept the cards. She wanted to. She also knew Lucy had asked to speak for herself.
“You can tell her you found the deck,” Nora said. “She can decide if she wants to play. You don’t need my permission to be honest with her.”
“Would you let her come by?”
“If she asks and I know where she’s going. I won’t make the invitation for her.”
Paul let out a breath. “You have an answer for everything.”
“No. I have an answer for what you asked.”
“You always get to be the honest one.”
“You can be honest too.” She ended the call before another round could make the simple fact into a contest.
Sam had proposed a small bowling alley on the other side of town. Nora had laughed at the idea and then agreed because she had not bowled since Mae’s birthday years ago. She also wanted an hour in which she could be terrible at something with Sam instead of waiting for her phone to reveal a man from 2013. She drove herself there.
Sam was standing beside the ball racks, examining a score sheet with unnecessary seriousness. “I’ve been told the lanes are slightly crooked,” he said when she came in.
“By who?”
“The man at the counter. He said it after I asked whether the floor was level.”
“You asked?”
“I thought it might affect my results.”
“You don’t have results yet.” Nora signed her name to the sheet. “Maybe you’re looking for an excuse in advance.”
“Maybe I am.” He leaned in and kissed her once, a greeting with no audience beyond a bored attendant. The contact loosened something in her shoulders. “Would you like a competitive game or a foolish one?”
“Foolish. I still intend to win.”
They took turns trying to land the ball on the most forgiving part of the lane. Nora’s first throw went straight into the gutter. Sam’s struck one pin and left it standing at an angle that seemed accusatory. She laughed hard enough to make the second throw worse. By the third frame, they had invented prizes for feats nobody could repeat: a point for the slowest ball, a point for a pin that refused to fall, a point for a successful shoe change after Sam discovered his right shoe was a size larger than his left.
“You can ask the counter for another,” Nora said.
“I will. I wanted you to see that the shoe was the problem.”
“The shoe did not choose the gutter for you.”
“You’ve learned nothing from the live wire story.”
She took his hand and pulled him toward the counter. His fingers closed around hers with an ease that no longer surprised her. She was beginning to know the weight of them. Her phone stayed in her jacket pocket, unheard beneath the crash of pins.
At the end of the first game, she had won by three points under their absurd system and lost by twenty-seven under the official one. Sam insisted the new rules were legitimate until the attendant said he had seen stranger scoring systems. They shared a bag of chips from the machine while another group took their lane.
“You wanted to win the official score too,” Nora said.
“I wanted to know which game we were playing.”
“We made it up after the second frame. You could have objected.”
“You were enjoying it.”
“That’s not a reason to surrender if you dislike the rules.”
Sam ate a chip and thought. “I didn’t dislike them. I disliked losing under two systems at once.”
“There he is.”
“Who?”
“The man who liked winning a negotiation more than was good for him.”
He gave her the score sheet. “Keep it. If I improve, I want proof of the starting point.”
“If you improve, I may change the rules again.”
“I expect you will.” He looked at her mouth rather than the sheet. The look made the cheap fluorescent light and scuffed bowling shoes briefly irrelevant. Nora folded the paper and slipped it into her pocket because she wanted the evidence too, though not of bowling.
“You were quiet when you arrived,” Sam said. It was an observation, not a request to tell him why.
“I left a message for Ryan through a work office. Lucy and I agreed on what to say. I haven’t heard back.”
“That is a lot to have in your pocket while you bowl.”
“It is.” She tasted too much salt and liked it. “I wanted to come anyway.”
Sam looked at her. “I wanted you here.”
Nora didn’t explain how much that mattered. She put the chip bag aside and kissed him where they stood near the vending machines. Sam’s hand settled at her back. A child ran past in bowling shoes, and they stepped apart laughing. She felt the awkward happiness of being visible and not minding.
They played a second, shorter game without keeping score. Sam told her about a contractor he’d once hired who could identify a failing motor by listening through a wall and could not remember a single invoice date.
“What happened when you asked for the invoice?” Nora said.
“He said the motor knew what it cost.”
“Did you pay him?”
“After I made him sit at a desk with me. I filled in the dates while he told me what he’d heard. He was right about the motor.”
Nora told him how Cass had insisted the near-miss report say which supervisor put the cart in the lane. Sam rolled his next ball too far to the right and waited while it took an extravagant route to one remaining pin.
“You let her correct the form?” he asked.
“It was her observation. My name was the one she corrected.”
“I would have wanted to defend the first version.”
“I did.” Nora watched the ball hit the pin after all. “I didn’t have a good defense.”
“You get the slow-ball point.”
“We’re not keeping score.”
“I’m keeping that one.” He held out his hand for hers when she came down from the lane. She took it, still amused by his unwillingness to let a game have no winners.
On the way out, Sam asked whether Lucy had liked the soup he’d heard about on Sunday. Nora said the soup was Lucy’s, and she liked it enough to eat the leftovers for breakfast. He asked no more about Lucy. He did ask if Nora wanted to walk once around the block before she drove home. She did. It was cool outside, and the bowling alley’s neon sign made the pavement look briefly blue.
They stopped at her car. Sam kissed her with a patience that made the memory of Monday’s phone call feel distant without erasing it. Nora wanted him to come home with her. Lucy was there and did not know him well enough for that. She leaned against Sam for another minute, listening to a bus idle at the corner, then told him she would call the next day.
At home, Lucy was in the living room with a notebook open on her knees. “Paul texted,” she said before Nora could ask. She held out the phone. He had written: Your mom and I both need time to work out what we want. I hope we can still talk.
Nora read it once. “What do you want to say?”
“I don’t know. The first sentence sounds like I should give him credit for our whole house changing.”
“You don’t have to answer tonight.”
“I might answer tomorrow.” Lucy took the phone back. “I don’t want you to write it for me.”
“I won’t.” Nora sat beside her. “He asked me to tell you the split was mutual. I told him it wasn’t.”
“I knew it wasn’t.” Lucy sounded more tired than angry. “He could’ve sent a picture of his new place and just said he missed our stupid game.”
Nora remembered Paul pretending he could not understand the cards so Lucy would explain them. He had not always been pretending. “You can tell him that too, if you want.”
Lucy opened a blank reply and typed with both thumbs, then turned the screen to Nora without handing it over: I miss our stupid game. I don’t want to say we all wanted this change. You left. I can miss you and still be mad.
Nora read it carefully. “It sounds like you.”
“Would you be upset if I sent it?”
“No.”
Lucy did not press send. She saved the words as a draft and put the phone beneath her notebook. “I want to see how I feel tomorrow. If I send it now, I’ll watch the screen until he answers.”
“I can sit here for a while.”
“You can sit. You don’t have to watch the screen with me.” Lucy turned on the cooking show Edith liked. The host was trying to make a sauce emulsify by shouting at an assistant to pour more slowly. Lucy said Edith would have taken the whisk and done it herself. They argued amiably about whether she would have apologized afterward.
At nine, Nora’s phone lit with an unfamiliar number. The message said: Nora Whitcomb? The office passed me your note. If this is the Nora who lived on Willow Street, I can call Sunday at eleven. Ryan.
The confirmation was small and exact. Nora showed it to Lucy before replying. Lucy read twice. “It’s him,” she said, although neither of them knew what the voice behind the message would be now.
“I can agree to the call. I will talk to him alone first and tell you what happened.”
“Sunday at eleven,” Lucy said. “I’ll be at Imani’s with the team. I want to know when I get home, even if he doesn’t sound nice.”
Nora typed that the time worked. She did not add the reason. Ryan answered with a brief thank-you. Lucy returned to her notebook, and Nora put the phone on the table between them, where neither had to pretend the call was still hypothetical.