At eleven forty-seven, Delia discovered that the final page of her proposal still promised to engage the wider community.
She had written the phrase herself. She could not think of a single person who had ever got home from work, taken off their shoes, and wished someone would engage them in the wider community.
She deleted it.
The replacement sentence concerned sixteen chairs, several ordinary objects, and a room in which people could talk about the places they remembered. It took up less space and committed her to more. She read it twice, checked that the small evening stipend was included in the budget, and sent the document to Devon before she could make the sentence worse.
The email disappeared. A school group thundered past her office, accompanied by an adult saying, with diminishing hope, that they were using their walking feet.
Delia sat with her hands on the desk.
She had expected the click to produce relief. Instead she could now see everything she had left out: instructions for someone who did not want to speak, a better example than the bus token, an explanation of how a recent arrival could participate without possessing a childhood in Bellweather. She reached for the mouse, then drew her hand back when Devon appeared in the doorway holding a chipped mug.
“Got it,” he said. “I’ll read it this afternoon.”
“The section about newer residents could be clearer.”
“Is it wrong?”
“No. Just—there are a few things I could add.”
“Let me read what’s there first.”
She nodded, embarrassed by how difficult this instruction felt.
Devon stayed in the doorway. “If it goes ahead, July fourteenth. That’s the room we’ve got. Can you do it?”
She checked the calendar she knew contained nothing that evening. “Yes.”
“And I still can’t promise funding beyond the trial.”
“I know.”
“Good. Go and eat something. You look like you intend to stay at that desk until June twenty-second.”
“Would that improve the chances?”
“It would make it awkward to vacuum.”
He left with his mug. Delia opened the sent message once more, simply to see that it existed, and then closed her laptop.
At lunch she took a sandwich into the small courtyard behind the museum. Its bench had been placed at an angle that offered a clear view of a drainpipe and half a tree. She chose the half with leaves. Her phone held a message from Soren, sent that morning: a photograph of a handwritten sign on his cinema door. Someone had added an extra letter to CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE, turning it into a confidently misspelled medical condition.
She had laughed when it arrived. Now she wrote, Sent the proposal. No one has offered me a statue yet.
His reply came while she was trying to keep a slice of tomato inside the sandwich.
Give them until three.
Then, a moment later: Well done. Hope they say yes.
She liked the second message better. He knew enough about her to understand the first, and he had sent the second anyway.
She wanted to call him. She wanted to hear the small sounds behind his voice, the door at the Lantern, his footsteps on the stairs. Instead she checked the time and saw that she had nine minutes before a meeting. He was working too. She ate the remainder of the sandwich and went back inside with tomato on the cuff of her sleeve.
Yasmin called at five fifteen, just as Delia was putting her laptop away.
“Tell me you’re still coming.”
“I’m still coming.”
“Because one of the display boards has fallen over, my husband is trapped at work, and somebody has told the caretaker the exhibition finishes at seven when it finishes at eight.”
“Do you want me early?”
“I want to be a woman who grows herbs and never speaks to anyone. But yes. If you can.”
Delia drove straight to the school. The entrance hall smelled of floor cleaner and warm paper. Beyond the double doors, painted self-portraits looked down from a wall: serious faces, green faces, faces divided by colors their owners had chosen with an assurance Delia envied. A cardboard city occupied three tables. One of its towers leaned with alarming confidence toward the fire exit.
Yasmin was kneeling beside a display board, trying to make a strip of tape hold something that required a bolt.
“Don’t say anything,” she said.
Delia put down her bag. “I was going to say your earrings are nice.”
“They’ve been caught in this thing twice.”
They carried the board to a wall where it could lean without injuring anybody. Yasmin stood back, blew a strand of hair away from her mouth, and looked at the line of paintings they had just rescued.
“There. Deliberate.”
“Entirely.”
“How was the proposal?”
“Sent.”
“Good. Tell me more in—” Yasmin looked past her. “Oh, no. The lights.”
She hurried away to intercept a man with a ladder. Delia watched her go, then picked up a fallen caption from beneath the table. Its title was My Street in Ten Years. The drawing showed the school surrounded by trees, an enormous slide running from an upstairs window, and a shop labeled FREE CHIPS.
She put the caption back where it belonged.
For the first half hour, Delia handed out the thin exhibition programs and pointed people toward the hall. When a parent asked whether there was a preferred direction, she said either was fine, though she could see exactly how she would have arranged the route. Several people went straight to find their child’s work, disregarding the numbered sequence. Nothing terrible happened. By six fifteen the hall was loud with voices and the squeak of shoes, and the leaning cardboard tower had acquired two small supports made from paintbrushes.
Yasmin came back with a paper cup of water. She had lost one earring.
“I think this is all right,” she said cautiously.
“It’s very all right.”
“You haven’t seen the clay table.”
Delia followed her. Most of the objects were bowls, though the category seemed broad. One had collapsed into something like a wave. A small plaque beside it read: It Was Going to Be Taller.
“That one tried to throw it away,” Yasmin said. “I made him keep it until it dried. Then he decided he liked it.”
“It’s good.”
“I know. He still thinks I’m being nice.”
She was looking at the bowl. Delia looked at it too, at the thumb marks along its uneven rim.
A woman approached to ask Yasmin about a photograph. Yasmin turned, and the woman talked for a while about her daughter, who apparently spoke very little about school at home. Delia moved away to give them space. She found herself beside a quiet girl in a denim jacket, standing near a painting of a kitchen.
“Is this yours?” Delia asked.
The girl nodded.
The room in the painting was almost empty, except for a red stool and a window reflecting another window. Delia had been about to call it lovely. Instead she asked, “How did you get the red like that?”
The girl glanced at her, testing whether this was a real question.
“Three colors. The first one looked like ketchup.”
She showed Delia where the earlier red remained visible beneath the new one. Her voice grew steadier as she explained what had gone wrong. Delia listened until the girl’s father arrived, and then listened a little longer because the girl wanted to finish telling her about the window.
At eight twenty, when the final visitors had left, Yasmin sat on the edge of a table and took off her shoes.
“Don’t look at my feet.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Everyone always says that and then looks.”
Delia looked deliberately at the ceiling. Yasmin laughed, a short exhausted sound, and leaned back on her hands.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean for actually coming. I know you’ve got a lot going on.”
Delia glanced at the painting of the kitchen, now half hidden behind a stack of programs. “You do too.”
“Mine involves thirty-seven people who all need the same purple pencil. It’s less glamorous.”
“There’s a glamorous version of my life?”
“There’s a man by the sea. That counts. How is he?”
“We’re all right.”
Yasmin tilted her head. Delia recognized the invitation to provide the longer answer. For once she did not need to use it.
“He’s coming on the twenty-third,” she said. “What happened to your other earring?”
“Oh, God.” Yasmin touched her bare ear. “It was a birthday present.”
They found it under the rescued display board. The hook had bent, but Yasmin held it up as though they had recovered something far more valuable. Then she wanted a photograph of the hall before the work came down. Delia took one from the doorway, another with Yasmin beside the cardboard city, and a third when Yasmin protested that she looked like the vice principal. In the last photograph her friend was laughing with her shoes in one hand.
It was after nine when Delia reached home. She kicked off her own shoes, heated leftovers she had made badly the previous evening, and called Soren while they turned on the plate.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“I’m about to attempt it.”
“That bad?”
She opened the microwave. “The rice has formed a defensive structure.”
“Can you get around it?”
“I’m considering going through.”
He laughed. Behind him she heard a door close and the jangle of keys.
“Still downstairs?”
“Just locking up. Hold on.”
She heard his breath change as he climbed to his apartment. The familiar intimacy of it made her put down the fork she had just picked up. She pictured his hand on the rail and the light in the stairwell, his shirt pulled slightly across his shoulders.
“There,” he said. “Tell me about the proposal.”
She told him the short version: the date, the room, the decision still ten days away. He asked what she had called the session, and she told him she was still trying to find something that did not sound like a municipal consultation.
“What do people do?”
“Bring an ordinary object, or choose one of ours. Talk about what it tells them about a place.”
“Then maybe say that.”
“That would be a very long title.”
“Small writing.”
She smiled into her plate. “How was your day?”
He told her about a delivery that had arrived without the item he had actually ordered, and a woman who had called to ask whether an old film contained horses. He had looked it up because she would not say whether horses were a requirement or a problem.
“Were there horses?”
“One. In the distance.”
“Was that enough?”
“I still don’t know.”
The conversation wandered. She ate; he searched for a clean glass. She told him about the kitchen painting and Yasmin’s lost earring. He said he wished he could have seen the cardboard city. It was easy to imagine him there, crouching to inspect the tower rather than standing politely beside her. The thought hurt in a small, pleasant way.
“There’s an outdoor concert here on the twenty-third,” she said. “In the park. Nothing impressive. Local band, mostly things people know.”
“I’d like that.”
“You haven’t heard them.”
“You seem worried.”
“Last year they attempted a song with a very high note.”
“Did they reach it?”
“In spirit.”
“Then yes.”
She pulled her laptop toward her. “I’ll get two tickets.”
“I’ll send you half.”
“They’re twelve dollars.”
“Then I can probably manage it.”
She chose two places on the grass, which was the only kind of place offered. A confirmation appeared in her inbox, beneath the message she had sent Devon that morning.
“Done,” she said.
“Good.” His voice softened. “I want to see you.”
She lowered the lid of the laptop. “I want that too.”
There was a little silence in which neither of them needed to invent a subject. Delia ran her thumb along the warm rim of her plate and listened to him breathe.