“No,” Malcolm had said. “I’m not.”
They were still sitting together, his arm around her shoulders, when he answered the question she’d finally managed to ask.
“Neither am I,” Annelise said.
“All right.” His thumb moved once against her sleeve. “Do you want to keep it that way?”
“With you. Yes.”
“I’d like that.”
She had wanted a longer answer until he gave her that one. Then she wanted his mouth, which was close enough that wanting it did not have to become another conversation. He kissed her and laughed a little when she pulled him back by his shirt.
At her door afterward, he had put on his shoes and discovered that one of his laces had a knot too small for his fingers. She had sat on the bottom step beside him and worked it loose while he rested a hand on the back of her neck. This, too, had seemed part of agreeing: neither of them suddenly becoming more impressive because they had said what they wanted.
On Friday morning the shoes by her own door were only hers.
She stepped over them with her laptop bag and reached the car six minutes later than she meant to, still thinking about the warmth of his hand. A delivery van blocked half the road. She waited behind it without once checking the time, an indulgence she abandoned immediately when she reached the office and found a message about a missing overtime payment.
The employee who had written it worked at one of the smaller branches. He had included a photograph of his time sheet, the edge of a break-room notice visible behind it. Annelise enlarged the attachment. Two approved hours had failed to transfer with the rest. The error was small to the system and unlikely to feel small to the person expecting the money.
She called the branch. The manager began by explaining why the time sheet had been late, though lateness wasn’t the problem. Annelise let him finish, then asked him to look at the two lines beneath the total.
“Those are approved,” he said.
“Yes. They haven’t transferred. I need you to confirm the hours so I can correct the payment.”
“Can’t it go in the next run?”
“It can, but he was expecting it today.”
There was a pause while the man did something away from the telephone. Annelise could hear a door opening, another voice asking a question. She waited, looking at the photograph of the sheet. The employee had drawn a small arrow beside the missing hours, carefully enough that she could imagine him taking the picture twice to make it clear.
“I’ll email you,” the manager said when he returned.
“Before eleven, please. That gives me time to process it.”
He agreed. She wrote down the next step and put the sheet aside. Twenty minutes later, when the email arrived, she completed the correction and told the employee when to expect the money.
At the next desk, a colleague asked whether she wanted anything from the coffee shop.
“Something with no decisions attached.”
“That costs extra.”
“Then just coffee.”
The colleague came back with a cup and a question about the weekend. Annelise had answered that question lightly for months: errands, reading, nothing much. Today she felt an unexpected reluctance to use the old answer.
“I’m seeing someone,” she said.
“Anyone I know?”
“I don’t think so. Malcolm Dade.”
“How did you meet?”
“We used to know each other. Years ago.”
The colleague smiled. “Have a good time.”
“Thank you.”
That was all. No interrogation, no assessment of whether it was too soon or too serious. Her colleague went back to work, and Annelise sat for a moment with the coffee warming her hand. She had said it aloud to someone who knew nothing of Richmond or a short telephone call, and the words had fitted easily into a Friday morning. At eleven she ate a cereal bar over a spreadsheet and realized she’d never finished her coffee.
Malcolm’s message arrived while she was rinsing the cup.
Could I call you about four?
She looked at it longer than the question required. Last night made four o’clock feel like something she could put a hand around.
Yes. I’ll be home by then.
After sending it, she went back to the report on her desk. She did not mention the message to the colleague who came to ask about leave balances. She liked having it in the day without handing it around for comment.
By half past three she was home, changing out of work pants in the bedroom while her phone rang on the kitchen table. Cecily’s name filled the screen. Annelise answered with one leg still trapped.
“Are you busy Sunday?”
“Part of it.”
“Which part?”
“I don’t know exactly yet.”
There was a rustling sound. “We’re going to Mom’s. Hugo and I. Just a final run through of things for the hall. She wants us there at twelve, which is ridiculous because we can’t get there until two.”
“Then go at two.”
“I am going at two. I’m asking if you want to come.”
Annelise pulled the pants off her foot. “Yes. Two is good.”
“Could you come earlier and get started with her? If she talks through the table arrangements once before we get there, possibly she’ll be finished by the time we arrive.”
The joke offered an easy route into saying yes. Annelise pictured Sunday not as an afternoon at her mother’s but as a day already claimed, its beginning handed over because someone had asked first. She sat on the edge of the bed.
“I can’t do the morning.”
“Okay.” Cecily paused. “Two, then.”
That should have been the end of it. Annelise heard herself inhale to explain, then stopped.
“What?” her sister said.
“Nothing. I’ll be there at two.”
“Bring the final readings if they’ve come through. And don’t arrive with a new seating plan. Hugo spent forty minutes on it and has developed feelings.”
“I respect his relationship with the seating plan.”
“You haven’t even met the latest version.”
Annelise smiled, then said, “I’d like to see you, too.”
“You will. At two. Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because you sound a little as though you’ve just been allowed out.”
After the call, Annelise put the pants on a hanger. The morning had remained hers with remarkably little resistance. Cecily had not demanded evidence. Her mother hadn’t even been on the telephone. She had prepared a defense for an argument that hadn’t arrived, and for a moment she felt ridiculous enough to laugh.
At four, she was sitting by the open window with a fresh cup of tea. It was warm for the end of September. Someone below was dragging a trash can back toward a gate, the wheels rattling over the uneven sidewalk. She moved the cup away from her phone before she answered.
“Hello.”
“Hello.” Malcolm sounded closer than the little speaker ought to have allowed. “Is this still a good time?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ve been looking forward to it.”
She sat back. The chair creaked beneath her. “Me too.”
He asked how her day had been, and she told him about the missing payment and the coffee she’d abandoned. He told her a customer had decided that a door being able to close was important after all, having spent a week requesting a handle that would prevent it.
“Did you say I told you so?”
“In my head. Several times.”
“Very restrained.”
“I was less restrained with Tobin. He had already told me so.”
She could hear something scrape at his end, then a door shutting. “Where are you?”
“Getting out of the workshop. I’m sitting in the truck now.”
“Oh. You don’t have to spend your journey on the phone.”
“I’m parked, Annelise. I asked to call you.”
There was no rebuke in it. She set her tea down and let him have the call he’d chosen.
“I wondered if you’d come to mine tomorrow,” he said. “Around six?”
“Yes.” The speed of her answer pleased her. “I’d like to.”
“I can send the address.”
“Please.”
“We can eat there. Nothing elaborate.”
“Should I bring something?”
“Something you want to drink, if you like. I’ve got food.”
She turned the handle of the cup toward herself. They had successfully discussed every part of the evening except the part occupying most of her mind.
“Malcolm.”
“Mm?”
“If I bring a bag—”
He was quiet, listening.
She began again. “I would like to stay. If you would like that, too.”
“I would.” His voice had changed, enough that she held the cup without lifting it. “Very much.”
“All right.”
“You don’t have to decide everything that happens because you bring a toothbrush.”
“I know.” She did know. She also knew what she wanted. “I’m bringing it because I expect to want it.”
He let out a breath that became a laugh. “Then I’m looking forward to seeing the toothbrush.”
“It’s a perfectly ordinary one.”
“I’m sure.”
They stayed on the telephone another ten minutes. He told her which turn people missed on the way to his street and warned her about the step just inside his front door. She told him she had to be at her mother’s by two on Sunday.
“That works,” he said. “We’ll have time in the morning.”
She liked the plain confidence of we. She liked it so much that she nearly lost the next thing he said about the easiest place to park.
After they hung up, she stood at the window for a moment. The gate below had been left open; the trash can was in its place. Nothing in the street had altered. Her desire had made no visible difference to anybody’s Friday.
She took the washing off the drying rack. One of the pillowcases was still damp along its hem. She folded everything else and left that one hanging, then went through the drawer where she kept sleepwear.
There was an old shirt she liked because the cotton had gone thin without becoming transparent. She took it out, put it back, and looked at the prettier thing beneath it. She had bought that during the last year of her marriage and rarely worn it. It did not belong to a tragedy. It simply wasn’t what she wanted to sleep in tomorrow.
She chose the shirt.
Packing ought to have taken three minutes. Instead she spent half an hour interrupting herself: changing the towel in her own bathroom, checking the weather, putting a charger into the bag and taking it out because she would need it tonight. She caught herself considering whether her underwear made a declaration of excessive confidence.
“Oh, honestly,” she said aloud.
She was thirty-eight. She had asked the man whether he wanted her to stay. He had said yes. There was no secret acceptable degree of wanting that she could calculate from the contents of a small canvas bag.
In the kitchen she ate toast and the last of the soup in the freezer. Then she read through the music for Tuesday, quietly picking out the line she’d stumbled over at rehearsal. The neighboring apartment had a television going; she could hear its applause through the wall. She sang the phrase again, less quietly, and found the interval on the third try.
Her phone lit up with Malcolm’s address. Beneath it was another message.
Six tomorrow. I might be at the door at five fifty-nine.
She laughed with her mouth still shaped around the note.
I make no promises about traffic. Otherwise yes.
She went back to the music after sending the reply. This time she tried standing, the folder balanced on the bookshelf, and discovered she could breathe more easily than she could folded into the chair. She sang the phrase once, then again.
A knock came at the door.
She stopped so abruptly that the last note seemed to hang in the room without her. The neighbor from the adjoining apartment stood outside in slippers, looking apologetic.
“I’m sorry. Could you keep it down a little? I’m on a call.”
“Of course. Sorry.”
“It’s just the wall.” He pointed vaguely toward it, as though she might not know which one they shared. “Sound comes straight through.”
“Yes. I’ll stop.”
“Thank you.”
She closed the door and stood beside it, face warm. For a moment she wanted to put the folder away and never open it at home again. Then she heard his television through the wall, still applauding something, and felt a small, useful irritation.
She didn’t need to retaliate. She also didn’t need to decide her voice was an offense because somebody had asked for quiet during a call.
She moved the folder to the bedroom and tried the line softly, enough to feel where the breath went without sending it through the building. Tomorrow she could practice earlier. At rehearsal she could sing properly. There were arrangements available between silence and making the neighbors listen.
On the next attempt, she found the interval without searching for it. The satisfaction was private and disproportionate. She closed the folder before she could ruin it by trying ten more times.
Then she looked at Malcolm’s message again.
She thought of telling him how nervous she was, then recognized that nerves were only part of what she felt. There was a bright, almost impatient pleasure underneath. She had spent the day carrying it through ordinary tasks, and it had survived being left alone.
Later, brushing her teeth, she looked at herself in the mirror without conducting an inspection. A loose strand of chestnut hair had caught against her mouth. She pushed it away with the back of her wrist. There were freckles on her shoulders he had once known by touch, and parts of her he had never seen. She couldn’t decide which prospect moved her more.
Before bed she took the sleep shirt out of the bag once more.
Then she folded it neatly and put it back on top.