Nadia won’t lie for her ex at the bank, then Oliver walks into her frame shop and speaks the One Name Between Us, the father Bea has never met, in a free novel.
On Sunday, August fifteenth, Pilar opened the shop for a paid day of prearranged work while Nadia was out. The lean hours normally kept the door shut on Sundays, but two owners needed to collect before traveling and Pilar had a pair of frames she wanted to finish without the weekday bell. She received a …
The new arrangement began with a toothbrush, which Nadia refused to let Oliver turn into a joke about moving in. She had brought it to his apartment after supper and left it on the bathroom shelf. On Monday she needed it at home, where Bea was making waffles with Rosa. She bought a second toothbrush …
The pasta went into the oven twenty minutes early. Nadia had misread her own note on the refrigerator and made enough for people who were not invited. Bea stood beside the cleared table tearing lettuce into a bowl. She said the pieces were too large, then tore one into four and held it up for …
Nadia waited until the cardboard city left the table. Bea and Hana carried it to the summer workshop in three trips, guarded by Miss Laird, who had borrowed a cart from the library. The apartment looked suddenly larger and not entirely happier. A silver thread clung to the chair leg. Nadia wound it around one …
Nadia bought the tomatoes because Rosa had said they were late, and she bought the flowers because Pilar said an evening with two women and no reason deserved them. By six on Friday the shop was shut, Oliver was going to Eric’s opening, and the tomatoes had made a dark red stain on the paper …
Bea chose the day of the shop’s inventory to mention a piece of the call. Nadia was counting lengths of moulding in the storeroom, and Bea had been assigned to put colored stickers on the bins. The stickers belonged to a school project that had ended; she had declared them better than the shop’s written …
The weekend began with a map Bea had drawn on the back of an envelope. It showed Rosa’s apartment, the community garden, the fabric store and a star over Hana’s house. Bea had marked Saturday afternoon as a sewing meeting, though Nadia was fairly sure the girls intended to eat snacks while disagreeing about the …
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 …
Nadia found the club by following a pair of women in bright coats down a stairway she had once known in the dark. A painted moon hung over the door. Its silver face had acquired a crack since she’d last been there, but the bass reached the street in the same slow pulse. Oliver paused …
Tessa brought the camera to the shop on Sunday with a paper bag of muffins and three examples of what her students called evidence. One photograph showed a dandelion so close that every seed was sharp and no leaf appeared. Another showed an entire vacant lot with the plant too small to find. The third …
