For the first twenty minutes of rehearsal, Annelise kept trying to solve a problem that wasn’t hers.
The alto beside her was someone she hadn’t sung with before. She had missed the previous week and was looking for markings everyone else seemed to have made. Each time the conductor named a starting point, she turned pages with increasing speed. Annelise slid her own music toward her, helpfully at first, then far enough that neither of them could see it properly.
“From the second system,” the conductor said.
Annelise pointed. The woman nodded. They both missed the entrance.
On the next attempt, Annelise tried to whisper the count and lost her own place. The woman shut her eyes for a moment, then said under her breath, “Could I just look before we start?”
“Of course. Sorry.”
She moved the music between them. During the next pause, the woman read the markings, made two of her own, and found what she needed without further instruction. Annelise sat back, slightly embarrassed by how much noise she’d made out of being useful.
When they began again, the woman entered correctly. Annelise followed half a beat late.
They looked at each other and nearly laughed in the middle of the phrase.
At the break, they stood beside the water cooler. The woman asked how long Annelise had been singing with the group.
“This is my third time.”
“Oh, good. I thought I’d forgotten everyone over the summer.”
“No. I’m new.”
“Then you can stop looking as if you should know all the answers.”
Annelise smiled. “Is it that obvious?”
“Only because I did the same thing.”
They went back to their chairs. Annelise discovered that her pen had rolled beneath the music stand and crawled after it, emerging with dust on one knee. The woman offered her a pencil with the eraser almost entirely gone.
“It stays where you put it,” she said. “Mostly.”
For the rest of rehearsal, Annelise marked only what she needed. She asked once when she wasn’t sure. The music did not become easy, but she could hear the place her part occupied when she stopped spending so much effort anticipating everyone else’s trouble.
At the end, the conductor asked them to sing the last page again without stopping. There were rough places. One note spread briefly into several possibilities before the group found its way back. Then the final chord settled, imperfect and satisfying, and Annelise felt herself smiling before anyone spoke.
She came out of choir with the wrong line of music in her head and the right folder under her arm. The other alto had told her to keep the pencil. Its yellow paint was chewed at the end.
Malcolm was waiting across the road, beside a closed shoe shop. He lifted a hand when he saw her.
“You’re smiling,” he said when she reached him.
“We managed the last page without anyone starting again.”
“A triumph.”
“It felt like one. You’d have had to hear the first attempt.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
She put her folder in the car, locked it, and came back to him. He kissed her, quick and warm, while a woman in a raincoat passed carrying flowers wrapped in paper. Annelise watched the woman turn the corner, then looked back at him.
“What?” he said.
“I like being kissed in the street.”
“Useful information.”
“Not by just anybody.”
“That narrows my options.”
She put her hand through his arm. They had agreed on a walk after rehearsal because he had been working late and she didn’t want another week to vanish between Sundays. The evening was cool enough for her light jacket. The shops were shut, but restaurants still spilled voices and warm air onto the sidewalk.
For a while she told him about the music. Not everything: she spared him the bar numbers and the dispute over a breath mark that had occupied six people for an unreasonable length of time. She told him how satisfying it was when the line she sang fitted against one she couldn’t have held on her own.
“I keep wanting to listen instead of sing,” she admitted. “Then I realize I’m supposed to be contributing.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He didn’t ask whether she was good. She might have told him she wasn’t, but she was tired of offering the information before anybody requested it. She tucked her hand more securely into his elbow.
They passed a row of buildings she remembered being brighter. The old cinema had become a fitness studio; the little shop next door was empty. There was a new bakery farther along, already dark, with tomorrow’s opening time chalked on the glass.
“I used to think this street was the entire world,” she said.
“You hated it by the end.”
His answer was quiet, almost conversational. She looked up at him.
“I don’t think I hated it.”
“You said you’d outgrown it.”
She remembered saying it. She remembered how useful it had sounded, a sentence with a destination built into it. Richmond, training, a paid position, somewhere her ambitions might have room. At twenty-one she had made the sentence large enough to conceal everything she could not say plainly.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
They reached the corner. He waited for the signal, looking straight ahead. She could have let the conversation stop there, but the easy motion of his arm beneath her hand had changed.
“What did you hear when I said that?”
The pedestrian signal clicked over. They crossed before he answered.
“That I was staying somewhere you’d become too good for.”
Her fingers loosened on his sleeve.
“I didn’t think—”
“I know what you say you thought.”
The sharpness surprised her. He glanced at her, and his mouth tightened.
“Sorry. That came out badly.”
They moved out of the flow of people into the recessed entrance of an office building. She let go of his arm because she wanted to see his face.
“I was going to tell you what I didn’t think,” she said. “Which probably wouldn’t help much.”
“It might. I don’t know.” He looked down the street. “At the time, I was proud of what I was doing. Still an apprentice, still getting plenty wrong. But I could see it. A life. Work I wanted. I thought you could see it, too.”
“I could.”
“And then you said you’d outgrown the city. As if the things still in it were things you had to leave behind to become yourself.”
She felt the instinct to explain her own fear rising so quickly it was almost physical. The training had frightened her. Leaving had frightened her. Staying with him and disappointing him later had frightened her more. All true; all familiar to him by now. None of it changed the sentence he had lived with.
“I made you part of what I was dismissing,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think cabinetmaking was beneath me. I need to say that once.”
“All right.”
“But I can hear why you thought I did.”
He took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed one palm over the other. “I wasn’t asking you to stay.”
“I know.”
“Ninety minutes. It wasn’t another continent.”
“I know that, too.”
A group came around the corner laughing, and they both moved farther into the entrance to let them pass. Annelise watched the last person hurry to catch up with the others. She had wanted once to believe that leaving was something people did cleanly, one place exchanged for another. She had done the untidy parts by telephone and left other people to stand in them.
“I wanted the position,” she said. “I wanted to find out what I could do somewhere else. And I was scared that if I tried weekends, I’d find out I wasn’t good at that either. Being away, being with you. I chose the version where I could call it growing up.”
His eyes came back to hers.
“It wasn’t growing up to refuse your call,” she said. “It was easier for me.”
He nodded, once. She couldn’t tell whether it hurt to hear or helped, and did not ask him to decide for her.
After a while he said, “I also remember saying you’d be fine. About the training.”
“We talked about that at dinner.”
“I know. I’ve thought about it since.” He leaned back against the stone behind him. “I was congratulating myself on being encouraging. You were trying to tell me you were frightened, and I kept giving you the answer that let us stop talking about it.”
“I might still have left the way I did.”
“I know.”
She was grateful he said it. She also wished, briefly and shamefully, for the relief of being less responsible. The wish passed. She stepped closer and touched his hand, leaving him room not to take hers.
He did.
They resumed walking. At the next block he asked if she wanted something hot to drink, and she said yes because her fingers were cold. A small cafe was still open. They bought tea in paper cups and stood beneath its awning while he waited for his to cool.
“Too hot?” she asked.
“Enough to qualify as a threat.”
She smiled, but the conversation remained near them. She could feel its unspent edges.
“I thought everybody was comfortable then,” she said eventually. “At home. With my friends. I assumed you were.”
He looked at her over the lid of his cup.
“Were you?”
“Sometimes.”
The answer made her stomach tighten more than a simple no would have. Sometimes was ordinary, complicated, impossible to refute with a list of people who had liked him.
“Sometimes I was the only Black person in the room,” he said. “You didn’t seem to notice.”
“I noticed. I don’t think I understood that noticing wasn’t the same as thinking about it.”
He shifted his weight. “There was a party at one of your friends’ houses. Do you remember the one with the terrible green sofa?”
“Yes.” She could picture it immediately: a sagging couch too large for the room, people balancing drinks on the floor. “I spilled wine on it and thought I’d improved it.”
“You went into the kitchen with three other people. I stayed in the living room. Somebody asked me where I was really from after I’d told them Ashcombe.”
She stared at him.
“It wasn’t a grand confrontation,” he said. “I answered. Then they wanted to know whether I played basketball. I didn’t feel like explaining why the sequence was tiresome, so I asked about their job. They were happy to talk about that.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No.”
“Did I come back?”
“Yes. You put your feet in my lap.”
The memory returned with a humiliating clarity. She had thought they were comfortable because she had been comfortable. She had carried that impression away as shared evidence.
“I’m sorry.”
He nodded. “I don’t need you to investigate the party. I barely remember the person’s face. I’m saying that when you told me everyone was having a good time, sometimes you were telling me how you felt.”
She watched a drop of rain slide down the edge of the awning. Her tea had cooled enough to drink. She took a sip, giving herself time not to fill the moment with assurances about how different she was now.
“I’d like you to tell me when I’m doing that,” she said.
“I might. I also don’t want to be responsible for catching it every time.”
“Right.”
He gave her a rueful look. “This is an excellent Tuesday evening I’m providing.”
“I asked.”
“You did.”
“And I want to know you.” She glanced at him. “I realize that’s inconveniently broad.”
A small smile moved his mouth. “There are worse requests.”
They finished their tea as they walked back. The conversation drifted, hesitantly at first, to a photograph he had tried to take of a reflection in a delivery truck. The truck had driven away before he was ready, leaving him standing in the road looking offended.
“Did you blame the driver?”
“Entirely. In private.”
She laughed. It felt better for having had to return on its own.
Near her car, a closed lighting shop had left its window display on. Warm light reached across the sidewalk, catching a loose strand of her hair. Malcolm stopped beside her while she searched for her keys, and when she looked up, he was watching her.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He smiled. “Just looking.”
She put the keys back in her pocket. He had not become easier to know tonight. She was still thinking about the party, about the certainty with which she’d once spoken for both of them. But he was here, close enough to touch, and she wanted him.
“May I kiss you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She set her empty cup on the low wall beside them and took the front of his jacket in her hand. His mouth was warm despite the cold air. He kissed her back slowly, one hand settling beneath her hair.
When they parted, she kept hold of his jacket for another moment. Neither spoke. He brushed his thumb along her cheek, and she leaned into the touch.
She kissed him once more before retrieving the cup.