Eric chose the diner across from the theater because its booths were deep enough to sit in without becoming a spectacle. Nadia knew the place. She had eaten there with him once after he exchanged two train tickets for the wrong day and insisted that a mistake was a reason to order pie. On Saturday she arrived without an appetite and took the booth farthest from the window.
The theater’s loading doors were open across the street. A crew rolled a painted wall up a ramp, one person guiding each end. Eric came through the door behind them with a tape measure clipped to his belt and a canvas jacket over one shoulder. His hair was lighter at the temples than it had been in the photograph on the production site. He saw her through the window and stopped so abruptly that the man behind him had to step around.
When he entered, he did not try to kiss her cheek or offer a handshake. “Nadia.”
“Eric.”
He sat opposite her. The server brought water and asked if they wanted menus. Eric ordered coffee; Nadia ordered tea she would probably let grow cold. They waited until the server moved away.
“I’ve imagined her face all week,” he said. “I know you said no picture.”
“Bea said no picture yet. That’s different.”
“I know what the words mean.” He rubbed his thumb over a paint mark on his hand. “I don’t know what to do with them.”
“You can ask me things. I may have to ask her before I answer some of them.”
“I asked you on the phone whether she was mine. You said you were certain. I want to know how certain.”
Nadia felt the old humiliation rise, then made herself stay with the question he had a right to ask. “I was not seeing anyone else in that period. The dates fit. If Bea wants a test later, we’ll discuss it with her. I’m not asking her to prove anything to settle an argument between us today.”
“I wasn’t asking her to.”
“I know. I’m telling you what I can answer.”
He lifted the coffee cup, then set it down untouched. “You used to do that when I asked if you liked a song. Tell me every other thing it wasn’t.”
“You used to ask while you were still playing it.”
For one small second he smiled. Then the smile went. The years between them were not an empty hallway they could walk back through. They had become other people, and one of them had raised a child the other had never met.
“I was in Des Moines when she was born,” he said. “It was a miserable load-in. The floor was uneven. I remember calling Oliver that week to complain about a crooked flat.”
Nadia set down her spoon. “You remember that week?”
“I looked up the date after your email. I was talking to him while you were in the hospital.” His voice sharpened. “There were people who could have found me in a day.”
“Yes.”
“You say that like it makes it all right.”
“It doesn’t. I don’t have a sentence that makes it all right.”
“You could have told me when you found out. You could have told me when she was one, or four, or ten. Did you imagine I didn’t want children?”
“I imagined a lot of things instead of asking you. Some of them were unfair to you.”
“All of them cost me.”
The server returned with their drinks and a plate of toast neither had ordered. “On the house,” she said. “You both look like people who forgot breakfast.” Eric thanked her. Nadia waited until she was gone before speaking. She would not apologize because toast had given her a convenient pause.
He turned the toast over in his hand. “When my marriage ended, I spent six months in hotels where I didn’t remember what city I was in. Oliver called every Sunday. He talked about a ridiculous chair he’d bought for his sister, or a guest who wanted a particular kind of ice at three in the morning. Anything that got me out of my head.”
“I’m sorry about the divorce.”
“It was over before either of us could say it. We were polite for a year after we should have stopped.” He put the toast down. “I keep trying to locate the man I was when Bea was born. I don’t know if I’d have been good at it. I would have wanted the chance.”
Nadia looked at the paint on his thumbnail. He would not have become the father she wished for by the simple fact of knowing. He would have had to learn Bea one day at a time, as she had. But the chance had not been hers to keep from him. “I know,” she said.
“No, you don’t. You know what you did. You don’t know what I might have done.”
“You’re right.” She hated agreeing because it could sound easy. “I can’t know now.”
He drank his coffee at last. She let the answer stand without adding another account of her fear. For years she had rehearsed explanations to a man who wasn’t there. None of them could give him back a single morning with Bea.
“They cost Bea too,” she said. “I know that. I loved the life we had, and I also made it smaller than it might have been. I can’t give you her first steps or her ninth birthday. I can tell her the truth and let her choose what comes next.”
“Did she ask about me?” Eric said.
“She asked why you weren’t there when she was little. I told her you didn’t know about her. That was true. When she was older she asked why you didn’t know. I said I’d tried to reach you and couldn’t. I left out the part where I stopped trying.”
He looked past her toward the theater door. “Did you think she’d never ask another question?”
“No. I thought I’d find a better way to tell her before she did. Then when she asked, I answered the easiest part.”
“What did she think I was like?”
“She invented different versions. One time she thought you must be an actor because she liked pretending. Another time she decided you repaired clocks. She knew those were guesses. I let them stay guesses because the real answer made my part in it visible.”
Eric pulled the untouched toast closer but did not eat it. “I’m not an actor or a clock repairer.”
“I told her what you do now. She knows your name and that you’re angry. She asked me not to contact you for a week, and I waited.”
“She had to give you a date.”
“She gave me a limit. I was the one who made her need one.”
He looked down at the toast. The conversation had found a sharper edge than the years alone. Nadia let it cut where it had to; she couldn’t protect Bea by making their old silence sound kind.
Eric tore a corner from the toast, then left it on the plate. “Is there someone else she’s been calling Dad?”
“No. She calls Rosa’s husband Tío Nico, though they’re not related by blood. Martin was my partner for two years. She liked him. He left last week.”
“That is a lot of men arriving and leaving.”
“You’re arriving. Martin left. Don’t make them the same story.”
“I don’t know the story yet.”
“Neither does Bea.”
He leaned back against the booth. She could see how tired he was beneath the anger. A tour packed sleep into whatever hours remained after a set was loaded, built, struck and loaded again. He had probably worked since dawn, or had not slept because twelve years kept arriving in pieces. That did not make his anger easier to hear. It made him real.
“Oliver knows,” Nadia said.
Eric looked up sharply. “About Bea?”
“He learned when he mentioned your name at the archive. I told him immediately. I asked him not to contact you before I told Bea and then you myself. He kept that promise.”
“He didn’t say anything to me.”
“I asked him not to.”
“He usually tells me when somebody’s moved the good coffee in his hotels.” Eric looked toward the street. “Why were you at an archive together?”
Nadia had not planned to make this the next difficult sentence. Delaying it would turn tomorrow’s encounter into an ambush. “We’re seeing each other. We met through my shop. It began before he said your name. I’m going to keep seeing him.”
Eric stared at her. “Oliver Mori.”
“Yes.”
“He knows you’re the woman from that winter?”
“He didn’t before Monday. You never gave him my full name or a photograph, and he was away then.”
“I talked to him about you once. Barely. I didn’t think I’d see you again.” Eric’s laugh came out bitter. “Now every time I think of her, he’ll be there.”
“He won’t be between you and Bea. I’m here to talk to you about her. Oliver isn’t carrying messages.”
“I wasn’t asking him to.”
“I’m glad.”
Eric looked down at his hands. “I’m allowed to be angry at both of you for the timing.”
“You are.”
“That doesn’t mean I get to decide whether you date him.”
She had not asked him to say it. Hearing it still loosened something in her chest. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
“I’m not offering a blessing,” Eric said. “I don’t even know what I’d be blessing. I had one version of him in my life and one version of you in my head. Those versions didn’t meet. Now they have, and apparently I’m late to the introduction.”
“You aren’t late because of Oliver.”
“I know.” He ran a finger around the rim of the cup. “I don’t want to find out my closest friend is waiting for me to stop calling so he can have an easier life with you.”
“You have to tell him that yourself.”
“I will. When I can say it without making it sound like a threat.”
Nadia had no promise to make on Oliver’s behalf. She knew he had chosen to kiss her with Eric’s friendship in the room. The two men would have to speak for themselves.
They drank the coffee and tea. Eric asked about Bea’s name. Nadia told him why she had chosen it and that Rosa had predicted a girl who would say what she meant. He asked if Bea liked the stage because of him. Nadia told him Bea had made a cardboard moon before she knew what a stage carpenter was. He smiled at that, unwillingly. Nadia described the crown with its taped hinge and the improvised line about giving away the job. She did not show a picture. She saw him hold those scraps of information as though they were pieces of a set he could not yet assemble.
“I’m working on someone else’s design for this production,” he said when she asked. “A street that folds into a kitchen. The designer wants the wall to turn in four seconds. The first version stuck. We’re rebuilding the hinge.”
“Bea would want to know whether the audience sees the turn.”
“They shouldn’t. That’s the point.”
“She’d ask anyway.”
“Then I’d tell her.” His voice caught. He cleared his throat. “If she asks.”
The server came for their plates. Eric paid for both drinks despite Nadia reaching for her wallet. She let him; it was only tea and coffee, not a claim on anything larger. Outside, the theater crew was closing the loading door for lunch.
“There’s music at the Mercer courtyard tonight,” Eric said. “Some of the crew are going. I told them I’d stop by.”
“I’ve gone for years. Oliver and I had talked about it.”
He looked at her. “You don’t have to stay away because I’ll be there.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.” He put on his jacket. “I need a day before I can answer anything else about her. When she’s ready to ask, I’ll answer what I can. Even if I’m clumsy.”
“I’ll tell her that.”
“Tell her I’m not asking to see her this weekend.”
Nadia nodded. They stood beneath the diner’s faded awning while people moved around them. At last Eric crossed to the theater without looking back. The open space where he’d been felt nothing like their parting in 2013. Then she had been certain there would be another call.
She went back into the diner for the envelope she’d left on the seat. Inside were notes she had made about Bea’s dates and the first year of the shop, the sort of material she had thought she might need if Eric doubted her. She had never opened it. At home she placed it in a drawer beside a letter she had written while pregnant and never sent. The letter began with a joke about how bad he was at choosing trains. She had been able to make that joke then. By the time Bea was born, she had stopped writing. Nadia read the first line, folded the letter again, and went to meet her daughter without showing it to anyone.
Bea wanted to know whether Eric had the same eyebrows as she did. It was not a question Nadia had prepared for.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “He has thick ones. Yours are like Rosa’s, if I’m honest.”
“Grandma has one eyebrow when she wants to win.”
“You have that one.”
Bea accepted this. They sat on the floor beside the cardboard set, where Bea had replaced the weak hinge with cloth tape. Nadia told her Eric had asked if she was well, had been angry about the years, and would answer questions when Bea wanted to send them. She said he would not ask to meet her this weekend.
“Did he ask if I was his?” Bea said.
“Yes. He wanted to know how certain I was. I told him I was certain. He didn’t ask you to do anything.”
Bea picked at a loose thread on the hinge. “He should ask. He didn’t know us.”
“That’s how I heard it.”
“Don’t make him nicer because I asked.”
“I’m trying to tell it exactly.”
“Okay.” She tugged the thread free. “Does he know about Martin?”
“He knows Martin was my partner and left. I didn’t tell him your private messages.”
“Good.” Bea stood and tested the wall. It turned without showing the hinge. “I might have a question about his stage later. I don’t know yet.”
She ran the wall through its turn a second time. “Do you think I got that from him?”
“The hinge?”
“Wanting to make it. Everybody keeps acting like I must have got it from somewhere.”
“I think you got an idea and then cut up half the cereal boxes in the kitchen to make it work.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“I can’t tell you which part of a person comes from which parent. I can tell you I watched you learn to make things. You started because a paper castle at school kept falling over.”
“That was a bad castle.” Bea frowned at the wall. “Maybe he likes making things and so do I. That doesn’t mean I have to call him.”
“No.”
“I know you know. I’m saying it out loud so I know.” Bea pressed the hinge flat and set the wall on the shelf. “Hana says I should ask him if he knows how they make people fly onstage. I might. Later.”
Nadia left the subject where Bea had put it. At six she changed out of the clothes she’d worn to the diner. She chose a red blouse for the music, one she had kept since before Martin because it made her want to move when she wore it. She texted Oliver that Eric might be at the courtyard with his crew. Oliver replied that he would still like to go with her.
The Mercer courtyard was a narrow open space between old brick buildings, hung with lights that never quite hid the wires. A four-piece band played on a low platform. People had brought folding chairs and paper cups; children slipped between them in games with rules no adult could follow. Oliver arrived carrying two tickets for drinks and a paper bag of warm almonds. Nadia took the bag before he could tell her where to stand.
“You’ve been here,” she said.
“As a boy. There was a different band and the same man complaining about the speakers.” He nodded toward an older man near the door, who was indeed frowning at the equipment. “He may be right tonight.”
The music began with a rough trumpet line that found its way into something sweet. Nadia ate an almond, took Oliver’s hand and pulled him close enough to sway. A few people danced. The rest watched from chairs. When he stepped on her foot, she told him the restaurant lesson had not taken.
“I was concentrating on the trumpet,” he said.
“It doesn’t need you.”
“Harsh.”
He kissed her knuckles and then let go to clap with the crowd. She liked how he enjoyed a room he did not own. She liked, too, the expensive watch visible beneath his rolled sleeve and the easy confidence with which he bought another round. She had no reason to pretend either part was absent.
Eric came in after the second song with two crew members. Nadia saw Oliver spot him; the change in his face was small but unmistakable. He walked over alone while Nadia stayed by the edge of the dance space. The men clasped hands, then released them quickly. Eric said something Nadia could not hear. Oliver answered. The conversation lasted less than a minute. Nothing in it looked like the old familiarity Oliver had described—no elbow to the ribs, no bad imitation of a crew foreman. Eric glanced once toward Nadia and gave a short nod. She returned it. Then he went to the drinks table with his coworkers.
Oliver came back carrying neither an explanation nor an apology. Nadia waited until the band started another tune. “Was that hard?” she asked.
“Yes.” He looked toward the trumpet player. “He asked whether I was with you. I said I was.”
“And?”
“He said he’d guessed.” Oliver’s mouth tightened. “Then he told me the kitchen wall is still sticking.”
Nadia heard what that ordinary complaint meant. Eric had spoken to a friend about the work they’d once shared, even if he could not manage more yet. She did not need to translate it for Oliver. He had been there to hear it.
The older man by the speakers finally got the technician’s attention. For a moment the trumpet vanished under a squeal of feedback; the dancers booed in good humor. Oliver winced. “He was right.”
“You owe him an apology.”
“He doesn’t know I doubted him.”
“I do.”
Oliver gave the man a solemn nod from across the courtyard, which he didn’t see. Nadia laughed. A little girl in a yellow coat came between them chasing a paper cup the wind had lifted. Oliver caught it with his shoe and handed it back. The girl thanked him without stopping. He was still watching her run when Nadia touched his wrist.
“I didn’t bring you so you could prove we’re all comfortable,” she said.
“Good. I would have failed.”
“I brought you because I wanted you here for the music.”
“And I came because I wanted to be with you.” He glanced at Eric, who had found a place on the low wall with his crew. “I also hoped I could talk to him. Both things were true.”
“Did you want to stay?”
“Very much.”
She offered him an almond. He took it. When the next song quickened, she stepped into the crowd without pulling him after her. He followed anyway. They danced badly enough to laugh and well enough to stay close. Across the courtyard Eric watched the stage, not them. Nadia was grateful for the distance. She was also grateful that Oliver was here, his hand at her back, while all three of their lives began to rearrange themselves without anyone being allowed to call the arrangement finished.