Previously – Chapter 10: The Offer
Mark Dorsey came into the lobby on November fourth at twenty past five, in his work clothes, and would not sit down.
Mia knew what it was before he opened his mouth, because there is a particular way a man stands in a room when he has come to talk about money and has been standing in his own kitchen for two weeks failing to.
“Is Adam. Is he about?”
“He’s got the four o’clock till half past. Do you want to wait?”
“I’ll wait. I can wait.” He looked at the corkboard. “It’s nothing. It’s not bad news, it’s.”
It was, of course, entirely bad.
Mia sat in the lobby with him for eight minutes while a class of five-year-olds could be heard through the wall being told where the window was, and Mark Dorsey talked about the weather, and the new traffic circle, and a truck he was thinking about selling, and did not sit down.
When Adam came out he took him into the office and shut the door.
Mia sat in the lobby and looked at a corkboard with a great many layers of paper on it.
Underneath a notice about a bake sale from 2023 there was a photocopied sheet in a handwriting she had never seen: SCHOLARSHIP PLACES. Two per year. Ask Heather. It had a phone number on it that was not Adam’s, and a tear-off strip along the bottom, and four of the strips had been taken.
Mia looked at it for a while.
She got up and lifted the corner of the bake sale notice and the one under it, a lost cat, and there were about nine more layers, and somewhere in the middle of it there was a whole year of a woman’s handwriting that nobody had taken down because nobody had ever needed the space.
She put the bake sale notice back exactly where it had been.
She heard nothing. It went on for twenty-five minutes. Two mothers came and went. Mrs. Fletcher counted the cash and left. At ten past six the office door opened and Mark Dorsey came out with his hat in his hand and said, “Thanks, Adam,” in a voice that had something wrong with it, and went out into the parking lot and sat in his truck for a while before starting it.
Adam came and leaned in the office doorway.
“Tori’s mother’s hours have been cut,” he said. “They’ve gone from two incomes to one and a half since August.”
“How much do they owe?”
“Three months.”
“How much is three months?”
“Three hundred and thirty,” Adam said. “He came in to tell me she’d be stopping at Christmas. He’d rehearsed it. He got about four words into it and then he had to look at the bulletin board for a bit.”
Mia waited.
“I’ve told him she’s on the same thing as Connor,” Adam said. “Work-study. Front desk on Saturdays, two hours, and we’ll call it square.”
There was a silence of about four seconds.
“Say it,” Adam said.
“You’ve got Mrs. Fletcher on the desk on Saturdays.”
“Tori can do the Saturday and Mrs. Fletcher can do the Tuesday. She’d prefer that anyway, because of her sister.”
“And the three hundred and thirty?”
“I’ve written it off.”
Mia sat in the lobby and looked at him.
“Don’t,” Adam said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’ve got a whole face on.”
“I’ve got a face because it’s the second one,” Mia said. “Connor’s is his whole fee for about two hours of mopping. I know that because I looked at the ledger in September, and I didn’t say anything then because it was one child and because you’d already done it.”
“So now it’s two children.”
“Now it’s two children in a studio that has lost half its roster in a month and has four thousand dollars in the bank.” She kept her voice absolutely level. “That’s two more children who don’t pay, plus the three hundred and thirty you’ve forgiven, and Lucy goes down to two hours in January and there is nobody left to notice when this happens again.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Adam, it will happen next Thursday.”
He came properly into the lobby then.
“What would you like me to have done?” he said. “Genuinely. Say the sentence you’d like me to have said to that man.”
“I’d have liked you to say let me look at what we can do and I’ll call you Monday.”
“And on Monday?”
“On Monday you turn it into a payment plan he can actually afford, so he keeps his face, and you put the work-study in for one term with a review, and you write it down, and Lucy sees it.” Mia had not raised her voice at all. “Which is about thirty percent less generous than what you did and about four hundred percent more likely to still exist in June.”
Adam was in the middle of his lobby.
“You think I’m sentimental,” he said.
“I think you’re the best person in this town and I think you are going to close this building by Christmas next year, and I think those two facts are the same fact.”
Adam went and got his coat and did not put it on.
“There’s a thing on the corkboard,” he said. “Under about nine other things. It’s a photocopy about scholarship places and it’s got her cell number on it.”
Mia did not say that she had looked at it forty minutes ago.
“Two a year,” Adam said. “That was the rule. She made it up in the first month and she wrote it on a bit of paper and photocopied it at the library, and we did two a year for four years, and we could afford it because we had a hundred and forty students.” He put the coat over his arm. “I’ve done six since she died. Six, in two years, out of a business that doesn’t make its rent. I’m not defending it. I’m telling you the number because you’d have worked it out by Thursday and I’d rather you had it from me.”
“Adam.”
“I know what I am,” he said. “That’s the bit everybody gets wrong. They think I don’t know.”
* * *
They did the four o’clock and the five-fifteen and the six on Thursday and were perfectly civil, and they were perfectly civil all through the Friday, and on Friday evening it went.
It went over something almost too small to describe afterwards.
The last class had gone. Mia was at the desk with the running order for the November showcase. They had agreed on it in principle two weeks earlier and it was now eight days away. Adam was in the office with the ledger and the door open.
“I’m putting Tori’s group second half,” she said. “After the interval, before the closing.”
“Fine.”
“And I want to put Connor in the opening as well as the teen piece, because he’s the only one of them who can hold a stage on his own and there’s nothing in the first half that isn’t children.”
“Fine.”
“You’re not listening.”
“I’m listening. It’s fine, do it.” Adam did not look up. “You don’t have to run any of it past me, honestly. It’s better than anything I’d do.”
And Mia put the pen down.
“Right,” she said. “What’s the number?”
“What?”
“You’ve been in that ledger for forty minutes and you’ve said fine four times. What’s the number?”
Adam sat back.
“November’s the first month the fees don’t make the rent,” he said. “Not don’t make a profit. Don’t make the rent.”
Mia got up and went as far as the office doorway.
“Then take the payment plan back to Mark Dorsey.”
“No.”
“Adam, it’s three hundred and thirty dollars, it’s a fifth of what you’re.”
“No,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because he’d stop bringing her.” Adam’s voice had gone up for the first time in six weeks. “Because a man who is that ashamed at a bulletin board does not sign a payment plan, he says thank you very much and then his daughter has mono for a term and then she doesn’t come back, and I have seen it happen in this building four times, and every single time it was a girl and every single time she was good.”
“Then the studio closes.”
“Then the studio closes!”
It rang around the lobby.
“Right,” Mia said, quietly. “Say that again.”
“Mia.”
“No, say it again, because I think you’ve just said the true thing by accident and I’d like us both to have heard it.” She was holding the door frame. “You would rather close this building than have one conversation about money with a frightened man. That’s the actual order of your priorities and you’ve just announced it.”
“That is not.”
“It’s exactly what you said.”
“Because it’s three hundred and thirty dollars against a child, and you are standing in my lobby doing arithmetic at me about a sixteen-year-old girl whose mother has lost her hours!”
“I am standing in your lobby,” Mia said, “trying to keep the only room in this county she can dance in open.”
And Adam said: “You don’t get to say that.”
The heating clicked off.
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ve been here nine weeks.” He had both hands on the desk. “Nine weeks, and you were asked in a public meeting in front of a hundred people whether you’d be here in a year and you said you didn’t know, and about nine people have said it to me since, in the diner, in the street, kindly, in the way this town does things. And you have every right to say you don’t know. But you don’t get to stand in my lobby and tell me what this building is going to look like in June.”
Mia stood absolutely still.
“That’s fair,” she said.
“Mia.”
“No, that’s completely fair, and I’d like to answer it.” She let go of the door frame. “You’re right that I don’t know. And here is the thing I have been sitting on for a week, and you should understand that I’m telling you in the middle of an argument. That is not where I meant to do it.”
Adam’s face changed.
“Danielle King offered me a job last Thursday,” Mia said. “Head of their pre-professional stream. Four days a week. Sixty-two thousand dollars, health insurance, a sixteen-thousand-dollar budget for guest work and a physical therapist in the building two days a week.”
The lobby was completely silent.
“I said no,” she said. “On the spot, in the café, in about nine seconds. And she asked me why, and I gave her four reasons, and not one of them was the real one, and I have spent a week trying to find the real one and I still can’t.”
Adam had not moved.
“So no,” Mia said. “I don’t know if I’ll be here in a year. What I know is that I turned down sixty-two thousand dollars and a proper floor on Thursday afternoon and I couldn’t tell you why, and I came in here on Friday and taught your teenagers from a chair, and I’ve been carrying it around ever since waiting for you to say one true thing to me so that I could put it down.”
She stopped.
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s the whole of it.”
Adam stood behind the desk in the office of a building his wife had named.
“Say something,” Mia said.
And what Adam Lockwood said was:
“Sixty-two thousand’s a good offer.”
* * *
Afterwards she could not entirely reconstruct the order of the next four minutes.
She knew she had said, is that genuinely the sentence, and that he had said something about her hip and the physical therapy and how that mattered, and that he had meant it, and that his meaning it was the worst part of the whole evening.
She knew that somewhere in the middle of it she had said the thing.
“You do this to everybody.” She had her coat half on and she stopped with one arm in it. “Connor and Mark Dorsey and me and the whole town. You give people the most generous possible version of what they want and you never once ask for anything back, and everybody thinks it’s kindness.”
“Mia.”
“It isn’t kindness, it’s insurance.” She heard herself and did not stop. “If you never ask, you can’t be refused. You’ve been pulling people out of the water for two years, Adam, and you don’t stop and you can’t stop, because you couldn’t pull her out, and everybody in this county is so busy being grateful that nobody has ever said it to you.”
Adam went completely white.
“Get out of my studio,” he said.
She got as far as the door.
“That’s the first thing you’ve asked anybody for since September,” Mia said, and went.
* * *
On Sunday afternoon Tori Dorsey turned up at Patricia Chambers’s front door, having walked from the highway, which was two and a half miles.
Mia opened the door and had about a second and a half to arrange her face.
“Is this weird?” said Tori. “Lucy gave me the address. This is weird.”
“Come in before you freeze.”
Patricia produced tea and shortbread cookies without being asked and then removed herself upstairs with the speed of a woman who has been waiting twenty-five years for somebody interesting to come to the house.
Tori sat on the edge of the sofa with her coat on.
“Is the showcase still happening?”
“Yes.”
“Only Connor said.”
“What did Connor say?”
“He said you and Adam had a row on Friday and you weren’t in Saturday.” Tori went red. “He wasn’t being. He was worried. He does that thing where he’s worried and it comes out like he’s being annoying.”
Mia sat down in the armchair and took her time about it.
“We had a disagreement about money,” she said. “It’s not about you and it isn’t about the showcase and it’s the sort of thing adults do when they’re frightened. The showcase is happening. You’re on second half. Nothing’s changed.”
Tori nodded and did not look convinced.
“Ask the actual question,” Mia said.
“What?”
“You’ve walked two and a half miles from the highway in November. That isn’t about the running order.”
Tori put the mug down.
“My dad went in to see Adam,” she said. “About the money. He told me he was going to and then he came back and told me it was sorted out and then he went in the garage.” She was looking at the carpet. “He thinks I don’t know that’s where he goes.”
“Right.”
“So is it sorted out?” Tori’s chin came up. “Because if it’s not sorted out I’ll stop. I’d rather stop than have him doing that.”
Mia looked at a sixteen-year-old on her mother’s sofa.
There were, she thought, about four available answers, and three of them were kind.
“It’s sorted out,” she said. “It’s genuinely sorted out. Adam’s put you on the same arrangement as Connor. Two hours on the desk on a Saturday, and it’s a real job and you will actually have to do it and Mrs. Fletcher will be extremely particular about the rosters.”
Tori’s whole body came down about an inch.
“And the answer to the question you didn’t ask,” Mia said, “is that your father is not going to stop being ashamed, and there is nothing you or I can do about that, because he’s forty-four and it’s how he was raised. What you can do is be so good that in about six years he gets to tell people about it. That’s the entire available strategy and I’m sorry, and it’s the same one I had.”
Tori was quiet for a bit.
“Did yours?” she said. “Get to tell people?”
“My mother’s got four photographs by the stairs,” Mia said, “and she has never once taken them down, and I have not been on a stage since March.”
Tori turned and looked at the four photographs by the stairs. She had not noticed them until now.
Then she said: “Can I ask you a technical thing while I’m here or is that rude?”
“That’s the least rude thing anybody’s said to me all week.”
They did forty minutes on the fall out of the turn in Patricia Chambers’s front room with the coffee table pushed back, Mia in the armchair describing it and Tori doing it into the space between the sofa and the fire, and at the end of it the girl had about seven percent more of it than she had arrived with, and Patricia came down and drove her home without being asked and did not say a word about it afterwards.
* * *
She did not go in on Sunday morning, and after Tori left she did not go in either.
On Monday she sent a message about the running order and he answered it in nine minutes, correctly and briefly.
On Tuesday she came in for the four o’clock and neither of them said anything that was not about a five-year-old, and the five-year-olds noticed. Mia had not expected that, and it was the worst part of the week.
Children are extremely stupid about some things and entirely infallible about others. Marcus asked, at the end of the class, in front of everybody, whether Adam and the lady with the stick had had a fight, and Adam said “no, we’re just tired,” and Marcus said “you have,” and went to get his coat.
On Wednesday the fire-drill notice fell off the wall and they both went to pick it up and stopped.
They ended up crouched on either side of a piece of paper in a corridor, which was, Mia thought later, an accurate physical summary of the entire two weeks.
“I’ll get it.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Mia, your hip.”
“I have got it,” she said, and got it, and put it on the desk, and stood up in the manner of a woman who has just spent a great deal of something to make a point of no value whatsoever.
Adam looked at the bulletin board.
“I shouldn’t have told you to get out,” he said.
“You should, actually.”
“I’ve never said that to anybody in my life.”
“I know.” Mia put her hand flat on the desk. “That’s why you should have. It’s the first thing you’ve ever asked for and it took me telling you the worst true thing about you in your own lobby to get it, and I’d like it noted that I’m not apologizing for the true thing.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No,” she said. “You haven’t asked me for anything at all since Friday, and I’ve been standing in this building for four days waiting.”
The heating clicked.
“I don’t know how,” Adam said.
It came out very quietly and he did not look at her when he said it, and it was, Mia understood immediately, the truest sentence he had produced since September, and there was absolutely nothing available to do with it at half past four on a Wednesday with the five-fifteen arriving.
“Right,” she said. “Then that’s the thing to work on.”
On Thursday Lucy said, “Right, what have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“Mia.”
“I told him the truth about himself in his own lobby at half past seven in the evening,” Mia said, “and he told me to get out, and he was right to, and I’d do it again.”
Lucy sat down.
“And the showcase is the day after tomorrow,” she said.
“The showcase is the day after tomorrow.”
“And you’re both going to be in that building for eleven hours being extremely professional.”
“Yes.”
Lucy looked at her for a long moment.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she said. “You’ll be great at it. Both of you.”
“Thanks, Lucy.”
“No, I’m not.” Lucy frowned at the table, working at it. “I’ve been trying to say a thing about you two since September and every time I get to the end of it, it comes out sounding like a compliment, and it isn’t one, and I can’t find the words that make it not one.” She gave up. “Never mind. It’ll come to me at four in the morning.”
Mia looked out of the window at Main Street, where the lights had gone on early because it was November now.
“Two days,” she said.
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