Previously – Chapter 8: Nine Dollars
“Twenty-two five,” Lila said, “and that’s with the drayage in it, which you will not see on anyone else’s number, because everyone else quotes you a room and then invoices you for the room’s opinions.”
She was on the third-floor landing because the front radiator had come back to life in October and had opinions of its own.
“And your fee,” Gwen Corriveau said.
“Flat. Thirty-three seventy-five, whatever the vendors do. I don’t take a point of anybody’s invoice. The day I start doing that I’m shopping for me instead of for you.”
“Honey, I’ve been buying trade show booths since 1996, and every one came with a markup nobody wanted to discuss. Flat is better than polite. Ask me what the night is.”
“What’s the night?”
“Ninety years,” Gwen said, “and I would like it not to be three hundred people in a ballroom eating chicken under a screen that says CORRIVEAU.”
“Two hundred and forty people,” Lila said, “in the old Bonneville Ice and Cold Storage plant, 1948. Forty-foot ceilings, cork in the walls, the original hoist still bolted to the beam. Nobody has to explain what the room is.”
“You’re hired.”
She went inside, where Jake was on the arm of the couch pretending to read something on his phone.
“Two hundred and forty,” she said. “Las Vegas. The fourteenth through the seventeenth.”
He put the phone down. “Say the fee out loud.”
“Three thousand three hundred and seventy-five dollars,” Lila said, “for one dinner,” and heard herself say it, and had to look at the window.
He didn’t whoop. The whooping had gone out of him this year, and she was still deciding whether she was allowed to like that.
“Get the GM’s cell,” he said. “Not the sales manager’s. The sales manager sold you the room; the GM owns the problem. You don’t want the person who’s proud of the building, you want the one who’s afraid of it.”
She wrote that on the back of an envelope, and neither of them said anything about where it came from.
“Wednesday to Saturday,” he said. “Okay.”
He went into the kitchen.
“Jake.”
“I said okay.” He came back with two glasses of tap water, which was what they drank now, and handed her one. “You want me to say something else. There isn’t anything else. Go be good at it.”
“You have three closes and the inventory.”
“Three closes and the inventory, and Ray’s got me Wednesday, and I’ll water the fern. I promise. Nine-forty Saturday. I’ll be at the curb at Midway.”
“You’ll be in the cell lot.”
She was still laughing when she went to get the good notebook.
* * *
He got up with her at four-forty, which she had argued against on Monday, on the grounds that one of them being wrecked was sufficient.
The kitchen at that hour was a small yellow room inside a black building. He made the coffee wrong, which was how she liked it, and stood at the counter in a T-shirt and the sweatpants with the paint on them while she went through the bag out loud: the good notebook, the two radios, the gaff, the shoes she would stand in and the shoes she would be photographed in.
He put a banana into the pocket where she kept the pens and did not mention it.
“You’ll eat,” she said.
“I’ll eat. You won’t.”
At the door he held her coat by the shoulders the way a maître d’ does, which she had twice told him was ridiculous and twice put her arms into anyway. He turned the collar down at the back with one finger and left his hand there a second.
“Say the fee out loud,” she said.
“That’s yours. Get your own material.” He got the door. “Go ruin somebody’s Thursday.”
The cab was at the hydrant on Kedzie. She looked up before she gave the driver the address: a lamp in a third-floor window, and a shape in it, and then no shape.
* * *
She had the building by ten and walked it twice: once for the plan and once at the hour the party would actually happen. At four in the afternoon the west clerestory windows laid a bar of white light across the floor at the exact height of a standing adult’s eyes, and she moved the cocktail tables out of it and rebuilt the first hour in thirty-five minutes.
At four-ten she called Jake and it went to voicemail, and that was nothing; he was at Tarrant’s from three, and the office there was a converted walk-in with a door that shut.
At eleven-twenty she opened the laptop to move the raw bar, and the browser offered her, as it always did, every tab open on every device she owned.
Under Jake’s iPhone there were four. A parts diagram for a Slant/Fin baseboard element. The Cubs. A recipe for something with fennel. And a fourth, a string of letters and a number that did not resolve into anything, and she looked at it for perhaps a second and a half.
She moved it. At eleven-fifty she went back to the list to open the fennel thing, because she’d thought it looked good.
There were three tabs now.
She sat with the laptop on her knees in a hotel room on Fremont Street and did nothing at all.
* * *
At 2:41 on Thursday afternoon, Deputy Fire Marshal Ochoa said he could not sign it. Fifty-something, mustache, clipboard, the flat pleasant manner of a man who has been shouted at by better people than her and outlasted all of them.
“Your egress from the mezzanine stair to the Main doors. I’ve got thirty-six inches at the pinch. I need forty-four.”
“Show me the pinch.”
He showed her. The LED wall’s structure came out eighteen inches behind the panels, the raw bar ran crossways to it, and between them was a gap you could put a person in, sideways, once. She looked at it for four seconds and knew where every inch of it had come from, in order.
“That’s mine,” she said.
Ochoa waited and did not fill the silence.
“I took the depth off the manufacturer’s cut sheet. A cut sheet gives you the panel. It doesn’t give you the frame, and the frame is eighteen inches, and it’s on page four of the rigging plot, and I’ve had the rigging plot since October.” Priya had come up on her left with the clipboard against her chest, and Lila did not turn her head and did not lower her voice for her. “I drew a thirty-six-inch aisle and put it in a rendering and sent it to Wisconsin on Friday, and Monday I got on the phone and told a sixty-three-year-old man it was going to be beautiful.”
“It happens,” Ochoa said, politely.
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
He let that stand and went back to the pinch. “There’s exposed cork behind the panel, too, where somebody cut for cable. Cork burns.”
“Cork burns beautifully. That’s why they used it.” She got his card off him and wrote Ochoa at the top of the seating chart and boxed it, then turned the chart over and handed it to him with the pen off her own clipboard. “I’m not going to argue with you, because I’d lose and because you’re right. Draw me the room you’d sign.”
Two seconds went by, and then his face let go of something, and he drew it, narrating the whole way, and by the end was making suggestions not required by any code in Clark County, the suggestions of a man who had walked a thousand rooms. She had Wes on the radio before he capped the pen.
“Wes. The wall comes off the north face and goes into the northeast corner on a forty-five. Yes, it’s the whole structure. Nobody’s writing a change order for this. It’s my drawing, and I’ll say so to anybody you want. Twenty-two minutes, and I want the cable run gaffed and matted, not taped, because Ochoa’s coming back and Ochoa can tell.” She was already walking. “Then five-eighths Type X over the cork. Eleven square feet, three people, screw it, don’t glue it, and it goes on my card and not the job’s.”
“We don’t have Type X.”
“Home Depot on Charleston, six minutes, take the van, get five sheets.”
“Five?”
“You’ll break one, and I’d rather buy a sheet than buy an hour.”
She got twelve feet before she came back. “The corner’s better. On the north face two-thirds of that room was looking at it edge-on. In the corner everybody’s square to it and it picks up the hoist beam.” She heard where the sentence was going and stopped it. “Log that as luck. It isn’t a save.”
Wes had four men and twenty-two minutes and said nothing, and nothing was the right amount. Before six she would have to call Gwen Corriveau and tell her the drawing she’d been sent Friday would not have passed, and that the room she was getting instead was better, and that both of those were the same mistake.
“I’m telling Wisconsin the corner was yours,” she said to Ochoa.
“It was mine.”
“They’re going to send you a hat.”
“I can’t accept a hat,” said Ochoa, with regret.
* * *
At 2:56 the freight was the problem.
Three Corriveau F-Series machines were the anniversary launch, the entire reason two hundred and forty people were getting on airplanes. They were on the show floor at the convention center, eight-tenths of a mile away, in a booth that could not release exhibitor freight until the hall closed at four, with a labor call carrying a four-hour minimum and a truck dispatch swore could not reach the dock before 7:15.
Doors were at 6:30.
Priya had it on speaker and was doing the thing people do on the seventh minute of a call with dispatch, which is get slower and more polite as a form of violence. Lila took the phone, said “Thank you, we’ll call back,” hung up, and dialed Gwen.
“Gwen. One question. Do the machines have to be in the room, or does the ice?”
Silence, with a convention center in it.
“Say more.”
“They get here at seven-fifteen, and at seven-fifteen your guests are inside looking at three appliances under a moving blanket. You flew two hundred and forty people in to watch a delivery.” Lila was walking toward the dock, fast, Priya jogging. “But if we run all three in your booth for an hour and a half, that’s eight hundred pounds of product, and ice isn’t exhibitor freight. Ice is a consumable. Consumables hand-carry out.”
“Hand-carry,” Gwen said.
“Anything one person can carry in one trip, on their own two hands. It’s a real rule and I’ve never seen it enforced against ice.” She hit the dock door with her hip and came out into the flat white light off the loading zone. “How many badges does Corriveau have?”
“Twenty-two.”
“How many are being used right now?”
Another pause. “Eight.”
“Then I need thirteen bodies with badges at your booth at four-oh-five, and a yes in the next fifteen seconds, because I have to get a truck of totes into your loading zone before the hall breaks.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” Lila was already dialing. “One more thing. The trough down the raw bar was eighteen feet of crushed ice from a vendor. It’s now eighteen feet of your flake with a card on it giving the model number.” She stopped walking. “And the machines go on the wall. Live. We run a camera in the booth, and the last thing anybody sees before dinner is your own equipment, working, eight-tenths of a mile away, making the ice in the glass in their hand.”
Gwen Corriveau said nothing long enough that Lila checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.
“Priya. Forty-eight-quart totes, thirteen, try Party Rental and then the restaurant supply on Western, and I want lids, because I am not carrying an open tote of flake through a convention center in front of God.”
* * *
At 3:11 Hal Corriveau came looking for her with a legal pad. He was sixty-three, had spent his whole life in a building in Sheboygan Falls, and had the pallor of a man who had been thinking about a speech since August. Six minutes had been agreed. What was on the pad, in longhand, front and back, four pages, was not six minutes.
“I made some changes,” Hal said.
Lila took it into the stairwell and read it twice while he stood there. Twenty-two minutes. Also, in places, extremely good: a paragraph about his father driving a truck through a February in 1961 with a broken heater and a load of ice that could not be allowed to melt, and that was the best thing anybody was going to say in that room all night.
“Twenty-two minutes,” Hal said, defensively.
“Twenty-two forty, at your pace, with the room.” She handed the pad back with three marks in blue pen. “So we’re doing it three times.”
“Three?”
“Welcome is four minutes, before anybody sits, on the floor, no mic stand, because standing people forgive a long speech and seated people don’t. Your father and the truck is six minutes, between the salad and the entree, the only window all night when the whole room has nothing to do.” She tapped the third mark. “The machine is five minutes at dessert, when the wall comes up. That’s your close.”
“That’s fifteen.”
“Fifteen of your best, three times. Nobody remembers a speech. Everybody remembers a guy who kept coming back.”
“You read them?”
“Twice.”
“Nobody reads them.”
“The truck’s real, isn’t it. The heater.”
“It’s real. He had a coat and a horse blanket and he came back with twelve hundred pounds of it and my mother wouldn’t speak to him for two days.”
“Then say horse blanket. You’ve got ‘winter conditions’ written down, and ‘winter conditions’ is what a man writes when he’s nervous.” She was already turning away, radio up. “Wes, where’s my Type X.”
Behind her, Hal Corriveau stood in the middle of a 1948 cold storage plant with a pen in his hand.
* * *
At 3:29 the rooftop unit on the west end tripped and did not come back, and Lila had the notebook out before she’d finished crossing the floor. On Monday, from her kitchen table in Chicago, she had called a dozen equipment yards in Clark County and asked each of them what they would do for her on a Thursday afternoon in November, and had written down every answer, and had felt, at the time, faintly ridiculous. Duane at the yard on Losee had three spot coolers. They came off a truck inside the hour and went behind the ice trough, where nobody would be looking.
By then the totes were on their way to the convention center, the wall was in the northeast corner picking up the hoist beam, and Ochoa had come back and looked at eleven square feet of five-eighths Type X and made a small satisfied noise and signed.
Priya stood six feet off with a clipboard held against her chest like a shield.
“An hour ago,” she said, “we had nothing.”
Lila looked out at the floor: at the corner, at the beam, at two men taping matting over a cable run because she’d told them not to tape the cable.
“Sure,” she said. “But we had a good building.”
* * *
Doors opened at 6:31 on a room that was sixty-eight degrees and smelled of cold stone and citrus, lit down to the level where a forty-foot ceiling becomes weather. Hal Corriveau said horse blanket and the room made a sound.
At 9:50 Gwen found her in the service corridor with a plate of something she had not asked for and ate anyway, standing up, out of sight, which is where the person who produced the party eats.
“Dallas,” Gwen said. “The tenth through the fifteenth. Then Atlanta in February and the dealer thing in August, and I’d like to put you on a retainer. Quote it. Say it like it’s on an invoice. I have never talked a vendor up in my life and I’m not going to learn how tonight.”
Lila set the plate down on an ice bin and said a number. It was more than she had ever been paid for anything in her life, and Gwen said, “Fine,” in a way that told her instantly it should have been more. It was hers. Nobody had given it to her.
She got back to the hotel at 12:40 with concrete dust on her shins, and sat on the end of the bed with her shoes still on and did the thing she had done twice a week since February, the way you push a door you have already locked. Checking, then his, then the small one at the Halsted Federal branch on Lincoln she’d opened for him, because you cannot get paid by a restaurant group without one.
She had missed Wednesday. She had been in a building on Bonneville Street with a fire marshal.
TUE 11/13 DEBIT $200.00
THU 11/15 CREDIT $900.00
Two hundred dollars. He was up seven hundred dollars.
The nine hundred was still there. It had landed Thursday and had not moved: no transfer, no card, no withdrawal, no second ticket. The account had held three hundred and forty-one dollars before Tuesday and it held one thousand and forty-one now, and it was Saturday.
Eleven minutes, and it was done, and she did not put the phone down.
The debit carried a descriptor she had never had a reason to read, a word that was not a word and then a number. She put it in the search field and set the range to January.
TUE 10/23 DEBIT $40.00
WED 10/31 DEBIT $40.00
FRI 11/02 CREDIT $86.00
SAT 11/03 DEBIT $75.00
TUE 11/06 DEBIT $75.00
SUN 11/11 DEBIT $120.00
TUE 11/13 DEBIT $200.00
THU 11/15 CREDIT $900.00
She went up and down it four times. Nothing above the twenty-third of October.
Not one of those numbers would have stopped her hand on a Sunday.
She checked the checking. She went back six months line by line at one in the morning, and it took an hour, and every account was clean, because all of it had gone through the one she opened.
She did not call him.
* * *
He was at the curb at Midway, where you are not allowed to wait, because he was someone the officer with the whistle had decided to like for thirty seconds.
He asked her about it the whole way up Cicero, the second question and then the third, and when she got to the totes he pulled the car over on Archer, actually pulled over.
“You took eight hundred pounds of ice out through the front of a convention center.”
“Thirteen people. One trip each.”
“That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”
At the apartment he’d cleaned. Not performed-cleaned. Actually cleaned, the baseboards, the inside of the microwave. The fern was alive. There was a bag of the coffee she liked and could not justify.
She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on.
“You put two hundred dollars on the Bulls on Tuesday,” she said.
* * *
He had a dish towel in his hand and he didn’t put it down and he didn’t move.
“Yeah,” he said.
She had built, over two days, an entire apparatus for the lie: a sentence ready for what are you talking about, one for it’s not what you think, a whole prepared position for the seventy-percent-true version he was so extraordinarily good at. He said yeah, and the apparatus came down on top of her.
“Tuesday night,” he said. “About nine-forty. You were asleep. I was standing right here waiting for the water, and I had it done in about four minutes, and then I stood here and watched the fourth quarter on my phone with the sound off.”
“And you won.”
“And I won.”
“Nine hundred dollars.”
“Nine hundred dollars,” he said. “Which is seven hundred up, and I know you already did that.”
“I did it in the hotel.”
“Sure.”
She took her coat off, finally, and hung it on the chair, then took it off the chair and hung it on the hook.
“I told Ray Wednesday morning,” Jake said. “Seven-fifteen, from the car outside Tarrant’s. Then I went to the Wednesday meeting at St. Bonaventure and said it out loud in a room with nineteen people in it, and a guy named Phil said thanks for sharing, and afterward we talked about parking on Diversey for twenty minutes.”
He was still holding the dish towel.
“Thursday I went to Lawrence,” he said. “Thursday was my year, so the box was already out. Charlene keeps them in a margarine tub and the twenty-four-hour chips live at the bottom, so she had to take the years and the ninety-days out one at a time and set them on the folding table while I stood there. It took a while. Twelve people watched her do it. Then I took one and said my name and sat down, and we did the rest of the meeting, and afterward I stacked the chairs.”
Lila did not say anything.
“They’d asked me to chair it starting in January, and I gave that back to her in the lot.”
“Wednesday morning,” she said. “I was in Las Vegas Wednesday morning.”
“You were.”
“And you didn’t call me. You told nineteen strangers and you didn’t call me.”
“No,” he said. “And not you.”
The radiator, the one he’d gotten the guy out for in October, the one that had been the whole triumph of a Tuesday, knocked twice and settled.
“Why,” Lila said.
He put the dish towel down.
“Because when I say it in that room, it’s over.” He said it slowly, which was not how he said anything. “It gets said and it’s done and somebody says thanks and then we talk about parking. That’s the whole design of it. It’s a room where you can put something down.” He looked at her. “If I say it to you, it doesn’t get put down. It goes in the file.”
“There’s no file,” she said.
Jake waited.
She could have recited it from where she stood, in order, with the amounts.
* * *
“How did you know,” he said. “You were on your feet nineteen hours.”
“I looked at the account. The credit union.”
“You have my login.”
“Since I opened it. The Lincoln branch, in February. You were in the chair next to me and I set the security questions because you didn’t know your mother’s mother’s maiden name, and I’ve never taken it off my phone.”
“How often.”
“Twice a week.”
“How often, Lila.”
“Twice a week,” she said. “Sometimes three. Sunday nights, and Wednesdays, and any day you’re quiet on the phone.”
“Since February,” he said. It was not a question. She answered it anyway.
“Since February.”
He sat down on the arm of the couch, where he always sat, and he did not look furious, and she would have preferred furious.
“I never changed it,” he said.
“I know.”
“I could have. Any Tuesday since February. Four clicks.” He rubbed his jaw. “And I didn’t, and I’ve never once said to you don’t look, and you’ve never once said to me I’m looking, and we have both been very careful about that, haven’t we.”
“Yes.”
“So what is that. What do you call that.”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I, and I’ve had a lot of help.”
She stayed where she was, against the counter, arms folded. “I’m not your warden. I never wanted to be your warden.”
“You didn’t want to be.” He said it gently, and gently was the worst possible way. “You just couldn’t stand not to be.”
She unfolded her arms and had nowhere to put her hands and folded them again.
“You went to Las Vegas and ran a building. Nineteen hours. Fire marshal, ice, three spot coolers, a guy’s speech.” He turned his hands over. “And at twenty to one in the morning, after the best day you’ve had in three years, in a hotel, with your shoes on. You opened my bank account.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t open your own.”
“No.”
“When did you last look at your own?”
She did not answer, because the honest answer was that there was nothing in her own to look at, and had not been since a Tuesday afternoon on her fifteen in a service corridor at the Warrick.
“Say the number,” Jake said.
“What?”
“Say it out loud. You never have. Not once, not in a fight, not the week I lost the shift at Tarrant’s.” His voice did not rise. “Say it, and I’ll say I can’t pay it, and then we’ll both have said something true and we can put it down.”
“I’m not going to say it.”
“I know,” he said.
* * *
“You want to know why I check,” Lila said.
“Yes.”
“Because there is nothing else.” She pushed off the counter. “There’s no version of this where I’m useful. You go to a room with Phil in it and do the actual work, and I can’t come, and I couldn’t do it for you if I could. You have a sponsor and a fellowship and a design.” She said the word the way he had. “I’ve got a phone and a Gam-Anon meeting in Naperville that I am not driving to on a Wednesday. I count. It’s the only part of this I’m allowed to touch.” Her hand had gone out and squared the salt cellar to the edge of the counter, and she watched herself do it and put the hand back down. “You know what it actually is on a Sunday? Eleven minutes. Three accounts, eleven minutes, and then it’s fine and I get to have a week.”
“And when it’s not fine?”
“It’s always been fine. It’s been fine a hundred and six times.”
“You counted.”
“Of course I counted.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t.”
“The neighbors. It’s loud.”
“It isn’t loud.”
She turned and faced the window and stood with her back to him, which she had never done in a room with him in her life.
“Tell me the thing I do instead. That’s a real question, it’s not rhetoric. Give me the thing I do on a Sunday night instead of the eleven minutes, and I’ll do it tonight, and every week, and I will never open that account again.”
The silence went on long enough that she turned back around.
“I don’t have one,” Jake said.
“No.”
“I’ve asked. Ray doesn’t have one either. Ray says.” He shook his head. “He said, she’s not your parole officer, but somebody made her one, and it wasn’t her.” He looked at the floor. “That was April. I’ve been carrying it around like a rock in a coat.”
* * *
She went and stood by the door, where his father was. The photograph had come to Chicago in the box she shipped herself out of the Los Angeles apartment, and she was the one who had hung it here in March, on one nail in hundred-year-old plaster, and it was crooked, because the wall was not true and never had been.
She put a knuckle under the low corner and brought it up until it sat true. She stepped back and looked, and it was still off, because the wall was off, and her hand went up again before she had decided anything about it and moved the frame a quarter inch and let go.
When she turned around he was watching her, and had been the whole time, and she understood that he had watched her do it a hundred times in this apartment and had never once said anything about it.
“Lila,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I got sober,” Jake said. “You didn’t.”
The refrigerator cycled on. Below them a door closed and a dog’s collar made its noise on the stairs.
She looked for the sentence, and went through the places where she kept them the way you go through a coat you know is empty, and there was nothing there.
So she gave him the file.
“October twenty-third,” Lila said. “Forty dollars.”
Jake looked at the radiator.
“The thirty-first, forty. The second, eighty-six back. The third, seventy-five. The sixth, seventy-five. The eleventh, a hundred and twenty. Tuesday, two hundred.” Her voice did the thing it did on a radio, flat and down a third. “Five hundred and fifty out. Nine hundred and eighty-six back. You’re up four hundred and thirty-six dollars since October.”
He did not correct any of it, and he did not look like a man who had ever put those six numbers next to each other.
“Say the last one again,” Jake said.
“Four hundred and thirty-six dollars.”
She could see him working it, the way he worked a covers count, and there was nothing at the end of it.
“I saw them,” she said.
He looked up.
“Sunday the fourth. My kitchen table, eleven minutes. The thirty-first was on that screen and the third was on that screen and I read both of them and I went to bed.” She had not moved away from the door. “Forty dollars. Seventy-five. The water bill is more than that.”
“Lila.”
“I did it right. A hundred and six times, and I did it right, and it was in front of me twice and I looked straight through it. So the only way I see it is if I read every line. Not the balance. Every line, both accounts, the card, every night.” She was not looking at him. “I want you to understand that I could do that. And that it would work.”
“I know you could.”
“I’d be good at it.”
The refrigerator shut off.
“I’ve been trying since the hotel to wish I hadn’t looked,” Lila said. “I can’t get anywhere near it. And it didn’t stop one of them. Not one, and there are six.”
“I love you,” Jake said.
“I know you do. I’ve never had a day of doubting it. It was never the part that was broken. It’s the only part that isn’t, and it doesn’t hold anything up.”
She was still standing there when he took his coat off the back of the chair.
“There’s a ten o’clock at St. Bonaventure,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Don’t do the okay.”
“I don’t have another word. I’m not doing anything to you. I genuinely don’t have another word.”
He stopped in the doorway with the coat over his arm, and for a second she thought he was going to say the other thing, the one with the promise in it, and she braced for it and it did not come, and she did not know until it didn’t how much of her weight had been on it.
Then he went down the stairs.
* * *
She did not throw anything and she did not sit on the floor. She made tea and let it go cold, and at 11:20 she called Bettina Ruiz, who ran the spa desk at the Warrick and was in Lisbon until March with a furnished one-bedroom in Pilsen sitting empty. Bettina asked no questions.
Sunday she did the rest, and she was very good at it, and it did not take long. She e-mailed Gwen at 7:40 accepting Dallas, Atlanta and August, and got a reply that said thank God and nothing else. Getting her name off the lease took twenty minutes and required her to spell Brenner three times.
She packed. The suitcase from Las Vegas had never been unpacked; she had washed and refolded and put everything back into the same bag, and noticed herself doing it, and did not stop.
She took what was hers, and left the good pan they’d bought together on Elston, and leaving it took a minute, standing there with it in her hand. Then she got an index card out of the drawer and sat down at the kitchen table.
Radiator: Petronis, 773-555-0141. Ask for Sam, not the office. He comes Tuesdays.
Car insurance renews 1/1. It auto-drafts. Don’t let it lapse and re-quote, it goes up 40%.
Dentist is the 14th at 2:10. Move it, you’re on the floor at 3.
Tarrant’s linen invoice is wrong every third month. They bill the mats twice. Ask for Doreen.
The fern is not a fern.
She read it over. It was a shift handover: the same document she had written four hundred times in six years, same hand, same descending order of consequence.
She thought about writing something on the back of it. She put the pen down and left the card square in the middle of the table, and took her keys off the ring, both of them, and set them on the card so it wouldn’t move when the door opened.
* * *
The 6:40 out of Midway was two-thirds empty and she had the row. She had a window and a coffee she’d bought from a woman at a kiosk who called her baby, and the seatbelt sign went off somewhere over Joliet, and Lila sat and waited for it. She had been ready since Saturday night. She had planned for it the way she planned everything, allowed for it in the schedule, taken the window seat so that if it came she could put her face to the plastic.
It didn’t come.
What came instead, at about ten thousand feet, was that her phone was in airplane mode. Nothing was going to arrive on it. Nothing was going to be on it when she landed that required her to look at anything. There was a client and a venue and a load-in Tuesday and a run of show that was hers, and for six days there was not one single thing in the world she was required to check.
Her shoulders came down about an inch and a half. She felt them do it. It happened without permission and took a while, and she sat very still while it went on, the way you sit still for something you don’t want to interrupt.
She got the tray table down and opened the laptop and pulled up the Dallas run of show, and worked, and did not stop working, and somewhere over Missouri she went to make a note in the margin of page four and stopped, because her hands were completely still on the keys.
They had not been still in a year.
She looked at them for a long moment, thirty-one minutes into the best six days she had been given in three years.
Then she went back to page four.
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