Previously – Chapter 7: The Afternoon She Was Keeping
Adam woke at ten past five on October nineteenth, the time he always woke, and lay in the dark and was happy for a moment.
Then he remembered, and the happiness did not go away, and that was the problem.
He got up. He made coffee in a kitchen he had not changed in two years, and drank it standing at the counter, and looked out at a garden that Heather had planted and that he had kept alive without ever once enjoying it.
I kissed Mia Chambers in the studio.
The sentence would not go anywhere. He turned it over and it stayed exactly the same size. There was no version of it that was smaller.
At half past five he conducted a conversation with somebody who was not there, as he had most mornings since about the fourth month. It was not, he was fairly clear, a spiritual practice. It was closer to the way you check a sum against a calculator: he knew what Heather would say about almost anything, because he had thirteen years of data, and the checking was automatic and could not be switched off.
He put the question in.
And nothing came back.
That had never happened before. He had asked her about the rent, about a boy in the seven-to-nines whose mother had stopped coming, about the wallpaper in the hall, about whether to sell the truck, and every single time the answer had arrived in about a second and a half, in her voice, with her particular flat Washington vowels, usually rude.
He asked her whether it was all right that he had kissed somebody, and the room did not do anything at all.
Adam stood in his kitchen at twenty to six and understood that he had just found the edge of the thing.
* * *
He went to the studio because it was Sunday and because there were eleven fans to check and an insurance company to photograph a ceiling for.
Frank Reilly’s brother had left a note taped to the door in pencil: BOARDS OK AT WEST END. WATCH THE 3rd + 4th SEAM. DON’T PUT THE HEAT ON TOO FAST.
Adam photographed the corridor ceiling from every angle he could think of, which the loss adjuster would later reduce to four. He measured the wet area of the supply closet wall. He wrote down the serial number of the boiler for no reason he could reconstruct afterwards.
And at about eight, doing the closet, he found the notebook.
It was in the third box, the one with the blue nylon in it. Somebody had put the boxes up on the shelf out of the water, six of them, one at a time, and Adam stood in the supply closet for a moment and thought about the person who had done that and what it had cost her, and then he lifted the top box down to check underneath and there it was, wedged down the side.
A hardback notebook. Green. About A5. The corner was water-stained and the stain was old.
He knew the handwriting from the outside of it, because there was a single word on the cover. The word was SPRING, and the P had the loop she did.
Adam sat down on an upturned crate in a supply closet that smelled of damp.
He did not open it.
He wanted to. He wanted to with a physical force that surprised him, in the chest, like the beginning of a cough. There would be choreography notes in it, and a running order, and probably a shopping list, because she wrote shopping lists in whatever was nearest, and there would be sentences in her handwriting that nobody had read since 2022.
And once he had read them there would be no more sentences in her handwriting that nobody had read, ever, for the rest of his life.
Adam sat on a crate for a long time with a green notebook on his knee.
Then he put it back down the side of the third box, and put the top box back on it, and went out and shut the closet door, and did not tell anybody about it at all.
* * *
She called at eleven and he let it go to voicemail, and then hated himself for four minutes and called back.
“Sorry. I was up a ladder.”
“Were you?”
“No,” Adam said.
There was a pause at the other end.
“Right,” Mia said.
“I’ve been doing the insurance photographs. Forty-one of them. There’s a form.”
“Adam.”
“And Frank’s brother says don’t put the heat on too fast. I don’t entirely understand it. There’s a plasterer coming a week from tomorrow who wants four hundred dollars, and Lucy’s done the money properly and it’s nine hundred and six, not nine hundred and eleven, because we double-counted the tips jar.”
“Adam.”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to talk to me about last night, or are you going to read me a list?”
Adam stood in the middle of an empty studio with the phone against his ear and eleven fans blowing at him, and heard himself say:
“Can we leave it a few days?”
The silence went on long enough that he had time to hear the whole sentence back.
“Sure,” Mia said.
“I don’t mean.”
“No, sure. A few days.” Her voice was completely pleasant. “I’m at Sasha’s on Tuesday anyway and I’ve got the Saturday, so.”
“Mia.”
“I’ll see you Saturday,” she said, and hung up, and Adam stood in the room for a while and then went and did something practical, because that was the available response and he had been doing it for two years.
* * *
The town got hold of it on Tuesday.
Adam knew the exact hour, because that was the sort of information the town supplied free of charge. At ten past nine on Tuesday morning Beverly Ann Wicklow came into the studio to inquire about her granddaughter’s Christmas class, a class that did not exist, and then stood at the desk for nine minutes talking about the weather with her eyes going to the corridor every forty seconds in case Mia Chambers came out of it.
By Wednesday it had been mentioned to him four times, all of them sideways.
The man in the hardware store said, “Good show Saturday. Good to see you looking well,” with an emphasis on well that could have carried a truck.
Ray Blackburn winked at him. Actually winked, in the street, in daylight.
A woman he had known since elementary school asked him, in the line at the diner, whether he was “keeping busy”, in the tone of a person laying a trap, and Adam said, “Very,” and she said, “Good,” and he went home and did not go out on Thursday at all.
None of it was unkind. That was the thing about Pine Falls that people who had never lived in one did not understand: the town was not policing him. The town was pleased. Every single one of those people would have said, if asked directly, that it was about time and that he deserved something nice.
It made no difference whatsoever. There is a specific kind of unbearable that is made entirely out of goodwill.
Don Wilcox called on Thursday evening about the gutter man and, at the very end of the call, after they had established the ninety dollars and the Friday, said:
“You want to take it slow.”
“Don.”
“That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying anything.” A pause on the line. “Sylvia’s all over it. She’s been calling people. So there’s that as well.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” said Don Wilcox, “the man’s coming at nine,” and hung up, which was, from Don, an entire conversation about grief, and both of them knew it.
Don Wilcox’s man came on Friday, and that was ninety dollars that saved the building, and nobody mentioned it again.
* * *
It was not, and he knew it was not, about Heather.
That was the part he could not have explained to anybody, and did not try to, and which he understood properly only in December in a cold studio at one in the morning.
It was about the fact that at ten past five on Sunday morning he had asked and nothing had come back, and that the reason nothing had come back was not that Heather had gone quiet.
It was that he already knew the answer.
She would have said: Well, obviously. She would have said it with her eyebrows up, in about a second and a half, doing something else at the time. Adam, she’s been in the building six weeks and you’ve had your hand on the small of her back at every door in this town. Well, obviously.
And she would have been pleased. That was the thing he could not put down. She would have been pleased, and she would have said something excruciating about it at the church, and there was no part of Heather Lockwood, living or dead, that would have wanted him to stand in a kitchen at half past five in the morning conducting a court case.
Which left Adam holding the problem itself. It was not permission and never had been.
The actual problem was that he had spent two years running a business he could not afford, in a building his wife had named, in a town where every single person he met made an adjustment in their face when they saw him. And he had gotten used to it. He had built an entire life inside it. He knew exactly who he was in Pine Falls: he was the man it had happened to.
And on Saturday night a woman had taken his hands and got herself up out of a chair, and for a moment he had been nobody’s tragedy.
He did not know how to want that and also stay standing.
So he did what he did. He was extremely pleasant, and extremely busy, and he answered every message within about four minutes, and he did not say a single true thing for eleven days.
The week had another version underneath it.
* * *
He drove out to Crestwood on Tuesday afternoon and sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes. He had not planned it and he did not tell anybody about it for two months.
There were cars in the new spaces and a folding sign on the grass and two mothers coming out of the glass front with children in cardigans, and there was still a dumpster at the side and a man on a cherry picker doing something to the signage. Through the glass you could see a lobby with a staircase and not enough furniture in it yet, and a woman in a hard hat walking about with a tablet.
Sixty parking spaces. He counted them.
Adam had eleven, in a yard behind the Ingram building, four of which were unusable when the diner had a delivery.
He sat in the truck and did arithmetic, because arithmetic was what he did. Eleven thousand square feet. He knew what a square foot cost to fit out because he had costed a sprung floor in 2021 and cried about it. He knew what the sign on the front had cost because a man had quoted him four thousand dollars for a much smaller one in the spring.
Somewhere between eight hundred thousand and a million and a half. Probably borrowed. Probably against the two studios she already had.
And there was nothing wrong with any of it. That was the part he kept arriving at. Danielle King had not done anything to him. She had looked at a county with forty thousand people in it and no proper facility and had gone to a bank. He could have gone to a bank at any point in the last six years and had never once considered it, because it had not occurred to him that it was allowed.
The woman in the hard hat noticed the truck at about minute eighteen and lifted a hand, pleasantly, in the manner of somebody who assumes you are a delivery.
Adam lifted a hand back and drove home.
He did not tell Mia, and he did not tell Lucy, and what he took away from it was not fear. He had gone out there expecting fear.
It was that in four years of running a business with his wife he had never once been in a room where anybody said the words what would it take.
* * *
The next afternoon Sylvia came with a coffee cake and found him on a ladder.
“Get down off that.”
“I’m nearly.”
“Adam Lockwood, get down off that ladder, I’m not talking to a man’s knees.”
He got down.
She had a look at the ceiling, cut back to the joists and waiting on a plasterer, and made a noise, and then went and filled the kettle in a building where she did not work.
“Don’s got a man,” she said, over her shoulder. “For the gutter on the north side. He’s coming Friday and you’re not paying him, before you start.”
“Sylvia.”
“It’s ninety dollars and Don’s known him forty years and if you argue with me I will be extremely unpleasant.” She got two mugs down. “What’s the plasterer costing?”
“Four hundred.”
“And the insurance?”
“They’ll do some of it. There’s an excess of five hundred and I’ve got a feeling about the wording.”
“Everyone always has a feeling about the wording.” Sylvia poured. “Now. Two things, and then I’ll go, because I can see you’ve got a ladder to be up.”
Adam sat down on the arm of a chair in his own lobby.
“One. Beverly Ann Wicklow has told the whole of St Luke’s that you’re carrying on with Mia Chambers.”
Adam put his face in his hands.
“I’m telling you,” Sylvia said, “so that you know it’s happened, and so that you don’t find out from somebody being funny about it in the diner. That’s all. I’m not asking you anything.”
“There’s nothing to.”
“I said I’m not asking you anything.” She handed him a mug. “Two.”
“Go on.”
“You’ve gone strange.” Sylvia sat down opposite him and put her purse on her knees. “I saw you on Saturday and you were a man I hadn’t seen since 2022, and I went home and told Don and he was very rude about it in his way, which means he was pleased. And I came in today and you’ve gone back.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine, you’re pleasant. That’s what you do.” Sylvia’s voice had not changed at all. “You were pleasant at the funeral. You were pleasant at Christmas. You have been pleasant at me for two years and I have let you, because I’ve been busy being pleasant back.”
Adam looked into the mug.
“I’m going to say the thing now,” Sylvia said, “and I’d like you to remember that I’m the only person on this earth who’s allowed to.”
“All right.”
“You are not going to hurt me.” She said it very slowly. “That’s what you think. You think there’s a version of this where I come into this building and see you happy and it does something to me. And you’ve decided to manage it, the way you manage everything, and you’ve decided it on my behalf without asking. That is the rudest thing you have ever done.”
“Sylvia.”
“I buried my daughter, Adam.” Her chin went up. “I am sixty-eight years old and I buried my only child, and there is nothing you can do in a lobby that will make that better or worse. Nothing. It is a completed fact. And you have been walking around it on tiptoe for two years as if you could still knock it over.”
The building was very quiet.
“You know what would hurt me?” Sylvia said. “Sitting at Don’s table in ten years’ time and knowing that my daughter’s husband spent his whole life in a room with her name on the door, being pleasant.”
Adam did not say anything for a while, because he could not.
“Right,” Sylvia said, and picked up her purse, and stood, and put a hand flat on his shoulder for a moment on the way past. “The coffee cake’s for the children and not for you. You’ll eat six.”
* * *
He taught the four o’clock on Thursday and it was the only hour of the two weeks in which he was entirely himself.
They were doing autumn. He had told them in September that they were going to be leaves and they had held him to it with the ferocity of a union.
“Right. Leaves. What does a leaf do?”
“FALLS DOWN.”
“A leaf falls down. What else?”
“Goes brown,” said a girl called Priya-Rose, with contempt.
“Goes brown, thank you.” Adam got down on his heels. “Now. Here’s the difficult bit and I want everybody to think. A leaf falls down, but it doesn’t go straight down, does it. Marcus. What does it do?”
Marcus, who was six and who had thought about very little else since September, said: “It goes sideways a bit and then it stops in the air and then it goes.”
“Yes.”
“And sometimes it goes back up.”
“Sometimes it goes back up,” Adam agreed, “which is why leaves are better than rain, and which is what we’re doing today, and which is hard.”
They did it for forty minutes. Eleven children falling sideways and stopping in the air. Theo cried, once, about a thing that could not be established. Rosalie was the best in the room and did not appear to notice.
At the end, a five-year-old called Ada, who had never said a word to him in fifteen months, came up and held out her hand with a leaf in it that she had carried in her coat pocket since Tuesday.
“For the dance,” she said, and went to find her mother.
Adam was standing in the studio holding a dead maple leaf and had, briefly, an extremely difficult minute.
* * *
Jensen’s email came on Friday.
Adam. Have had the building assessed following the water damage. Rather than absorb into next April, propose the following: increase of 8% effective 1 January, and I’ll go halves with you on the ceiling. Let me know. Bob.
Adam read it four times.
It was an offer that helped him this month and hurt him from January, and it was also, and both men knew it, entirely reasonable.
He sat in the office with the ledger open and did the numbers for an hour and a quarter, and the numbers said what the numbers had been saying since the spring: the studio broke even in the months with five Saturdays.
At about seven he wrote a reply that said Bob, that’s fine, thank you for the ceiling, and did not send it, and went home.
* * *
The plasterer came the following Monday and was called Ivo and was extremely good and extremely slow, and Adam spent four hundred dollars watching a man skim a ceiling for six hours and found it the most restful day he had had in two years.
At about two Ivo said, without turning around, “You’ve had this before.”
“Sorry?”
“Water. This corner.” He pointed with the trowel. “Not this bad. But look at the joist, that stain’s old. Ten year, maybe more. Whoever had the building before you.”
“Furniture showroom.”
“Then they had a leak and they never fixed the gutter, and you’ve had it since.” Ivo went back to the ceiling. “Get the gutter done and this’ll last you twenty years. Don’t and I’ll be back in eight.”
Adam wrote GUTTER on his hand, and then remembered that it had been done, that Friday, by a man he had never met, while he was teaching.
He liked the days with tradesmen in them. He worked that out sitting on the floor of the corridor at half past three with a mug going cold: that what he liked was a problem with a price on it, and a man who could tell you what the price was, and the possibility of the problem then being over.
Almost nothing else in his life had that shape any more.
* * *
The Saturday before that, Mia had come in at twenty past nine and got herself sat down before anybody arrived, and he had put the chair out, in the considered place, with a water on the table.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
And that was it. That was the entire content of the exchange, and they both heard it, and eleven teenagers came in four minutes later and neither of them had to say anything else for two hours.
At the end of it, packing up, she said, without looking at him:
“Jensen’s put the rent up.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Lucy does your books, and Lucy tells me everything, and she thinks I’m going to make you deal with it.” Mia put her bag on her shoulder. “Eight percent in January.”
“He’s paying half the ceiling.”
“He’s paying half the ceiling because he’s a decent man who’s putting your rent up, and both of those things are true, and it doesn’t matter.” She got herself up out of the chair, on her own, and Adam did not offer, and neither of them mentioned that either. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Adam.”
“I genuinely don’t know yet,” he said, and it came out harder than he had meant, and he watched it land on her.
Mia looked at him for a moment.
“Right,” she said, and went out through the lobby and said something to Mrs. Fletcher on the way that made Mrs. Fletcher laugh.
Adam stood in the empty studio at half past twelve and listened to it, and could not have said why it was the worst thing that had happened to him all week.
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