Daniel lived on the second floor of a house with a porch too narrow for sitting on and a doorbell that sounded as if it resented the work.
He opened the door before Iris could ring it twice.
“You found it.”
“Your directions were alarmingly specific.”
“The navigation sends people to the alley.”
“I thought you didn’t trust navigation.”
“I trust it to be wrong in familiar ways.”
Upstairs, his apartment had tall windows, worn wooden floors and fewer possessions than she expected from someone who spent his working life looking at other people’s. A brown sofa. A deep armchair with a patch on one arm. Shelves of books, not arranged by color. On a small table near the window stood a blue ceramic bowl, badly off-center, containing keys and a rubber band.
Something smelled of lemon and roasting chicken.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He gave her a glass of wine and left her to look while he checked the oven. No performance of indifference. No hurried apology for his things.
She liked the armchair immediately. It was broad enough to sit curled up in, upholstered in soft brown wool, with a loose thread at one corner where someone had attempted a repair.
“Yours?” she asked.
He looked over from the kitchen. “Most of it.”
“The stitching.”
“Oh. Yes. Not my best work.”
“It appears to be your first work.”
“It was holding until you insulted it.”
She laughed and went to the bookshelf. Detective novels. A book about old railway hotels. Another about the history of household lighting. A fat paperback with a creased spine that turned out to be about a woman abandoning her career to restore a ruined garden.
“Grace gave me that,” he said from behind her. “I liked the garden.”
“Did you like the woman?”
“She made some expensive decisions.”
Iris turned, smiling. He set his glass down and came nearer.
“What?” she asked.
“I’ve been waiting for you to stop inspecting the shelves.”
“Oh.”
He kissed her. She put her free hand against his shoulder, felt him draw her close, and stopped caring whether the chicken was reliable.
A timer sounded from the kitchen.
He closed his eyes. “That’s not fair.”
She laughed against his mouth. “You chose to roast something.”
“I regret the whole menu.”
They ate at a small round table by the window. The chicken was very good, with potatoes crisped in the same pan and a green salad cut in pieces Iris could identify. He had apparently taken her criticism to heart.
“This is excellent,” she said.
“Good.”
“Do you make it for everyone?”
“No. Sometimes I make eggs.”
She considered him over her glass. “I have moved up in the world.”
“Considerably.”
He smiled, but there was color in his face. She liked having enough effect on him to interrupt his composure.
After dinner he put on music, giving her a look of warning before the first song began. It was soft guitar, entirely defensible. She stretched out on the sofa with her feet tucked beneath her while he made coffee.
His phone rang on the table.
“Dad,” he said. “Do you mind?”
“No.”
He answered and walked toward the window. Iris looked away, though she could hear him perfectly well.
“Yes, it arrived. Did you try it?”
A pause.
“Because it’s the correct size.”
Another pause, longer.
“No, I didn’t think you couldn’t do it yourself.”
Iris took a sip of coffee.
“I know. I know you didn’t ask.”
The conversation softened after that. Daniel listened, asked about the garden, then laughed at something his father said. When he hung up, he stood for a moment with the phone in his hand.
“The greenhouse catch?” Iris asked.
“Apparently he was happy with the wire.”
“Was it holding?”
“Yes.”
“Then you improved something he didn’t want improved.”
Daniel looked at her. “That’s not unprecedented.”
“Did he tell you so?”
“In detail.”
He sat beside her and put the phone down.
“I don’t know why I do it.”
“I imagine you like things fixed.”
“I do.”
“People are inconvenient that way.”
He smiled, but not entirely. She resisted the urge to turn the moment into a joke he could leave comfortably behind.
“Does he live alone?” she asked.
“Yes. Grace and I worry about it. He worries about us worrying.”
“Does he have people nearby?”
“A neighbor. Friends. A woman he claims is only interested in the garden.”
“Perhaps she’s very interested in the garden.”
“Apparently she comes for tea four times a week.”
Iris laughed. Daniel shook his head, smiling now.
“I’d like him to tell me things before they become an established fact.”
“Would you?”
He looked at her, caught the question beneath the question and sighed.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“A little. Again.”
He took her cup and put it beside his. Then he leaned toward her.
“This seems unfair.”
“I’m told people develop if you give them time.”
He kissed her before she could say anything else, and she let her own attention become pleasantly inefficient.
Later, she stood in his bathroom brushing her teeth with the toothbrush he had found, unopened, in a cupboard. She had brought a small overnight bag and left it in the car until after dinner, because she hadn’t known how to carry it up the stairs without making an announcement.
Now it sat on his bed, ordinary and welcome.
The room was cooler than hers, the quilt heavier. Daniel turned the lamp down, and she went to him without the strange newness of Friday, though there was still plenty to learn.
In the morning she discovered that he talked before coffee and she didn’t.
It was an unexpected incompatibility, and he seemed amused enough by it to risk a second attempt at conversation.
“Beautiful day,” he said.
She looked at him over the cup.
“All right. Too much.”
“Give me five minutes.”
“I can do five.”
He could do approximately ninety seconds. Then he wanted to know whether she liked eggs. She threw a clean tea towel at him. He caught it, grinning, and finally let her drink.
They drove separately to Wrenford. On the road, Iris found herself humming a song she’d disliked at Leo’s. She stopped, then began again because there was nobody in the car to make a remark.
At the store, reality had left three messages on the office phone.
Tess Reed had another interested party for the Mill Lane unit. She wasn’t applying pressure, she said, but needed to know whether Iris wished to put forward an application. The other messages concerned a vacuum cleaner and a box of stock delivered to the wrong entrance. Those, at least, had straightforward answers.
Iris called Tess back.
“Do you have the details of the smaller place you mentioned?”
“I can send them. It’s not the same exposure.”
“I know.”
“And the larger unit?”
“I can’t make that decision today.”
“Then I can’t hold it.”
“I understand.”
When the call ended, Iris stood looking at the picture of Leonard and the governor. She wanted the room. That had not changed. Wanting it did not make the money appear.
She opened her notebook.
By the time Daniel came down, she had made a list of questions for a small-business adviser at the library. She wanted to understand the costs she kept discovering after she thought she had counted them all.
“I’ve booked to see someone Wednesday,” she said.
“About the studio?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Tess has another interested tenant. I may lose the room.”
He put his case down. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
He looked as if he wanted to say something practical. She could almost see the suggestions lining up. Then he leaned against the doorframe and waited.
She smiled despite herself.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re working very hard not to help.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“It isn’t natural.”
“I know.”
He smiled back. “Would it be permissible to buy you lunch?”
“That depends. Are you hoping to fix anything?”
“My own hunger.”
“An excellent cause.”
At two, Iris went upstairs to meet Winnie, who had come in on a Monday because the held-goods audit had proved more interesting than the lunch club.
They checked four garments and two repairs. Everything was where it should be. Iris felt the steadying pleasure of a system working because people had been given time to use it.
Then Winnie stopped beside the navy suit.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you want me here?”
Iris looked at the careful line of the shoulders beneath the cover.
“I think so.”
“I’ll come in at ten.”
“Thank you.”
Winnie touched the hanger once, then turned back to the ledger. They worked for another hour without needing to fill the silence.
At closing, Daniel had already gone to a meeting in Providence. On the desk lay a small paper bag from the bakery. Inside were two biscuits and a note.
For the five minutes before conversation is possible.
She read it twice, smiling, then put it in her handbag.
The smaller room’s details arrived by email as she was shutting down the computer. One hundred and eighty square feet. No street window. Shared entrance at the side of a building behind the pharmacy. Six-month term.
She could fit a sewing machine in it. A mirror, perhaps, if she used the door. Not the rail of clothes, not the cutting table, not the future she had photographed.
She downloaded the particulars anyway.