Winnie opened her door wearing slippers, an apron and an expression that suggested she had been expecting trouble but not this particular delivery.
“Oh,” she said when she saw Iris’s face. “Come in.”
Her apartment smelled of coffee and furniture polish. A half-finished crossword lay on the table, a pencil balanced across it. The television played silently in the corner, where two people appeared to be disagreeing about a kitchen.
Iris sat down and began to cry before she had removed her coat.
It was not dignified crying. She could hear herself making the sort of sounds she had once hushed in Beth at the supermarket, as if sorrow became less real when it embarrassed other people. Winnie handed her tissues, then took the coat without asking.
For several minutes she said nothing at all.
When Iris could speak, she told her what had happened. The job, the card, the dates. The sentence about five weeks and a marriage. She left out the intimate details because they belonged to the part of the relationship she did not want comfort to expose.
Winnie listened. At the end, she put a cup in front of her.
“I’d give him a good talking-to.”
“No.”
“Not literally.”
“No,” Iris said again, more quietly. “I don’t want that.”
Winnie sat back. For once she looked uncertain what to do with her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I want to make you feel better.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know enough to tell you what to do.”
“I don’t know enough either. That’s rather the problem.”
They sat with their tea. The people on television appeared to have resolved the kitchen and moved on to a staircase.
“Do you think I’m asking too much?” Iris asked.
Winnie sighed. “I think you’ve had a horrible month. I think a man can want you very much and still be bad at making a place for you. I don’t know what he’s willing to learn.”
“Neither does he.”
“Then perhaps that’s his work for a bit.”
Iris looked down at the tissue twisted in her hands. She had come hoping, in some unacknowledged corner of herself, that Winnie would say she’d been foolish and send her back before the day became permanent.
Instead her friend reached for the crossword.
“Seven letters,” she said. “A place for keeping things safe.”
“Cupboard?”
“Eight.”
“Cabinet.”
Winnie counted. “There you are. You’ve improved my afternoon.”
Iris laughed through the remains of her crying. They spent ten minutes on the crossword, disagreeing about a bird neither had ever seen. The ordinary foolishness made room around the pain without pretending to remove it.
At three, Iris had to leave. The house viewers would be there soon, and she had promised the agent to be out. Winnie offered to take her shopping for the studio chair.
“I can’t buy a chair today.”
“You don’t have to buy it. You can sit in several and insult them.”
This seemed a task within her present abilities.
They went to a secondhand furniture warehouse at the edge of town, a place Iris had driven past for years without entering. Inside, chairs stood in ranks under strip lighting, each with a ticket tied to its arm like a luggage label for a journey none had taken.
Winnie rejected the first because it looked too much like a dentist’s waiting room. Iris rejected the second because a fitting customer might never get out of it again. The third made an alarming noise when Winnie sat down.
“That’s personal,” she said, getting up.
At the back they found a wooden chair with upholstered arms, a firm seat and a rather ugly floral covering. It was not elegant, but it was comfortable. The frame was sound. Iris ran her hand along the arm and felt the smooth wear beneath her palm.
“Forty dollars,” Winnie read.
“I could recover it.”
“Yes.”
“Blue, perhaps.”
“Not beige.”
“I wasn’t going to say beige.”
“You looked dangerously sensible.”
Iris sat down again. Her feet reached the floor. The armrests were at the right height. A customer could sit to put shoes on, or catch breath after the stairs, or explain a repair without remaining politely vertical.
She bought it.
The man at the desk offered delivery for another twenty dollars. She accepted rather than asking Winnie to help wrestle it into a car neither owned in the appropriate shape. Delivery after the lease began. The receipt carried the Mason Street address.
Outside, Winnie squeezed her arm.
“That’s one thing.”
“Yes.”
A chair, paid for, on its way to a room where she intended to work.
The agent called at five.
The couple were interested. They would speak to their lender and come back through the office. They liked the garden, the kitchen light and the space for a child. They wanted the roof inspection before committing to anything.
“Of course,” Iris said.
She sat in her car outside the warehouse while Winnie waited beside her own. The house could be sold. The studio could open. Daniel could go to Oregon. All these things could happen without waiting for her feelings to become convenient.
At home she made soup from vegetables that needed using and ate two bowls because she was hungry. Then she checked her phone.
A message from Daniel.
I understand what you asked. I won’t call tonight. I’m sorry I hurt you.
She read it once, then again. It did not ask her to reassure him. It also did not tell her what came next.
She put the phone down without answering.
On Sunday morning, she woke with the brief, merciful blankness before memory. Then it returned. The kitchen. His face. The door closing.
She lay still until staying in bed became less restful than getting up.
Downstairs, the tulips had begun to shed petals. She gathered the fallen ones, changed the water and cut the stems a little shorter. They would last another day, perhaps two.
The house was quiet. Too quiet to ignore.
She put on music, chose the album herself and made breakfast. Afterward she took her own blue blouse upstairs, the one with a cuff she’d meant to repair for months. She sat at the machine by the bedroom window and removed the damaged stitching.
The work required enough attention to occupy her hands, not enough to conceal her thoughts. She missed him. She was angry. She wanted the morning back before he had spoken.
She finished the cuff anyway.
At noon Beth called. Iris told her she was having a difficult weekend and did not tell her how to feel about Daniel. Her daughter listened, asked if she wanted company and accepted no without making it sound like abandonment.
“Next weekend?” Beth asked.
“The store closes Friday.”
“I know. I thought I might come Saturday. Help with the room.”
Iris looked at the repaired cuff, the neat blue line where the old damage had been.
“Yes,” she said. “I’d like that.”
After the call she wrote the delivery date for the chair on her calendar. Then she wrote Beth’s name on Saturday.
There were still things to look forward to. She did not feel them brightly yet. She could put them down in ink.