On Tuesday morning a man on the fourth floor asked Mara whether they could change the weather.
She was carrying two empty ice buckets. Behind him the curtains were open on a day as gray as the carpet.
“I'll put it through,” she said.
He smiled, relieved that she had understood the joke. She liked him for not asking it again.
Priya was halfway into the linen closet with a cart that wouldn't follow. She pulled it backward, turned it and tried again. The bad wheel squealed. Mara put down the buckets and took the front end.
“Ready?”
Priya braced a foot against the door. Between them they bumped it over the metal strip. Mara let go first, and the cart rolled against Priya's stomach.
“Sorry.”
“Keep hold till I'm dead.”
They worked a room together because the guests were arriving early and Simon had said there would be a tip. Priya opened the windows while Mara stripped the bed. The fitted sheet came away on one side and held fast on the other, snapping a corner back toward Mara's face. Priya took the other end. The mattress lifted. Mara reached beneath it, freed the corner and got a palmful of something hard.
It was a child's plastic cow.
She stood it on the desk. Priya turned it toward the window before they went on with the bed.
By twelve they had finished the early room and two others. The tip had not appeared. Simon passed them near the elevator holding a roll of cable and said he was chasing it up. Mara asked him to bring it back alive.
At lunch she suggested Friday for another meal. Something outside town, perhaps, with a view. Priya said she had something on Friday but would send a message if it changed. Mara began putting the other women into the seats around an imagined table, then Priya interrupted her.
“Can you take me somewhere after work? West side. Four fifteen.”
“Which bit?”
Priya gave her a street. Mara knew it, or thought she did. There was a store near there where she'd once bought a cabinet that came home in too many pieces.
“I'm looking at an apartment,” Priya said. “I asked last week, but this is when she could show me. Will you come in?”
“To look?”
“The bike. Arun says he'll carry it up, but I don't know where it'll go when it's there. I'd like someone else to see.”
She took a folded paper from the back of her phone case. On it she had written the width of a couch, the length of a bed and, beneath both, Bike including handles. Mara smiled.
“Arun's contribution?”
“He made me put including.”
Mara handed the paper back. “I'll come.”
They finished at three thirty. Priya came out wearing a cardigan over her work shirt, carrying a folder and a small tape measure she'd borrowed from maintenance. She said she had to return it tomorrow before six or they would tell everyone she had left the country with hotel property.
The afternoon traffic moved in short grudging bursts. Arun was with his father until six. Priya had sent him a photograph of the front of the building, and he had asked which windows would be his. She had taken the photograph after dark because she wanted to know what the street sounded like when people were home.
“Was it all right?” Mara asked.
“A dog had a lot to say. Inside a house, though. I can live with that.”
Mara turned onto a street narrower than she remembered. At one house a man had put a couch on the sidewalk, with a sheet of paper taped to its back. Across from it, three brown steps led up to a building with a strip of garden made mostly of gravel. Somebody had put basil on a downstairs sill.
A woman in a red raincoat was waiting at the gate. Priya waved to her and got out, pulling the folder from beneath the seat belt. Mara locked the car and followed.
The woman was called Janet. She shook both their hands, took them up the stairs and apologized for the smell of toast.
“Downstairs. It travels. They haven't set the alarm off this week, so we're doing well.”
She unlocked the second-floor door and stood aside. Priya went in first. Mara waited while she walked from the small hall into the living room. There was nothing in it. A rectangle of paler paint showed where the last person had hung a picture, a long darker stripe beneath it where a couch had rested against the wall.
Priya put her folder on the floor, opened it and took out the paper.
“Our couch would go there.” She pointed to the stripe. “Not all the way across.”
Mara held one end of the tape while Priya drew it toward the corner. The end slipped. It flew back with a sharp sound and both of them jumped.
“Maintenance will hear that,” Mara said.
Priya laughed and tried again, this time hooking it beneath the edge of the trim. She measured the wall, checked her paper and made a little mark beside the couch.
Janet showed them the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Priya tried the bathroom window. It opened over a narrow yard, letting in a smell of wet wood and someone's lunch.
“That opens,” she said, pleased.
Mara looked into the tub. There was a little shelf at one end wide enough for bottles without having to balance them along the edge. She could picture Priya's folded towel on it. She remembered its faded edge from the time Priya had lent her a bag of swimming things.
The front bedroom was larger. Priya stood in the middle, turning slowly, then went back to the smaller one. Mara followed. Through the window they could see the upper branches of a tree; a dry seed pod struck the glass and rattled away.
“His bed would be against there,” Priya said. “Desk under the window. He'll complain the sun's on the screen. He complained when it wasn't.”
“Give him the bigger one.”
“I might.”
She put a hand on the wall, thinking. Mara went to the door and swung it toward the corner. There was a broad space behind it that the open door had hidden.
“How wide did he say?”
Priya checked the paper. Mara held the door at a right angle and Priya stretched the tape along the wall behind it. The bike would project past the door's width, but there was space before the bed would begin. Priya crouched and laid her forearm along the floor where the front wheel might be, then moved it a little.
“Dirty tire against his clean bed,” she said.
“Put something down. Like we do under the wet bags.”
“A mat. We have that black one.”
She got up too quickly and caught the tape against the door handle. Mara took it before it recoiled, and Priya stayed where she was, laughing with one palm pressed to her forehead.
“You and that door,” Mara said.
“Don't tell him how we worked it out.”
Mara went into the front bedroom and looked at the stripe of light on the floor. It was quieter than the room at the back. Priya could have a bed that didn't need to be pushed aside to get at anything else. She stood beside Mara and looked too.
“I'd have this one,” she said.
“Your curtains are short.”
“I know. They'll look stupid.”
She took out her phone and photographed the window, then the space behind the other door. While Mara put the tape away, Priya called Arun and held the phone so they could both hear him.
“It won't fit,” he said at once.
“We measured.”
“The handlebars?”
“Especially the handlebars.”
Mara began laughing, and Priya moved away before she could infect the conversation. By the time the call ended she had promised him the photographs and said no, she wasn't bringing his bike over tonight to try it. He could come for a second look.
Janet was waiting in the living room, answering a message. Priya asked when they could come back with Arun, and whether there was anything else she needed to bring for the application. Janet gave her two possible times and a short list. Priya wrote it inside the folder, asked about the ordinary costs she had noted down and checked the answers against her figures. Mara stood by the door, holding the tape measure.
They left with an appointment, not keys. Priya folded the paper along its old crease, but it would no longer fit neatly in her phone case. She put it in the folder instead.
Outside, the man with the couch was peeling the sign away. FREE, it said, in large black letters. He looked at them and lifted it.
“You want it?”
Priya looked at Mara. They both knew precisely how long her present couch was, how much space it would leave, how its bad cushion could face the window if she turned it the other way.
“Not today,” she said.
The man lowered the sign. “That's what everybody says.”
Mara unlocked her car. Priya put the folder on her lap and took out her phone again. Arun had sent a picture of the bike from above, the handlebars nearly filling the frame. Beneath it he had written I can turn them.
Priya showed Mara.
“Tell him after we've carried it up,” Mara said.
“You coming back for that?”
“Someone has to protect the door.”
Priya smiled and kept the photograph open while Mara pulled out into the traffic.