Wednesday, November 4
The man at the Bellwether's side door didn't know Willa's name. He did know Jo's, but said she wasn't here yet.
“I'm supposed to be,” Willa said.
“I'm sure.”
He held the door open without letting her through it. Behind him she could see a staircase, a coil of yellow cable, and the back of a woman going somewhere with purpose. Willa had arrived fourteen minutes early. She wished she'd made the mistake in the other direction.
The woman turned around.
“Willa?”
“Yes.”
“Denise. Come on.”
The man moved aside, smiling now. It wasn't his fault. Willa thanked him and followed Denise into the building.
“Have you been here before?”
“In the audience.”
“That's the easy route.”
Denise wore sneakers and a cardigan with two different pens in one pocket. She took Willa down a passage with dressing rooms on one side. The biggest had a shower. Willa tried not to look as if that interested her.
“This one's yours,” Denise said, stopping at a smaller room.
There was a mirror with bulbs around it, a chair, and two hooks on the wall. One hook was bent. On the table lay a packet of tissues, unopened.
Willa put her tote on the chair.
“All right?”
“It's great.”
“Can be cold. Bring something for the wait.”
Willa touched the back of the chair, as if checking that it was real furniture. She'd performed in a converted garage with an excellent sound system and a bucket behind the toilet. She had done a corporate lunch where she'd changed in a room full of stacked high chairs. The bent hook felt generous.
Denise led her through to the stage. For a moment Willa thought they'd come out in the wrong place. The space was too wide, the microphone too small. The red seats climbed away from her, ending at a balcony with a gold rail.
“Eleven hundred,” Denise said.
She hadn't asked.
“That's with the balcony?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I was hoping for a balcony.”
Denise smiled and put a hand in her cardigan pocket.
There was a piano pushed back against the wall and a table under a work light. Near it a man was unpacking something from a padded bag. Denise showed Willa the entry she would use and where she could stand without being in anybody's way. Then she left her alone with the room.
Willa went to the microphone. It was off. She moved the stand up a little. The simple sliding resistance felt the same as it did at Rafi's, which was a relief.
She said, “Hello.”
A sound came back from the room, not an echo exactly, more like the word had reached other things before returning to her. She tried it again, softer.
“Are you being religious?” Beth asked from behind her.
Willa stepped away from the microphone.
Beth had two cups of coffee and a bag of bagels balanced against her hip. She held one cup out.
“Black. I didn't ask, I guessed.”
“Correct.”
“I guessed you were still you.”
She put the bag down on the table. There were names on the cups in thick black pen, but no name on Willa's.
“Is mine stolen?”
“Mine is. That's why I know what's in it.”
They drank facing the room. Beth bent to pick up a length of tape from the floor and put it in her pocket.
“Don't do that,” Willa said.
“What?”
“Pick up every bit of the building.”
Beth looked at the pocket, almost surprised to find her hand there.
“Habit.”
She had her own job starting on the twentieth, Willa knew. She'd mentioned it twice in messages, lightly, as if it were a restaurant reservation. Here in Jo's workplace the date seemed less casual.
“Who's doing all this when you leave?”
“Somebody who's paid.”
“You're paid.”
“Yes. Somebody else who's paid.”
She showed Willa a photograph on her phone of a rack of costumes in a van. Willa enlarged the picture and tried to determine why one of the hats had antlers.
“That's the new show?”
“That's the old show. They sent it so I could see what I'm working with.”
“What are you working with?”
“An astonishing confidence in bungee cords.”
Beth put the phone away. Willa didn't ask what they were paying her. If it was less than Jo paid, she might have to hear herself say so.
Mae came through the audience with a man Willa didn't recognize. She waved, stopped to talk to the man, then came up the side steps alone.
“Glad you made it.”
“Didn't have to leave the state.”
“You'd be amazed what interferes.”
Mae shook hands with Beth, who offered a bagel and named all the kinds in a tone that suggested there would be a consequence for choosing wrongly. Mae took a plain one. Willa took sesame.
They spoke about the filmed evening. Mae wanted Willa's twenty to stand by itself, she said, and would like to hear it well before the night. She asked what Willa was thinking of opening with.
“The driving stuff, probably.”
“Good. It's yours.”
Willa glanced at Beth, but her sister was looking for a knife in the bag.
Mae had a sheet of paper folded lengthwise. She unfolded it, then folded it again.
“I don't need an answer now. Just don't spend the first five minutes telling them who you're related to. We'll know.”
“I wasn't going to.”
Mae nodded. Willa wished immediately that she'd said something better.
The stage door opened and Jo came in wearing a red coat, carrying her own handbag. The man from outside followed with a paper tray of coffee. He looked much less certain now. Jo said hello to Denise, hello to the man at the padded bag, hello to somebody Willa couldn't see, and reached her daughters as though she'd been trying to find them for hours.
“Oh, good. You've fed her.”
“Coffee?” Beth asked.
“Mine's coming.”
The man with the tray came toward them. He caught a cable with one shoe and tried to recover, a small jolt, the cups shifting in their cardboard holes. One tipped. Coffee spread across the table and down the front of his trousers.
There was a burst of movement: Beth grabbing the bagels, Denise reaching for the cups, the man apologizing into everyone's voices.
Jo caught his wrist.
“Hot?”
“No. I'm all right. I'm sorry.”
“Look at me. Is it hot?”
He shook his head. His face was bright red.
“Then you're doing better than I am. Mine's in my bag.”
She opened her handbag and looked inside. Willa knew there was no coffee in there. Jo held it open for the man to see.
“I've been carrying a hard candy for three presidents. It's got its own lining.”
He looked, breathed, and laughed once, gratefully.
Denise had found a roll of paper towels. Beth was wiping the table. Jo kept talking to the man, asking where he'd got the coffee and whether they were always that careful to make sure nobody burned themselves. He began to tell her about the machine in the lobby. By the time he joined the cleanup, he was telling them the coffee was on his shift and he could replace it.
“Fine,” Jo said. “But I want the one that makes me twenty-eight.”
“That's extra.”
“There you are. He's in charge now.”
She smiled at him and took her coat off. The room went back to work.
Willa stood with the bagels in her arms. Jo looked at her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, give me a bagel. I'm only eating them because you're here.”
There weren't enough chairs by the table. Jo sat on the piano bench, Willa took a folding chair, and Beth stood. Mae sat cross-legged on the floor with her papers on one knee. The man from the padded bag introduced himself as Owen, sound, and asked Jo to do something into a microphone so he could hear the room.
“Something, or something good?”
“Your choice.”
Jo stood in the coffee-dark patch by the table. She waited until the stage was quiet, then put a hand to her ear.
“I'm retiring from touring. Not from talking. Some of you have leapt to a very hopeful conclusion.”
Willa smiled into her coffee.
“People keep asking what I'll do with myself. As though I've spent forty years being delivered places without a self. I'll go home. I'll open a drawer and know what's in it. I stayed in a hotel last year where the bedside drawer had a Bible, a room-service menu and an empty condom packet. Finally, three stages of a marriage in the correct order.”
Beth's head went down. Mae laughed, then looked at Owen, who made a small adjustment on his board.
“I'll miss hotels. At home, if I put a towel on the floor, it's a choice I've made. In a hotel it means I'm a person with needs.”
“That's good here,” Owen said.
“Don't tell me. I'm a person with needs.”
She went back to the bench. Willa could hear where Jo had chosen to pause, how she had made the opening wider after Mae's first laugh. She wanted a room like that, where a small adjustment in her voice reached the last row.
Denise asked about a piece of furniture Jo had requested for part of the set. Beth took out her phone. There were photographs; there had apparently been a discussion about height. Jo had forgotten this discussion and wanted the original chair.
“The original chair is in your kitchen,” Beth said.
“Then we know where it is.”
“And you sit on it every day.”
“Not that day.”
Beth closed her eyes briefly. Jo looked toward the red seats.
“I can come look,” Denise said.
“Don't start,” Beth told Willa, who hadn't spoken.
“I wasn't.”
“You were breathing funny.”
“That's my supportive breathing.”
Jo laughed. Beth tried not to, failed, and opened the photograph again.
Later, when everybody was occupied, Willa went back to the microphone. She wasn't sure if it was on now.
“Can I try something?” she asked Owen.
He nodded.
She told the first minute of the driving set. At first she felt ridiculous. The bright empty seats made each word feel slightly too large. Then she slowed down, held the question about confidence, and found a place to stand that let her forget how much floor there was.
From the back Jo said, “Don't swallow the last word.”
Willa stopped.
“Which one?”
“Mattress. Give it to us.”
She tried the line again. She heard the difference, hated that she heard it, and did it once more. Mae was talking to Denise in the aisle. She stopped talking long enough to listen.
When Willa came off the stage, Beth had saved her a bagel in a paper napkin. The coffee stain was almost dry. Her mother was already back at the microphone, saying something Willa couldn't hear because Owen had turned it off again.