Sunday, November 8
Jo called at nine forty while Willa was putting on one sock.
“Are you awake?”
“No. This is my morning answering service.”
“Good. Come over.”
“I have things.”
“What things?”
Willa looked at the sock in her hand. She did have things. Laundry, a shopping list, a set to send Mae, the conversation she hadn't yet had with Beth.
“I'll make eggs,” Jo said. “Bring the notebook.”
That changed the invitation. Willa found the other sock and went.
Her mother had put the small kitchen table by the window. There was a stack of cards on it, a pencil, and a plate with toast crumbs. She'd made only one cup of coffee. When Willa arrived, Jo took out another mug without asking what she wanted.
“You ate,” Willa said.
“I got hungry.”
“You offered eggs.”
“I have eggs. Nothing's happened to them.”
Jo opened the refrigerator, and Willa went to fill the kettle. On the counter stood the brass screw from the wastebasket. She didn't mention it.
“Good room last night,” Jo said.
“Usually is.”
“The little woman at the front. She knew your sister.”
“She didn't know Beth.”
“I mean she knew her.”
Jo broke two eggs into a bowl, beat them with a fork, and gave Willa the bowl while she reached for a pan. Willa kept beating them because she'd been given something to do.
“The room wasn't all good,” she said.
“No room's all good.”
“The first part.”
“Too many introductions. You brought us out one at a time. Mother, husband, sister. It's not a wedding.”
Willa put the bowl down. That was the sort of thing she usually had to work out herself, days afterward, listening to a recording she didn't like.
“You think I should start with Beth?”
“Do you?”
“I don't know.”
“Then don't yet.”
Jo held out her hand for the bowl and poured the eggs into the pan. The butter hissed.
“I do the driving first.”
“That's what Mae liked.”
“What did you like?”
Jo looked up.
“I liked you having fun.”
Willa waited, suspecting the rest.
“You've been good for years,” Jo said. “You haven't always enjoyed it.”
“I've enjoyed it.”
“You've endured a lot of it very well.”
Jo turned the heat down, and Willa sat. She wanted to argue, but she remembered her shoulders in the June recording.
Her mother slid the eggs onto a plate and put it in front of her. They were a little too soft, the way Jo liked them. Willa ate them anyway.
“Read the chair,” Jo said.
“You heard the chair.”
“I want the bits around it.”
Willa found the page. Without the room's noise, the lines looked impudent and thin. She read the first one without looking up.
“Stop,” Jo said.
“What?”
“You're reading it as though I found it in your schoolbag.”
“Then don't say stop.”
“All right. Go.”
Willa tried again. Jo sat with her forearms on the table, listening. She didn't smile until Willa reached the chair's lack of plans for the kitchen.
“There.”
“The kitchen?”
“The chair doesn't make plans. That's the man. It's not furniture. That's why it's funny.”
Willa drew a line underneath the sentence.
“The stool's too much, maybe.”
“The stool's good. But let the chair be her new man before you bring him a friend.”
“Husband.”
“Same trouble.”
They worked on the order. Not all of it improved. Jo wanted to cut the mismatched glasses, which Willa liked because she'd seen Beth holding them up. Willa put a bracket around it and kept it.
“It's less funny.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
“Because it is.”
Jo looked at her, then shrugged. “Your set.”
That was worth nearly as much as the laugh.
Willa finished the eggs, put her plate by the sink, and got a fresh piece of paper. For ten minutes the kitchen was full of crossing out. Her mother didn't take the pencil from her. She waited while Willa found a word, offered one worse, laughed when Willa said so. The word they eventually chose was Willa's.
At eleven, Jo's phone rang. She looked at the screen and answered.
“Mae. Yes. She's here.”
Willa bent her head over the paper.
“No, we're working.”
She said it so simply that Willa couldn't help looking up.
Jo handed over the phone. Mae asked whether Willa could send her last night's running order, even a rough list.
“I don't have a recording.”
“I don't need a recording.”
“There are things I'd change.”
“Then change them. Send what you want me to see.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. Don't send me an apology before the file.”
Willa smiled.
“And the twenty for the theater. The actual twenty. You'll have time to work it in a room?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I'll call you this week.”
Willa gave the phone back. Her mother listened for a moment, made a note, and ended the call.
“What?” Willa asked.
“What what?”
“What did she say after?”
“Something about a lighting package.”
“Oh.”
Jo leaned across to see the new order. “That's better.”
Willa didn't go home immediately. Jo found a container of soup and asked her to hold it while she looked for a lid. The wrong lid was on a container of buttons. Willa tried it on the soup anyway.
“I'm living dangerously,” she said.
“Since breakfast.”
The warmth was ordinary enough to be almost embarrassing. She wanted to call someone and say she was at her mother's, working, as if other people's mornings could be made to stop and look.
On the way home she stopped for groceries. At the checkout she added a bag of good coffee instead of the one on sale, then put the sale bag back exactly where she'd taken it from. She felt paid already, which was foolish. Nobody had given her any new money.
She called Beth from outside the store. It rang out.
At home she put away the groceries, copied the running order into a document, and sent it to Mae. She removed the first sentence of the email, as requested. She sent the theater twenty too. At the bottom she wrote, Looking forward to it, and didn't delete that.
Beth called at four.
“Sorry. We were out.”
“It's fine.”
“How was it?”
“Last night?”
“No, your trip to the moon. Yes.”
Willa sat down on the floor beside the grocery bags she hadn't folded.
“Good.”
“Did she come?”
“Yeah. Mae too.”
“Brave.”
“I asked them.”
“I know. I meant for them.”
Willa smiled and rubbed a finger across the seam in the floor.
“I used some of the apartment.”
There was a pause.
“What do you mean?”
“In the set. Some of the stuff from Thursday.”
“Which stuff?”
“The chair. And the alarms.”
Beth said nothing.
“It wasn't—people liked it. It was about you being capable. How well you've done it.”
“Done what?”
“Leaving.”
A sound came through the phone, metal on china. Willa heard Simon say something too far away to understand. Beth answered him with, “Just a minute.”
Then, more quietly: “You told a room I was leaving my husband?”
Willa looked at the grocery bags.
“Yes.”
“Did you say my name?”
“Yes.”
“Was Mom there for that part?”
“Yes.”
The answers seemed to get louder as they became shorter.
“I was going to tell you,” Willa said. “That's why I'm calling.”
Beth breathed in. Willa waited for the words that would let her explain the set, the actual shape of it, how it wasn't just revealing something for the pleasure of seeing a face change. She wanted Beth to hear the chair line, and was ashamed of wanting it badly enough to have it ready.
“Are you at home?” Beth asked.
“Yes.”
“I'm not talking about it now.”
“Beth.”
“I'm not talking about it with him in the next room.”
“I know.”
“No. You knew.”
Willa held the phone tighter.
“I'm sorry.”
Beth ended the call without saying goodbye.
For a while Willa listened to the silence after it. Then she put the phone down, opened the email she'd sent Mae, and reread it. It was a good running order. Better than the one she'd had last night.
She went back to the notebook and wrote out the mother's version of the marriage bit, as much as she could remember, next to her own. There were real things she could change in hers. She worked on the sentence about a hotel room until she had taken all the hotel out of it.
At six her mother sent a message: Thought of a better word.
Willa opened it. She laughed, then covered her mouth although she was alone.
She wrote back, Mine's better.
Jo replied, Unfortunately yes.
Willa left the phone beside the page and kept working until she could no longer read the words without saying them.