Mae set down the coffee.
“Okay.”
“Don't do that set.”
Nora had intended to begin with something less abrupt. She'd heard the smoother version while they waited for the others to leave. It concerned expectations and an unfortunate moment and what she would prefer to happen next. Now the room was empty and she could not make herself begin anywhere except there.
Mae pulled out the chair beside Nora's. She didn't sit in it.
“It's a workshop.”
“Yes. And now I'm telling you. Don't do it.”
“I'm not pretending we didn't talk about it.”
“We didn't talk about you performing it.”
“No, but—”
“I said it was mine. You said you'd give me notes.”
Mae rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I did give you notes.”
“Some of them were in a different font.”
“Nora.”
She didn't want that tone. It was the one Mae used when Nora had made a joke because she was about to cry, and usually it was accurate, which made it more insulting now.
“You knew what I meant,” Nora said.
“Yes.”
The word stopped her. She had built several minutes of speech around getting Mae to acknowledge that. Now Mae had done it, and there was nothing satisfying about the sound.
“I knew you wanted to do it yourself.” Mae finally sat. “I didn't know how to ask you.”
“Then you should have kept not asking.”
Mae looked toward the door. Nora could hear Toby saying something about lunch, followed by Miriam explaining that she was not about to send six people out separately to achieve sandwiches.
Mae lowered her voice. “I tried it last night. Alone. I was going to talk to you today.”
“You did. You introduced me.”
“I mean before.”
“But not before doing it.”
Mae looked at her hands.
The room was very quiet around the hallway noise. Nora had made this happen. They were in the conversation she'd demanded, and she kept wanting some other version of it where Mae had not already chosen.
“It's the best thing I've had in months,” Mae said.
“It's the best thing I've written in months.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I fucking do. Who do you think I think wrote it?”
There she was. Not the woman a whole theater understood before she'd finished the setup. Nora's friend, angry, frightened, unable to keep her face pleasant in a room where that was supposed to be unnecessary.
Nora stood up. She had forgotten she'd been sitting until her knee struck the table.
Mae reached for the coffees before they tipped. She caught both. The simple competence of the gesture almost undid Nora.
“I'll open with it,” Nora said. “It's twelve minutes. That's the slot. You can go back to what you were doing before Monday.”
Mae's mouth tightened.
“I'm building the new hour around that.”
“Since Monday.”
“Yes.”
“So build it around something else.”
Mae pushed a cup toward the center of the table. “I can't have the opener do the same shape of material.”
“The opener?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. That's the problem.”
“I'm not talking about you like you're some—” Mae stopped. “Look. If we both do versions, it's bad for you. It's bad for the show. The opening is a chance to do something new.”
“It was new.”
Neither of them moved.
Nora could go to Miriam. She could tell the small room what had happened in the smaller one. Miriam might believe her. Probably would believe her; there were drafts, messages, fifteen years of writing credits in the places credits were actually recorded. But this was still Mae Bell's comeback. Miriam's job was not to get Nora on television at any cost. The honest likely result of making them choose now was not Mae graciously surrendering the central twelve minutes and waving Nora toward the lights.
It was Nora outside this building with a rightful set and no one scheduled to hear it.
She hated that she could see it so clearly. Usually seeing things clearly was what she offered.
Mae said, “We'll make you something better.”
“How generous.”
“I don't mean it like that.”
“Then try meaning what I'm saying. I want this one.”
Mae lifted her face. “I need it.”
For a second Nora wanted to hit her. Not in the abstract. She wanted the flat physical interruption of a hand against Mae's cheek, and the thought frightened her enough that she took a step backward.
Mae saw something in the movement. Her face changed.
“I'm not asking you to be fine about it.”
“Good.”
“We have ten days.”
“You have ten days. I apparently have ten days and your existing job.”
“Then we do less of the existing job.”
“How much less?”
“Whatever you need.”
That was a thing Mae would say and mean when she said it. Later there would be another emergency. There would be somebody waiting in a room, somebody already paid, a car idling downstairs. The whatever would become one thing, just one thing, which of course Nora could do, she was the only one who could do it that fast.
Mae stood. She was not taller than Nora, but she had always looked taller standing still. “You're good at this.”
“At which part?”
“The part you want. Not just the part you think I want.”
“I don't need you to encourage me right now.”
“All right.”
“I need you not to take it.”
Mae's eyes shone. She blinked once, hard.
The door opened a few inches. Toby put his head through. “Any allergies?”
“Not now,” Mae said, too sharply.
He withdrew.
Nora picked up her bag.
“Don't do that to him,” she said.
“I'll apologize.”
“Yes. You will.”
Mae looked as though Nora had slapped her after all.
Nora went into the hallway. Toby was bent over a takeout menu. She told him chicken would be fine and offered to carry the order back, because her mouth apparently worked independently of the rest of her.
By the time she got outside, she had volunteered to collect six lunches.
The cold air felt good. It was a bright, windy afternoon, the sort that made the city seem pleased with how little it cared about you. Nora walked past the sandwich shop before she noticed, then went back.
At the counter she read the six orders off her phone. The woman taking them asked whether she wanted the sandwiches labeled.
“Yes, please.”
“Names or what's in them?”
“Names.”
The woman held her marker ready.
Nora said, “Chicken.”
The woman waited.
“Sorry. Nora.”
She stood by the display of bags of chips and looked up Low Ceiling on her phone.
Same website. New photographs. Gloria's face had acquired a deeper line beside her mouth. The stage was still in the corner. Somebody had replaced the old red curtain with a dark blue one and left the same terrible painting beside it, an oil portrait of a ship that looked sorry to be on water.
She found the number. She saved it.
Then she put away the phone because the sandwiches were ready.
Mae was kind to Toby when Nora got back. Not conspicuously kind. She asked him about a cable that had been giving him trouble, and when he showed her, she listened. Nora was glad and furious to see it.
She stayed through the afternoon. There was work she had agreed to do, and doing it required much less of her than leaving would have. She wrote down the places Mae moved too quickly. She helped Miriam cut a transition that referred to a bit no longer in the show. When Mae came to the new section again, Nora said, “We heard that already.”
Mae looked at her.
Miriam said, “Good. Move on.”
For the next hour, Nora didn't laugh once.
At home she put the groceries away and discovered she had bought enough cilantro for four people who liked cilantro. She lived alone. She liked cilantro in the quantities restaurants used to suggest they had heard of Mexico.
The apartment was still unfamiliar in ways she found embarrassing after eighteen months. She couldn't remember which kitchen drawer she'd put the can opener in because in her mind it still lived to the left of Daniel's stove. Her own stove had nothing to its left except a narrow cabinet too small for any object that existed.
She ate standing over the sink, then sat down and got a plate because she was not going to have a whole evening be visible in the position of her body.
Her mother called while she was washing up.
“Ben says you're coming Saturday.”
“It's your birthday. Why wouldn't I?”
“Last year you were in Phoenix.”
“Last year you came to Phoenix.”
“To see the show. On my birthday.”
“And you liked it.”
“I did. I'd like lunch this year.”
Nora shut off the water. Ellen did not sound wounded. She sounded interested in getting the details settled so she could stop thinking about lunch and return to whatever she was actually doing.
“I'll be there.”
“Can you get me? I don't want Ben paying for everybody's parking on top of the meal.”
“He doesn't have to pay for my parking.”
“Then tell him that.”
“I'll get you.”
“Noon. The reservation's one.”
“Noon,” Nora repeated.
“Not your noon.”
“There are regional differences.”
“Fine. Use mine.”
Nora wrote it on the back of an envelope. ELLEN. NOON. SATURDAY. She put the envelope beside the coffee maker, where she would have to see it repeatedly before she could forget it.
“Are you all right?” Ellen asked.
The question caught her in the middle of capping the pen.
“Why?”
“You sound like you're trying to get me off the phone.”
“I'm not.”
“All right.”
She could tell her mother. It would feel good for half an hour. Then Ellen would want to know what Nora was going to do, and after that she'd want to know why Nora didn't do the thing she had suggested, and Nora would be angry with someone who had not stolen anything.
“We're working on the show,” she said. “There's a lot.”
“Will Mae be nice if I tell her she can't have you Saturday?”
“She doesn't need to have me Saturday.”
“Good. That's settled, then.”
They talked about the restaurant and whether Ben had invited Ellen's sister, who had started describing every food she didn't want as an allergy. When they hung up, Nora wanted to call again. Instead she put the envelope on top of her notebook.
She opened a new document.
She typed a title, deleted it, and typed another. Then she deleted that because giving a set a title seemed to assume there was a set.
She tried the line about the cabbage bowl. She took it out. She was not going to write around the holes Mae left and call the result new.
For a while she wrote ordinary things about being forty-two and divorced. The refrigerator. The passwords. The particular indignity of changing an emergency contact to somebody who would first have to find her reading glasses. Some of it was funny. None of it seemed able to stand against what Mae had done in that room.
She wrote: My best friend has always encouraged me to use my voice. Preferably in an email to her, by noon.
Nora laughed.
She read it into her phone. The little moving line on the screen registered the breath before the punch line, the small pleased noise she made afterward. She listened back.
It was good. Or it felt good. She listened a second time, unable yet to tell the difference.