Miriam began the Friday meeting by putting a kitchen timer on the table.
It was shaped like an egg. Mae touched it with one finger.
“Don't,” Miriam said.
Mae withdrew the finger.
“It's a timer,” Miriam continued. “It isn't the visual concept for the show. Nobody has an egg-related note.”
She turned to Nora. “Twelve minutes. Entrance to exit. Not twelve, then a story about how grateful you are to be there.”
“I won't have that story,” Nora said.
Miriam looked at her, deciding whether to make room for this, then looked back at the schedule.
They were in the same rented studio. No one was eating a banana. Cal had brought a paper bag full of little sandwiches, the kind that pretended their shortness meant they weren't lunch. The room smelled of the space heater somebody had plugged in beneath the coffee table.
Nora had slept badly and then too late. She'd sent her home text to Mae the previous night, but nothing else. Mae had written back a heart, which Nora had found both inadequate and more than she could stand.
Now Mae sat across the table in reading glasses, picking the seeds off a sandwich roll. The big yellow outline on the schedule was labeled NORA. Nora kept looking at it when she was supposed to be looking at Miriam.
“This is the show we're making,” Miriam said. “Seventy-five minutes. Live at the Avalon. Harbor carries it, the regional television partner carries the same program. We aren't stopping to fix a face or say a sentence better. We will rehearse. We will still have faces.”
“Speak for yourself,” Mae said.
Miriam put a page in front of Nora. “Your entrance comes after the opening package and the introduction. That number there is your call time, not the time you start trying to park.”
Nora put a mark beside it.
“I'll send the full theater call sheet when it's settled. There'll be a dress next Friday. I need your working material before that, with enough time to flag anything the production actually has to provide.”
“I don't need anything.”
“You'll need a microphone.”
“Apart from that.”
“Don't be brave about objects. Tell me what the bit needs. Don't turn up with a horse and say it's a feeling.”
Mae laughed into her sandwich. Nora smiled before she remembered she was not going to make Mae comfortable today.
Cal slid another page across. It listed the work Nora was doing for the production and, separately, the performance. They had talked about the writing before she'd sent the private set to Mae. That part was a job, with scope and payment dates and the ordinary small relief of knowing where the next rent would come from. The twelve minutes were newly confirmed. They did not require her to write any particular subject.
“This doesn't change the writing already agreed,” Cal said. “If the new slot means the work needs moving, tell us before we discover it on the day.”
“Mae said we could do less.”
Mae set down the sandwich. “We can.”
“Then say which less,” Miriam said. “I can't put less on a call sheet.”
They went through the jobs. Nora had already finished the transitions she'd promised. Some short pickup lines could wait. The opening package still needed a final pass and there were the promotional bits they were filming that afternoon. Mae had agreed to a brief warm introduction for the regional partner, and somebody had written an early version that made her sound as if she were presenting a carpet-cleaning demonstration.
Nora had wanted the afternoon to herself. She had planned to listen to the sentences from last night she could remember and figure out why she'd lost the plates. Instead she heard herself say, “The partner intro won't take long.”
Mae's face softened.
Nora added, “If that's the whole task.”
“That's the whole task,” Miriam said. She crossed something off. The pen made a firm, satisfying line. “Good. Now we know.”
Cal stayed when Miriam went out to find the person with the camera. Mae went to the bathroom. For a minute it was just Nora and the timer.
“You all right?” Cal asked.
“Is that on the form?”
“No.”
She looked at the paperwork. It was not a bad offer. The figure for the performance made a small noise in her stomach. She had paid more in car repairs than that before, but nobody had offered her that much money to stand alone and say things she'd written for herself.
“How am I being credited?”
“For the writing?”
“For everything.”
“Your name goes in the writing credits. The opening appearance goes in the program and the listing. You saw the schedule.”
“I've been in writing credits before.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn't make people know you did it.”
Cal folded the top of the sandwich bag over so the bread wouldn't dry out. “No. Being on the stage does more of that.”
“And that's twelve minutes.”
“It's a real twelve.”
She wanted him to understand how that could feel like everything and not enough at the same time. But he was looking at the date beside her signature, and he did not owe her a different job from the one he was arranging.
“Did Mae tell you about the set?” she asked.
Cal's hand stopped on the paper bag.
“She said you were working out what you'd each use.”
“Is that what she said?”
He took off his glasses. His face, without them, looked less interested in negotiation.
“Nora, I don't want to be in the middle of something I only know half of.”
“You could ask for the other half.”
“I am. What's the problem I can actually solve?”
She looked at the yellow rectangle on the schedule. It was her name. They'd put it there. She could make this conversation about taking it off.
“I need time to make the opening work,” she said.
“That's what we just did.”
“I need the time to stay mine.”
“Then don't say yes when Miriam asks who can do an extra thing.” He put his glasses back on. “I'm not being clever. You say yes very fast.”
She wanted to say something about how often fast was what he'd paid her for. Instead she checked a spelling on the page, because she could not bear to sign in the middle of his being partly right.
Mae came back in carrying her sweatshirt over one arm.
“Have you signed?”
“I'm reading it.”
“Good.” Mae sat down, then stood again. “Have you eaten?”
Nora took one of the little sandwiches. It had turkey in it. For a moment that was all it had in it, and she was hungry.
The promotional setup occupied a corner of the studio. Someone had put a pale background cloth behind a chair and arranged a lamp so Mae looked as though she'd always lived in beautiful afternoon light. Toby had a small monitor. A camera operator crouched to adjust something and came up with a strip of tape stuck to her sweater.
“We're going to do the partner welcome first,” Miriam said. “Eight seconds. Then the longer promo.”
Mae sat on the chair and smiled at the camera.
Toby read the supplied line.
“‘I'm Mae Bell, and I'm delighted to be welcoming you back to an evening of shared laughter, right here at the Avalon.’”
Mae kept smiling.
“Is my family in danger?”
Toby lowered the page.
“It came from their office.”
“I understand. Did they send a proof-of-life photograph?”
Nora laughed. Toby did, too, then glanced at Miriam to see whether he had endangered his employment.
“Fix it,” Miriam said. “Eight seconds.”
Nora uncapped her pen.
“You're not welcoming them back to the Avalon,” she said. “Most of them have never been there.”
“I've barely been there,” Mae said. “I saw the loading door.”
“Don't mention the loading door.”
Mae looked into the camera. “‘At long last, I'm here, and I've found where they keep the trash cans.’”
The camera operator snorted. Nora could feel the small heat of work beginning to go properly. She wrote two possibilities, crossed out one, moved three words in the other.
“Just say you're glad they're watching. Then something you actually mean.”
Mae changed the smile. Not bigger. Less fixed.
“I'm glad you're here. If you can hear me from the kitchen, bring the good snacks. We're starting.”
Miriam pointed at the camera. They tried it. The first time Mae put too much invitation into snacks. The second time the camera operator asked her not to lean toward the lens quite so far. On the third she seemed to notice one particular person off to the side of the screen and catch them deciding whether to come back.
Nora lowered her pen. That was the take.
“Good,” Miriam said. “We have it.”
They moved to the longer promo. It needed the title, the carrier and the Saturday date, and somehow the director on the call had asked for more warmth and less selling. Nora wrote a simpler first line. Mae tried it, then lost patience with where she was supposed to put her hands.
“What am I doing with these?”
“What you normally do,” the camera operator said.
Mae looked down at her hands as though they were two understudies the production had sent over. She set them on her knees. They looked falsely modest. She put one on her hip and became a person selling a particularly stern house. She folded them in her lap and waited for a verdict.
Toby began to laugh.
“Don't encourage her,” Miriam said.
Mae turned to Nora. “Tell them. Where do I keep my hands?”
“In my work.”
The answer came out before Nora could stop it.
Mae's face went quiet. Toby looked down. The camera operator suddenly had an adjustment to make.
Nora's pleasure in the room vanished. She had wanted to be funny. She had wanted Mae to feel it. Now she had both and no idea what to do with either.
Miriam said, “Two-minute break.”
Mae stood. Nora thought she would leave, or say something too intimate in front of people. Instead she went to the little table, picked up a bottle of water and carried another back for Nora.
“That was good,” Mae said softly.
“It wasn't for you.”
“I noticed.”
She sat in the chair again. Nora remained standing beside the monitor. The bottled water was cold enough to hurt her palm.
After a while Mae said, “I look like I'm trying to hide a ham.”
“You do.”
“Where should it go?”
Nora looked at her. Mae had one elbow pressed to her side, protecting an imaginary illicit lunch. It was ridiculous. She could not hold it without making the rest of her body confess.
Nora put down the water.
“Don't hide it. You're supposed to be pleased to be here.”
Mae opened both hands, offering the imaginary ham to the lens.
Toby lost it. He turned around to laugh into his sleeve.
Miriam looked up from the call. “What?”
“Nothing,” Mae said, too late.
Nora was laughing now, too. The wrong kind of laugh for a useful afternoon. It made her chest ache. Mae turned the offering into a dignified presentation, moved an inch to make room for a dish that wasn't there, and waited for them to recover.
“Put them on the arms of the chair,” Nora said when she could speak.
“Without the ham?”
“The ham has its own call time.”
Mae shook her head, smiling, and put her hands where Nora told her.
They got the line on the next take.
By the time Nora left, the light outside had changed. She had three messages about small work decisions, a meeting notice for next week and the performance confirmation in her inbox. The name on it was hers. She stopped beside the car to read it one more time.
Then she played the opening line from the promo in her head, hearing the pause Mae had put into it, and wished they could have had that afternoon without Wednesday in it.