Inez had left a voice message rather than a text. Nora listened to it in the car outside the studio.
“Hi. It's Inez. From yesterday. I got your number from Gloria, which sounds worse out loud than it did when I asked. You can tell me to lose it. Not lose you. The number. Anyway, I'm doing Monday at Low Ceiling and somebody's dropped out, so there's a spot if you're working on something longer. Not like an hour. Like eight or ten. Tell me. No rush except there is a rush because I have to put the thing up. Okay.”
Nora listened again. Not because she hadn't understood. It was nice to hear somebody wanting something from her that she wanted to give.
They agreed to meet near the club. Inez was coming from her day job and had an hour before she needed to help Gloria move the tables for a private event. Nora could have talked to her on the phone, but the studio was filling again and her apartment would be the same room she'd left that morning.
Inez was sitting outside the café when Nora arrived, eating from a plastic container and wearing a coat too thin for the weather. She had a headset in her hand, wound neatly around itself.
“They don't want outside food,” she said. “I bought a coffee. But not enough coffee for a whole salmon, apparently.”
“We can go inside somewhere else.”
“No, I'm almost done. I just made too much and then I brought too much, which is a two-stage process.” She made room on the bench. “Sit. You want any?”
Nora shook her head.
Inez ate quickly, with the absorption of someone who had exactly this long to eat. Nora watched a bus turn the corner and tried not to look like a woman waiting for a pitch.
“Hotel reservations,” Inez said, holding up the headset. “Not reception. People always think it's reception and say, oh, you must meet so many people. I meet no people. I meet a voice saying he booked a king and he wants to know if a different bed is hiding behind it.”
“Is it?”
“Not at that rate.” Inez scraped the last rice into a corner. “Mondays are mine once a month. New work. Gloria doesn't pay us, but she doesn't charge me to use the room, so I get to feel like a producer without learning anything useful about money.”
“How long is the show?”
“An hour if everyone does the time they said. An hour twenty if a man decides to work something out.”
Nora smiled.
“I do it, too,” Inez added. “I just want a special category for when I do it.”
She closed the container and tucked it inside a second plastic bag. Only then did she take out her notebook.
“Would ten help?”
“Yes.” Nora didn't try to make the answer smaller. “It would.”
“Good. I watched a bit of your stuff last night.”
“My stuff?”
“The local television thing. Little stage, purple lighting?”
Nora sat back. “That's still online?”
“It's in somebody's archive upload. You were very dressed.”
“I thought that was part of it.”
“You looked like my bank had organized a talent show.”
Nora laughed. She couldn't help it. The old shame had never been phrased exactly that way, and somehow the new wording gave her a moment's room beside it.
“Ninety seconds,” she said. “Seventeen years ago. Very much not a current sample.”
“I know. You were good about the apartment buzzer.”
“I wasn't good. I spoke too fast.”
“You can be both.”
Inez found a page with three names and a scratched-out fourth.
“I need a line for the listing. And a picture if you've got one that isn't that.”
Nora had a professional photograph. It had been taken for a writing profile, and she disliked it because the photographer had kept saying she looked guarded until she'd made a face so falsely open she didn't recognize it. Still, it was a photograph of a present-day person who could reasonably be expected to arrive Monday.
“I'll send it.”
“And the line?”
“Nora Moss.”
“Yes, we're good on that part.”
“New material. Returning to stand-up.”
Inez considered it. “Could we say Mae?”
There was a bus going by now. Nora waited until its noise had passed, though she'd heard the question perfectly.
“You mean writer for Mae Bell.”
“Well, that's true, right?”
“Yes.”
“It would help. It's Monday. I don't get people by accident.”
Nora looked at the notebook. Inez had drawn a box around the empty place, as if that might keep the evening from leaking out.
“I'm opening the special,” Nora said.
Inez's face changed.
“Oh, shit. That's great.”
It was the first uncomplicated reaction Nora had received, and she let herself have it.
“It's twelve minutes.”
“Twelve on that show is twelve on that show. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
Inez was already writing. Nora felt something in her tighten.
“Just the writing line,” she said. “Not opening. They're doing their publicity. I'd rather not jump that.”
“Okay. Writer for Mae Bell, back onstage with new work.”
Hearing it aloud was worse. Nora wanted a room without Mae in it, and here she was needing Mae to get anyone into the room.
Inez looked up. “If you hate it, we won't.”
“I don't hate it.”
“You're making the face people make when they want a quiet room directly beside the elevator.”
Nora took out her phone. She found the photograph, stared at it briefly, and sent it before she could choose to spend another half hour disliking the same image.
“Use the line,” she said.
Inez tapped it into her phone, then showed Nora the draft listing. Her own name was at the top. The photograph beside it was not flattering, but it had energy, her mouth open in the middle of an explanation she clearly intended to finish. Nora's face below looked more professionally arranged and less alive.
“It's a small thing,” Inez said. “My account. Some local comedy accounts share it if I ask. Don't expect much.”
“I wasn't.”
“Good. Then if seven people come I can say I managed expectations.”
They moved inside the club when Gloria unlocked the side door. The room had to be changed for a company event that wasn't a comedy show, which Gloria considered a profitable abuse of the furniture. Inez put down her tote and started shifting chairs. Nora carried her bag for another minute before she noticed how useless this made her.
She put it on the bar and took the other end of a table.
“You don't have to,” Inez said.
“I have carried furniture before.”
“I wasn't questioning your training.”
They moved three tables together, then apart again when Gloria explained that the people renting the room needed room to get up and introduce themselves. A stack of printed name tags waited on the bar. Somebody named Brian had apparently insisted on his own font.
“My sister's wedding,” Inez said, straightening a row of chairs. “I planned every place at the table. My mother changed them at eleven in the morning because she'd heard from an aunt.”
“Which aunt?”
“It doesn't matter which aunt. It's a job description.”
Nora laughed. Inez grinned and kept working.
They finished before the first guests arrived. Gloria gave Inez a set of instructions about the microphone and the water pitcher, then looked at Nora.
“Monday, then.”
“If that's all right.”
“Inez asked. Ten. It's her bill.”
Nora nodded. She liked the room better with its tables in the wrong places. It had become a workplace instead of a site of personal judgment, though that would change as soon as she stood on the little stage again.
Inez took her aside near the back.
“Can I ask you about the ending?”
“Of your set?”
“Yeah. I cut the Fundamentals thing like you said. Now it just stops at the knee, which is funnier, but I feel like I've left a door open. Not an artistic door. Like a door that should be shut because there's a draft.”
She showed Nora two handwritten versions. One had arrows that took the sentence all the way around the margin.
Nora read them. The first put the teacher back into the scene. The second explained why taking up space had been a bad idea, which they'd already watched happen.
“Do the first one, but don't go back to yourself afterward,” Nora said.
“What do you mean?”
“Stay the teacher when you tell me to leave Cheryl alone. Let us see you think you're being helpful.”
Inez tried it in a low voice, then tried it bigger, shoulders back, palms flat in the patient air of an instructor suffering from too much confidence.
“No,” Nora said. “You're laughing at yourself already. You don't know it's funny. You're running a class.”
Inez tried again. The instruction became stern and personally offended in a way she had not meant to make it. Nora laughed.
“Oh,” Inez said. She tried it once more and laughed, too. “Oh, that's gross. That's him.”
For several minutes Nora forgot about Monday. There was a thing on the page that could go two ways, and here was somebody willing to follow the stranger one. She felt the ease in her shoulders when Inez found it.
The first company guests were arriving. A woman with a name tag asked whether they worked there. Nora shook her head before realizing that Inez did, at least for the next hour.
“I'll send you two recordings later,” Inez said, gathering her pages. “Twenty seconds each. You could tell me which one? When you're not doing the whole famous thing.”
“Tonight's fine.”
“Only if you can.”
“Send them.”
Nora meant it. At that moment she could not imagine not having forty seconds.
At home, the performance confirmation was still open on her laptop. She read it again while water boiled for pasta. When Inez's first recording arrived, Nora listened and wrote back, First is closer. Don't hurry the turn.
Then a message came from Mae asking which line had made it into the longer promotional take. The production needed to put captions on the version going out next week.
Nora opened the page from the afternoon. There it was, in her own handwriting, the invitation she'd written between the carrier name and the date.
Bring your terrible week. I'll put it next to mine.
She sent the exact words for the longer promo.
Mae replied with a photo of the page. The words were circled. Under them she'd drawn an ugly little creature that looked like a dog auditioning to be a chair.
That was one of their old ways of saying thank you. Nora had no idea where it started. Some terrible airport, probably, a missed flight during which Mae had spent an hour drawing the things the announcements said not to leave unattended.
Nora smiled at the animal. Then she saw Inez had sent the revised versions.
She was about to play them when Toby called to ask whether she could check the caption breaks, because the line looked odd split after terrible. It took less than a minute to answer. Then she noticed something wrong in the date card and sent a note about that.
The pasta water had boiled down. Nora added more and waited for it to come back.
Inez had written, Better? under the two clips.
Nora put the phone beside the stove. She would listen while she ate. Then the pasta was ready and she found the earlier set open on the laptop and began making a note about plates. By the time she went to bed, the two recordings were still there, their small play buttons untouched.