At seven forty Nora's phone fell between the bed and the wall. She left it there until it rang again.
She had slept in pieces. At one point she'd dreamed Mae had come back for the water and found both glasses empty. Now there was a sound from under the bed that might have been Cal, if a manager could be recognized by his vibration.
It was Miriam.
“Have you spoken to Mae?”
“Last night.”
“Since then.”
“No.”
“I need you both here at two. I sent a message. Can you confirm?”
Nora sat up. A strand of hair was stuck to her lower lip. “Am I still performing?”
“That's what we're making a decision about.”
She looked toward the closet. The green shirt hung over its door where she'd left it. It did not look like evidence of anything.
“I've stopped tomorrow's placement,” Miriam said. “The solo invitation. There's no point paying to send people into an argument we aren't answering.”
“It's already out.”
“A preview is out. A kitchen video is out. They're staying out. I mean the next one. The scheduled use. I need the replacement plan this afternoon, and the video by tomorrow.”
Nora pressed her feet to the floor.
“You're saying I need to answer it.”
“I'm saying I've got a slot for a short promo video and no useful video for it. Now everybody will hear every word of an invitation as an answer to you. I need to know what we're making.”
“I didn't tell anybody not to watch.”
“Two o'clock,” Miriam said. “Read what I sent before you come.”
After the call Nora found the message, which was only three lines long. It named the room, the time and the decision. She had wanted there to be more, something so unreasonable that she could forward it to someone else.
In the kitchen the glasses were still standing where she'd moved them. She poured both down the sink and filled the kettle.
There were new messages from people she hadn't heard from in years. A woman who'd once booked a miserable Tuesday show congratulated her on finding her voice. The man who had hosted that show wanted to know whether she had twenty minutes. A former colleague sent four laughing faces, then a separate message saying, Seriously, though, are you okay?
Nora answered that one first. Fine. Busy day.
Her mother had sent a photograph of the scarf laid across a chair. Beneath it: Washed perfectly. You were right about cold.
Nora opened the photograph until it filled the screen. The chair was one she'd always thought Ellen should replace. Its seat had been repaired with a rectangle of fabric that almost matched. She typed, Looks good, and sent it without telling her about the clip.
She ate bread standing by the toaster. The first slice was barely colored. She put it down again and began reading the comments while it burned.
By nine the fan account had started a poll. Had she exposed something, or was this what hiring a writer meant? Nora had never been an option in a poll before. She touched the screen, stopped before voting for herself and put the phone facedown.
Cal called as she was scraping the toast.
“You made some calls unnecessary,” he said.
“Good morning to you, too.”
“I mean people know your name. How much usable material have you got?”
“For Saturday?”
“For yourself. Club set.”
She put down the knife.
He described a room west of the city, the Switchboard, which booked music most nights and occasional comedy. Daryl Kent ran its Friday late show. He'd seen the clip through someone who followed Mae and had asked Cal whether Nora would do twenty minutes the Friday after the special.
“Nine hundred,” Cal said. “One appearance. He's putting a guest act before you.”
She looked at the burnt crumbs in the sink.
“For twenty minutes.”
“He sells tables. He's got a gap next Friday, wants an answer quickly enough to advertise.”
“Why's he asking you?”
“Because he has my number. Do you want me to give him yours?”
Nora did. She also wanted to make Cal describe the offer again, more slowly, so that it became a thing which had happened to her rather than a noise her phone was making.
“Does Mae know?”
“I haven't spoken to her about your club work.”
The your was pleasant. Nora let it be pleasant.
“Yes. Give him the number.”
“He wants the stuff he saw. Just so we're clear.”
“That's my stuff.”
“Then talk to him.”
Daryl called before she finished clearing the kitchen. He spoke as if they were picking up a conversation interrupted by a delivery truck.
“Loved it. My wife sent it to me, I said, that's somebody we want. Are you free next Friday?”
Nora said she was.
“Late show. You'd go up around ten. I can send everything. Twenty, maybe twenty-five if they're good, but I'm paying you for twenty.”
She heard a door close at his end. He told somebody a package was in his office, then came back to her without apologizing.
“The writer gets her own microphone,” he said. “That's what I like. My wife's been watching Mae since before the TV thing. That voice you did. Man.”
Nora leaned against the counter. There was a cupboard handle against the back of her hip. She stayed there.
“I've got other material, too.”
“Sure. Bring it. We need the Mae piece, obviously. That's how they know what they're buying.”
“It's not twenty minutes about Mae.”
“No, no. Don't do twenty minutes of anything. Give them a show. But the thing people have seen, the backstage stuff, that's the draw.”
He told her the fee again. This time she could picture it reaching her account. She could picture the email in which she would give him the correct information instead of forwarding a production invoice to Cal.
“What do you call it?” he asked.
“The set?”
“You. Have you got a title?”
She hadn't. He had one already. Behind the Smile. Nora Moss, the writer behind Mae Bell, live and uncensored.
“You don't need uncensored.”
“It's late. We like people to know they don't have to bring their children.”
“You can put adults only.”
“People think that means something else.”
Nora laughed. He laughed, too, then waited for her to agree to the words he'd started with.
She ran her thumb over the edge of the counter.
“Put my name first.”
“Absolutely. That's what I said. Nora Moss. Big.”
“And send me the advertisement before it goes out.”
“Cal already said you might want that. Sure. It's nine hundred for the spot. Are we doing it?”
“Yes,” she said. “We're doing it.”
He asked for a short biography and a photograph which would work cropped. She offered the one Inez had used. He said fine and gave her an email address. She repeated it back. He thanked her, with a sudden warmth that made her feel she'd saved him from something rather than supplied what he wanted.
Afterward she wrote the date in her notebook. Not in the paid-work section. On a clean page, with the amount beneath it.
She left the nine hundred visible while she answered his confirmation.
Inez texted just before eleven. Can you meet for a coffee? Before work. I have an hour, technically forty-seven minutes now because I wrote this twice.
Nora asked whether something had happened.
Yes. But not a disaster. I think. Are you coming?
They met at the place near the reservations office. Nora arrived first and bought two coffees because she remembered how Inez took hers. She had a small glow of satisfaction about remembering until Inez came through the door and asked whether she'd ordered food.
“No.”
“Great. I'll get some. I haven't eaten.”
Inez waited in line without putting down her bag. She wore the yellow sneakers with the black work pants, a combination which made the pants look like a rule she intended to obey only as far as necessary. When she came back, she had an egg sandwich cut into two unequal pieces and a receipt she folded into her pocket.
“Look.”
She put her phone down beside Nora's coffee.
There was the end of the clip, with their names, the date of the next monthly show and the small logo Inez had made. People had begun asking where they could buy tickets. Beneath them were questions about Mae.
“They have to click another thing to see the date,” Inez said. “I thought I'd done it right. It looks right on mine. Can you see it?”
Nora could. She enlarged it with two fingers.
“Not on the video. On the page.”
“Oh.”
Inez showed her. The account now contained Nora's face in several places where Inez's had been. People had followed it, then sent messages addressed to Nora. One asked whether she would be prepared to speak about working for narcissists. Another had sent a long account of a sister's wedding.
“I didn't answer those,” Inez said. “Because, firstly, I can't. Secondly, I think if you answer one sister wedding, you get all the sister weddings.”
Nora looked for the view count.
“This is good,” she said.
“It might be. I put my teacher thing beside it.”
She opened a different video. The dance-class bit, filmed from the side, had Inez's whole body in the frame. She watched herself begin and made a face at the phone.
“That's the noise the chair made. I should've cut the first two seconds.”
“Leave it.”
“Everybody waits for something now. You have to make them not wait.”
The Inez on the screen told Cheryl not to move. Her knee took her sideways. A woman laughed too near the microphone, and Inez at the table laughed with her before hiding her mouth with her wrist.
Nora watched. The hand pointing to the space was good. She'd forgotten how much better it was with the whole person visible.
“You can't lose that,” she said.
“The chair?”
“Your foot. It has to be in the picture.”
“I know. I put my name across my face so I didn't have to put it across my foot.”
They watched the ending. Nora was about to say the last turn needed more time when Inez touched the screen.
“I put this one first.”
The teacher video now sat above the roast on Inez's page. The roast's number was much larger. Nora looked from one to the other.
“Wouldn't you keep the thing people are coming for at the top?”
“They can still find it. I want them to find this.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think that's stupid?”
“No. I mean, I don't know how any of it works.”
“Neither do I. Yesterday I had a dance teacher and forty-three people who liked my cousin's dog. Now people are asking if I can explain an actress. I don't know her. I know where Cheryl shouldn't put her foot.”
She took a bite of the sandwich and glanced toward the counter. A man was waiting to collect an order, looking into every paper bag the barista put down.
“He'll have eaten it by the time he knows it's his,” Inez said, softly, watching him.
Nora turned. The man had opened another bag. They both laughed, and Inez put her phone away as though that was what she'd brought Nora to see.
For a minute they ate. Nora had been handed the smaller piece of the sandwich. She couldn't remember being offered it, only accepting it.
“I've got a booking,” she said.
Inez's face opened. “Oh, shit. Where?”
Nora told her. She tried to name the room and date without the amount, then said nine hundred before Inez asked.
“That's good,” Inez said. She was genuinely pleased. “That's really good. For how long?”
“Twenty.”
“Paid in money?”
Nora laughed.
“Sorry. I'm serious. Gloria once paid me partly in a heater. Not a joke, a very good heater. I use it.”
She asked who else was on the bill. Nora didn't know. She asked if the show had a name, and Nora told her that, too.
Inez's smile became less broad.
“So you're doing the Mae thing.”
“Among other things.”
“Right.”
Nora could hear Daryl saying that's the draw. She broke the remaining corner of her bread in half.
“It's not all I have.”
“I saw. The potatoes were good.”
“I know.”
“I mean I was there. You don't have to tell me you have an act.”
Nora put the bread down.
Inez glanced at her watch, then at the half-finished coffee. “I have to go in ten minutes. There's a company coming in and they keep changing who is allowed a king.”
“A what?”
“Bed. It's a hierarchy. On the list you can tell who got promoted before they tell their wife.”
She pulled a page from her bag. Nora recognized the beginning of the teacher set, with an entirely new paragraph underneath it. Inez had drawn a box around a sentence and written a question in the margin.
“Could you hear this when you have time? Not now. I have a recording. The turn after Cheryl. You said don't come back to myself, but I think I have to come back eventually or I live in the class.”
“Send it.”
Inez nodded, then held the page a second longer before handing it over.
Nora folded it into her notebook, over the page with the nine hundred on it. Her phone lit up. Two people had mentioned her in something. She could see her own surname twice.
“Two o'clock,” she said, remembering the meeting aloud.
“What?”
“Nothing. Production.”
Inez finished the sandwich. She carried their cups to the return tray and came back for her bag. At the door she said, “Don't share the old version of mine. If you share it. This one. With my feet.”
“I heard you.”
“I know. I just had to say it.”
After she'd gone, Nora opened Inez's page again. The teacher stood at the top, waiting to be played. Below, partly cut off by the edge of the screen, Nora's paused face waited in a different woman's smile.
She shared the teacher. Then she watched to see whether anybody noticed who had shared it.