On Saturday Nora woke before the alarm and waited for it anyway.
There was no good use for the extra hour. She'd gone through the set enough that the first line now sounded like a password she was being asked to remember under stress. She made breakfast, took two bites and put the rest away. The person who would want it later seemed as remote as any future employer.
She had laid her clothes on the chair. Not a costume. A dark pair of pants which let her bend without thinking about it, the green shirt, a different pair of shoes from the ones she'd worn at the workshop. She put the shoes on to make coffee and discovered the left one squeaked on the kitchen floor. She stood very still, listening for a problem which didn't happen unless she moved.
At ten her mother called.
“I'm not calling to ask if you're nervous.”
“Thank you.”
“Ben says I can't ask whether you've eaten either.”
Nora looked at the plate in the refrigerator.
“He's very strict.”
“I don't know how I raised someone like that.”
There was a small rustle, as though Ellen were moving something from one hand to the other.
“I've got it set up,” she said. “Erin did it. So I don't have to get to the right place while it's happening. I just press it.”
“What do you press?”
“Don't start. She showed me.”
Nora smiled. “Okay.”
“Are you wearing something nice?”
“Mother.”
“I didn't say nervous. I can ask what you're wearing. It's television.”
“Green shirt.”
“The one I like?”
“I hope so.”
“Good. I won't keep you.”
But neither hung up immediately. Nora could hear something small and domestic at the other end, a cupboard closing, a spoon touching a cup. For the first time in days she wanted to know what Ellen would do with an ordinary Saturday before the program began.
“Are you going out?” she asked.
“In a minute. To the shop.”
“What do you need?”
“Nothing you can get from there. I'm going to the shop, Nora.”
“I know.”
“I can still do that.”
Nora looked at the shoes beside her chair. “I didn't mean it like that.”
“I know. Good luck tonight.”
There it was, the ordinary phrase. Nora accepted it without asking Ellen to improve it. After they hung up she stood in the kitchen and ate the rest of the toast.
She left for the theater too early, then stopped at a pharmacy for tissues because she couldn't bear to arrive holding only things she actually needed. She walked past a row of bandages and kept going. At the checkout the woman asked if she wanted a bag, and Nora said no with a force which made the woman lift her eyebrows.
“Just the tissues,” Nora said.
“That's what I meant.”
Outside, someone had sent her a photograph of the poster at the Switchboard. It was up in a window, her face above the promise of an evening with the writer who knows. Nora saved the image, then looked at it again in her photographs as if the second appearance made it more permanent.
At the Avalon the temporary display had the right time. The ladder was gone. People were already walking past and pausing at Mae's name, checking the date and one another's plans. Nora stood far enough away that nobody had to decide whether they recognized her.
A woman in a red coat pointed to the smaller line.
“That's her.”
Her companion leaned toward the glass. “The writer?”
“Yes. The one from the video.”
“I thought they made up.”
“That's why we're coming.”
Nora walked around to the stage entrance before she could hear the rest. At the folding table the same woman found her name more quickly this time.
“You're early.”
“I know.”
“Coffee's through there.”
Nora thanked her and went to the room with her photograph. The repaired chair was still there. Someone had laid a fresh towel over the little table and put water beside it. She moved the water farther from the edge, then put it back because she hadn't been asked to arrange the room.
There were hours to get through. Clothes, hair, the microphone check, a meal she didn't want until she smelled it. She tried to rehearse quietly and stopped when she heard Mae through the wall. Mae was running a transition, not a private phone call. The words were easy to hear and not directed at her. Nora put headphones on without playing anything.
At the sound check she could remember where to stand. Her voice came back large enough to frighten her, then became her own again once she had said more than one sentence. The theater had begun acquiring people, crew in the seats, a woman checking the aisle with a flashlight, a man who brought a coat in and asked where somebody wanted it. None had arrived to decide what Nora's life meant. They needed her to make a sound into the microphone, so she made one.
Miriam asked if there had been changes since dress.
“Small ones.”
“Anything affecting the cue?”
“No.”
“Then the note stands. Both parts. Inside your time.”
Nora nodded. Mae was at the other side of the stage, listening to someone explain where she would wait. The little mark was visible against the darker floor.
“You want to see it?” Jo asked Nora.
“I saw it yesterday.”
“I'm checking if you can see it in this light.”
Nora looked. She could. Mae stood back from it while the check continued, not claiming the place before it was needed. A hand at her side held the same pen she'd used to cross lines out all week. She had not selected a special pen for the manager; the physical habit could arrive without one.
They left the stage to the crew. Nora ate half a sandwich, then the other half because she could hear Ellen not asking. She went through the pockets of her coat for the tissues and found the little wrapper from Lena's room, though she couldn't remember putting it there. She threw it away. There was a wastebasket. That was what it was for.
Cal came to her door before the audience was admitted.
“Daryl says they're nearly through the first batch of tables.”
“Good.”
“He wants to know whether he can use anything from tonight tomorrow afternoon. He's holding a place on his page.”
Nora stood with the green shirt half buttoned. Cal looked away from the mirror, though she was perfectly covered.
“After the show,” she said.
“I said that. He asked me to remind you what he's after.”
“I remember.”
“You don't have to answer now.”
“Then don't ask me now.”
Cal put his phone in his pocket. For a second she thought he would go. Instead he looked toward the empty chair.
“May I sit?”
She moved the coat from it.
“It's not a warning,” he said. “I think you hear everything I say as a warning.”
“Frequently it is one.”
“Frequently it's a message somebody asked me to pass on. This is one. He wants the thing he booked. If you give him something else, he may not want it. That's all.”
“That's plenty.”
Cal nodded. He didn't try to make it smaller.
Nora finished the button. The mirror showed her a man waiting for a working conversation to end and a woman who wished there were somewhere to put her hands which would make the decision less visible.
“Did you send the date?” she asked.
“Which date?”
“Finishing the continued work.”
“Yes. It's in your email. As agreed.”
“Okay.”
He stood. “Have a good one.”
She said thank you. After he left she checked the email, not to argue with it, only to see the date. It was there. Some choices reached her as ordinary messages because ordinary messages were how people kept them.
By the time the doors opened, Nora could no longer stay in the room. She walked toward the front of house, stopped before the corridor opened into a public space and looked through a gap beside a display.
Coats. Tickets on phones. People irritated by the delay which let them talk, people pleased to find a bar, people inspecting the seating map as if a different life might begin in the next section. Nora had always liked an audience better before it became one. Each person appeared to have enough on their mind without needing her to say anything.
Then a man turned and saw her.
“Nora?”
She moved back, but he had already raised a hand.
“From Monday,” he said. “We came. I said we'd come, didn't I?”
His wife was beside him. There was no coat saving Mae a chair now. They had paid for seats which placed her somewhere they couldn't move.
“Hello,” Nora said.
“You got a pen?” he asked his wife.
Nora didn't know what he wanted until he showed her a folded printout. A picture of the Switchboard listing, her name, the date. Somebody had put the line about competent office support beneath it. Nora couldn't tell if it was part of the official image or a caption someone else had added.
“We're doing both,” the woman said. “Tonight and next Friday. A proper night out.”
The man held out the printout. “Would you?”
Nora took the pen. It had a cap on a little chain, as if it belonged to the woman's keys. She signed in a blank corner, too small at first, then made the last letter bigger to compensate.
“I don't know what I'm supposed to write.”
“Your name,” the man said. “That's what we're here for.”
She gave it back.
“Are you going to make her answer it?” the woman asked.
Nora looked at her.
“The thing she did. I saw the interview. I always thought it was her writing.”
“A lot of it was work I sold her,” Nora said.
“I know. But the personal thing.”
Nora nodded. “That wasn't.”
“Well, then.” The woman tucked the page into her bag. “She should say it.”
“We'll hear what she says.”
Nora could hear herself evading them. She had been exact about the true charge and still left them expecting the product she was being paid to make. The man was smiling at her with such uncomplicated anticipation that she found it difficult to go.
He leaned closer.
“That voice,” he said. “You should do it when she's standing there.”
Nora looked at the doors into the auditorium. A staff member was directing people through one side so the other could be kept clear. She said she had to go back.
They wished her luck. The woman put a hand on her arm, not as a demand, simply the brief touch people made when they believed they'd already shared something.
Nora returned to the corridor.
At the turn a young woman was waiting with her mother. They weren't waiting for Nora. Their tickets were in the mother's hand, and the younger woman was trying to explain that the entrance they needed was farther along.
“This is where we came in last time,” the mother said.
“You came to something else last time.”
Nora could have walked past. Instead she asked to see the tickets and pointed them back toward the open doors.
The mother recognized her. Her mouth changed, a little closing around whatever she'd meant to say.
“We're here for Mae,” she said.
“I know.”
“Not because—”
“It's her show. That's fine.”
The younger woman looked embarrassed. Nora wished she hadn't said fine. It made it sound as though permission had been required from her.
“She's had a rough year,” the mother said. “People like to see you get up and then they want you down again.”
“She has people here,” Nora said.
“Yes. She does.”
They went toward the right entrance. Nora watched them merge into the line. The mother stopped to say something to her daughter, and the daughter leaned down to hear.
She went backstage. On the way she passed the door Mae had used, heard a laugh from inside and felt, absurdly, excluded. Mae could laugh with another person five minutes before something Nora thought ought to occupy both of them entirely.
Nora knocked.
Mae opened the door. The other person was the woman doing her hair. She had a comb in one hand and the patient expression of someone whose client wouldn't hold still.
“You okay?” Mae asked.
Nora nodded. Then she shook her head, a small correction.
“They're in.”
“I heard them.”
The hair woman asked Mae to sit once more. Mae sat and kept looking at Nora in the mirror. Nora stood inside the door, unsure whether she had come to ask for help or to prove she wouldn't.
“I met two,” she said.
“Only two? They'll have to spread out.”
Nora laughed. Mae's face eased.
“They wanted something,” Nora said.
“They all do. Sometimes it's a drink.”
The hair woman smiled. Nora looked away from the mirror until the woman finished and gathered her things. Mae thanked her. The door closed, leaving the room too quiet after the small, concentrated activity.
Mae lifted a hand to her hair, then remembered she'd been told not to touch it.
“I'll be where they said,” she told Nora.
“I know.”
“Not hovering. Just there if you need.”
Nora sat on the edge of the spare chair. It was a better chair than hers. She noticed, then was tired of noticing.
“I don't want you to think everything I say is for you.”
Mae looked at her.
“Tonight,” Nora said.
“Okay.”
“Some of it is just the set.”
“Okay.”
Nora wanted a stronger answer, then realized she had come to stop Mae making the answer stronger.
“Good luck,” she said.
Mae nodded. “You, too.”
She did not add a compliment. Nora got up before the absence could become another thing she asked Mae to understand.
In her own room she took one last look at the page with the cut marked. Forty-five seconds could be found. The permitted question was there if she needed it. She knew the gesture in her whole arm.
She put the page away.
Jo came for her. The corridor looked narrower now, cases pushed farther back, people standing still in places which had been full of movement all afternoon. Nora could hear the sound from the auditorium, many conversations dissolving into one.
She passed a monitor and saw the camera finding the front of the stage. There was the room. There was the microphone. Her place existed without her in it, waiting for someone to come and make it less empty.
Mae arrived behind her. Nora knew it was Mae before she turned, some small recognition of the walk which had nothing to do with the manager. Mae stopped short of the marked position, waiting for the opening package to finish.
The sound changed. Jo lifted a finger. Nora looked down at her own shoes, the left one mercifully silent on the theater floor, then out toward the light.
“Stand by,” Jo said.
Nora opened her hands at her sides and let them close again.