On Sunday Sam asked Nora to hold his coat while he went to find somebody who knew where the extension cable was.
She took it. He had a job in the school performance, a practical job which required him to move with purpose while other people worried about the things they would say. Nora had assumed he was onstage. He was pleased to explain that if he did his job correctly, nobody would look at him.
“Except us,” Ben said.
Sam made a face and went down the aisle.
The coat was warm from his body. Nora folded it over her knees. Ben asked if she wanted to talk about last night. She said not yet, and he said all right before asking whether she had a tissue. She handed him the packet from the pharmacy. He took one and gave it back.
Somebody needed a seat. Nora moved her bag. The lights changed badly, then changed again. From the far side of the little room Sam lifted a hand to someone Nora couldn't see, and the first person came out to begin.
Two weeks later, Gloria gave Nora a paid twelve on a bill which had room for neither a feud nor a comeback.
“You're fourth,” she said on the phone.
Nora wrote it down.
“What time do you need me?”
Gloria told her. There was a fee, small enough that Nora had to stop herself doing the comparison in the middle of the call. She accepted it without asking whether her name would be above somebody else's.
At Low Ceiling she put her bag under the back table. Inez was already there, marking something on the running order. Her next monthly show was on the wall. The photograph had her whole body in it, knee out, one hand sternly directing a woman nobody could see.
“Good picture,” Nora said.
“My sister took it. I made her stand on a chair. She's still telling people.”
Inez had another room asking her back after the brewery set. Not a big room, and not on a night which would let her leave the hotel job. She was trying to decide whether getting a photograph of the new bit was worth the journey on a day she wasn't performing.
Nora listened. She didn't offer to ask anybody for anything. When Inez wanted to know which of two dates seemed better for putting up the new listing, Nora said she didn't know and asked when Inez could actually finish it.
“Tuesday,” Inez said. “So Tuesday, then.”
She wrote it down. There was a pen with a little striped cap beside her hand. Nora almost picked it up, then got her own out of the bag.
They had not done a public tour of the clip. Inez had put a short note beneath it directing people to Nora's page and the later interview, then kept her own work at the top of the page. Nora had answered the messages addressed to her, sometimes badly, sometimes not until the next day. None of it had produced a number she could call finished.
There was a message from Mae on her phone. A photograph of a package in a store: the crackers they'd both thought had disappeared, in their new color. No words. Nora had looked at it several times on the train.
She sent a picture of the little table where she was sitting. The coffee ring, the running order, Inez's hand holding the page down while the door let in a draft.
Mae didn't reply before the show began.
Nora put the phone away. Inez went up first, thanked people for coming and tried a new opening which made the first row look up from their drinks. The teacher arrived a minute later, confident of a floor he couldn't control. At the ending Cheryl found her keys and left. The teacher's hand stayed out. His little puff of breath came too late to bring her back, and a woman near the bar laughed while Inez was still standing there.
Inez waited until the laugh stopped, her hand still extended. Then she took it back and left.
The next comic had a story which Nora thought might become good when he stopped telling the room it was true. For now he told them it was true three times. The third comic was somebody she didn't know. His pants were wet below the knee, and he began by explaining why. The explanation was funnier than the prepared first line he tried afterward.
Then it was Nora's turn.
She stood. Gloria had put her name on the running order exactly where she'd said it would be, no extra introduction. The host said Nora Moss and people clapped because that was what happened when a person walked toward the stage.
Some of them might have recognized her. She didn't inspect their faces to decide which ones she owed a version of the week. She took the microphone from the stand and adjusted it for the person who would need it afterward.
“I bought a secondhand desk,” she said. “The woman selling it said the drawer stuck, but only if you put things in it.”
A small laugh.
“She was very firm. It was a desk for looking like you worked. I told her I'd been looking for one for years.”
Another laugh, from farther back. Nora felt it and let her hands find the drawer.
She tried to open it carefully, already performing how reasonable she intended to be. It didn't move. She tried again with a smile for the woman who'd sold it, as if the woman were still in the room and might be able to appreciate the effort.
The drawer remained stuck.
Nora put one foot against the invisible leg and took hold with both hands.