At six fourteen, Daniel found that he had finished everything he had meant to do.
The groceries were put away. The towels had dried. He had tightened the screw beneath the kitchen drawer so that it no longer caught against the drawer below it, and for a while he had opened and closed both, enjoying the separate, competent movements. Now he stood with the screwdriver in his hand, trying to remember where it belonged.
From the bedroom, Mara said, “Does this look like something you wear to ask for money?”
She was wearing black trousers and a green shirt he liked. One cuff was turned back; the other hung over her wrist. She held up two earrings, then lowered one.
“Who are you asking?”
“People who already have it.”
“Then yes.”
“Useful. Thank you.”
He put the screwdriver on the kitchen counter and went to look properly. There was a tote bag on the bed containing her overnight things and a paperback with a receipt tucked into it. She was going to a benefit for the community arts organization where she worked, then staying with her sister in Long Beach. In the morning they would take their mother to lunch. He had been invited to all of it. He had chosen a night at home with the mild pleasure of a man protecting time for himself.
“The small ones,” he said.
“Too small?”
“You’ll be wearing that badge. The big ones will hit it.”
She held an earring against her neck and turned toward the mirror.
“This is why I married an engineer.”
“There were other reasons.”
“There was the parking.”
He took the earring she had rejected and put it in the little dish on the dresser. The dish was shaped like a fish and had a chipped tail. They had bought it together somewhere neither of them could now agree on. He thought a shop near her father’s hospital. She insisted they had owned it years before her father got sick.
She was searching in the tote.
“What?”
“My notes.”
“Printer.”
“Right.”
He brought her the folded sheet. There were three short paragraphs on it, covered in revisions. Beside the last, she had written slow down.
“Read it to me,” he said.
“I’ve read it to you.”
“You changed it.”
She looked at the clock, then took the paper. He sat on the edge of the bed. The speech concerned a Saturday program that had outgrown its borrowed room, the cost of keeping it open through the summer, a girl who had started drawing everyone’s shoes because she did not yet like drawing faces. Mara reached the girl’s name and stopped.
“Too much?”
“No.”
“It feels like I’m selling her.”
“Does she know you’re telling it?”
“She said I could. Her mother said I could. I showed them.”
“Then tell it.”
She read the last paragraph more slowly. He could hear where she had taken his advice from the night before and where she had sensibly ignored it. When she finished, he wanted her to do well. The feeling was simple and available to him. He reached for the loose cuff and folded it back to match the other.
At the door she asked what he was going to eat.
“There’s chicken.”
“There’s chicken if you cook chicken.”
“I understand the sequence.”
She kissed him, adjusted the tote on her shoulder, and went down the stairs. He listened until the outside gate struck its latch. Then he remembered the screwdriver.
He put it away.
He cooked the chicken in the heavy pan, with lemon and the last of the thyme. While it rested, he ate a piece of skin from the edge. It was hot enough to hurt his fingers and tasted exactly as he had hoped. He salted the rice, cut a tomato, and carried his plate to the table.
Across the courtyard, someone had propped a bicycle upside down on a balcony. A man in reading glasses was turning one pedal with his hand. The wheel spun, slowed, spun again. Daniel had seen him often enough to nod to him at the mailboxes but did not know his name.
His phone lay beside the plate. He turned it facedown.
There was nothing difficult waiting for him at work. A timing update had gone through on Thursday, and Friday’s review had ended eleven minutes early. For two weeks his team had been trying to determine why a corridor kept lengthening pedestrian waits after the evening rush. The fault had been in how an old sensor’s missing reports were being interpreted. He had found it. Someone else had fixed it. No one had needed to stay late.
He had slept well. He had gone to his morning meeting and helped return the chairs to the cupboard afterward. A new man had asked how long he had, and Daniel had said a little over four months. Saying it had given him a small, private satisfaction. He did not have to round upward or explain an exception.
He ate the tomato last, wiping the juice with a piece of chicken he had saved for it.
There was more rice in the pot. He considered taking some, decided he was full, and washed his plate. Then he washed the pan before the fat could set. He wiped the stove. The whole meal, including preparation and cleaning, had used less than an hour.
He went into the living room.
For several weeks he had been saving a film for an evening alone. Mara did not like the director, whose characters, she said, needed jobs and firmer mattresses. Daniel had defended him, though he could no longer remember on what grounds.
He found the film and dimmed the lamp.
A woman arrived at a house beside the sea. She carried her suitcase through several empty rooms. There was an elderly man at the kitchen table. They spoke about someone who had died. Daniel watched the light moving on a water glass and thought it was beautiful. Then he wondered how long the film was.
He brought up the progress bar. Nine minutes had passed.
He put the remote down.
The woman went outside. Wind moved through grass. He knew he was meant to settle into the pace, and for a few moments he did. He had once been good at this. In college he had gone alone to afternoon screenings and emerged into daylight with the gratifying sense that he had been somewhere other people had not. Now he found himself thinking about the people who had made the film: the cold crew waiting just out of frame, the person responsible for continuity, how many times they had carried the suitcase back to the car.
He checked his phone without remembering picking it up.
No messages.
He paused the film so that he would not miss anything. On the screen, the woman stood with her mouth partly open, about to say something he had already stopped wanting to hear.
There were other films. He returned to the menu and moved through them. Each offered a place, a face, some manageable trouble. He opened the description of a thriller and recognized it halfway through. He had seen the whole thing. He could remember the basement and nothing that had brought anyone there.
He turned the television off.
The living room appeared in the dark glass: lamp, couch, his bare legs beneath his shorts. It was seven thirty-eight.
He could read.
On the low shelf beside the couch were books he had bought because he wanted to read them, and books he had bought because buying them briefly restored his confidence that he was someone who read. He chose one about water in the American West. There was a bookmark on page eighty-six, an envelope from the dentist.
He began a paragraph about a reservoir, reached the bottom of the page, and went back to the top. On his second attempt he understood the paragraph. He turned the page and checked how many remained in the chapter.
Outside, a child was refusing to come indoors. The refusal was composed of a single vowel, sustained with impressive breath. A woman answered in a low voice. The child stopped, listened, and began again at the same pitch.
Daniel smiled. He wanted to tell Mara. He could almost hear her defending the child’s position.
He picked up his phone and typed, How’s the money extraction?
He deleted it. She would be preparing to speak, or speaking, or trying to remember the names of people who expected their names to be remembered. He put the phone down and read another page.
There were ways to handle an evening like this. He knew them. Eat something. Leave the apartment. Call someone before there was a reason to make the call difficult. He did not resent the advice. It had helped on other evenings, and some mornings, and once during an hour in a parking lot when he had called a man he scarcely knew and listened to a detailed account of a dishwasher installation until he could drive home.
Tonight he had eaten. He had been around people that morning. He was neither especially tired nor angry. His body felt fine. His body seemed prepared to go on feeling fine for a very long time.
He put on shoes.
At the gate, he met the man from the balcony carrying the bicycle by its frame.
“Any luck?” Daniel asked.
The man looked at him.
“Saw you working on it.”
“Oh. It’s my daughter’s. Brake rubs.”
“You fix it?”
“I made it rub on the other side.”
Daniel laughed and held the gate. The man maneuvered the handlebars through, thanking him twice. A strip of pink tape hung loose from one grip. Daniel watched him lower the bicycle gently into the back of an old hatchback, placing a towel between the frame and the bumper.
He turned toward the boulevard.
The air had cooled, though the stucco walls still gave off heat when he passed close to them. Someone was watering behind a hedge. At the corner, roots had raised two slabs of pavement and the city had painted the edges yellow. He stepped over them without looking down.
He liked this neighborhood. He and Mara had stayed in the apartment through three rent increases, two noisy upstairs tenants, and a year in which every conversation seemed to end with the possibility of moving. They could walk to things here. They had a table that fit the window. On clear winter mornings, from one particular place in the street, you could see snow on the mountains beyond the signs and wires.
The light changed. He crossed with a young couple carrying a sleeping child between them, the child’s cheek flattened against the man’s shoulder. The woman had one hand on the small bare foot that stuck out beneath his arm. Daniel glanced at them longer than he intended, then looked ahead.
A restaurant had put little battery lamps on its outside tables. Two women were sharing fries. One was talking with both hands while the other watched her, smiling before she reached whatever was supposed to be funny. Farther down, a man alone was cutting a large sandwich into halves. He aligned the halves, considered them, and began with the smaller one.
Daniel walked past the bookstore. It was closed. A handwritten card beneath a novel said the bookseller had stayed awake until three finishing it. He leaned close enough to read the first paragraph through the glass, but the displayed copy was shut.
He could go for coffee. Coffee would leave him awake. He could order tea, which would mean sitting somewhere with a cup of tea, performing the public version of what he had just failed to do at home.
At the next intersection he stopped, though the walk signal was on. There was no place he was trying to reach. The realization embarrassed him, as if someone watching from a car might have noticed.
He crossed anyway.
His phone vibrated outside a dry cleaner.
Mara had sent a photograph of her place card beside a bread roll. Beneath it: They put me next to the foundation guy who calls us scrappy.
Tell him scrappy costs more this year, Daniel wrote.
Her answer came quickly.
Stealing that.
Then: What are you doing?
Walking. Made chicken. Started that film you hate.
Which of the nine thousand?
Dead father. Coastal house.
Oh god. Enjoy.
He stood smiling at the phone. Behind the dry cleaner’s window hung a row of shirts in translucent bags, each with a paper square at the collar. A little motor turned an advertisement for alterations. He waited for another message, although there was no reason for her to send one.
He could write that he was having a strange evening. She would understand enough to ask a question. If he said he was restless, she might step outside and call. He pictured her standing near a service entrance, holding the phone against her ear while staff carried trays past her. He did not want that. He wanted her inside, using his joke, getting through the part about the girl who drew shoes.
He sent a heart and put the phone away.
On the way home he bought a small tub of ice cream. He spent some time deciding between coffee and pistachio. The cashier asked if he wanted a bag, and he said no, then wished he had said yes because the tub was cold against his palm.
At home he ate three spoonfuls standing by the sink. The pistachio was good, richer than he expected, with a little salt at the end. He put the tub in the freezer. He could have more later.
It was eight forty-six.
He went to the bathroom and washed his face. In the mirror he looked like a man who had washed his face. Water had darkened the neck of his shirt. He dried it with the corner of a towel, which did very little, and went back to the living room.
The book lay open on the arm of the couch. He picked it up to avoid losing his place and then realized he had already lost it. He inserted the envelope and closed the cover.
For a while he stood in the middle of the room.
The refrigerator started. A car door shut outside. He could hear a television upstairs, followed by the brief, hard sound of something being dropped on the floor. None of this bothered him. He would have welcomed something that bothered him in a way he could locate.
He lay down on the couch. Then he sat up because lying down at this hour felt like surrendering the evening, and he had wanted this evening. He had been looking forward to it since Wednesday. At work, between messages and the corridor review and a call that had become two calls, the prospect of these hours had seemed almost luxurious.
Now he had them. He could do anything he liked within the ordinary limits of his life, and he could not get beyond the choosing.
He opened a music app. The first song was one he loved. He listened through its introduction and moved to another. Then another. He recognized the little intake of breath before a singer began, and skipped it before she could.
He set the phone on the cushion beside him.
“Come on,” he said.
He was not sure whether he meant get up or stay still.
There was a meeting at nine, twenty minutes away. He looked at its address. He had been there twice. The room was too cold and the man who made the coffee filled the urn as if he were punishing it. Both times, Daniel had felt better afterward.
He could arrive late. No one would mind.
He imagined sitting in the circle and saying that he had eaten a nice dinner and gone for a walk and now did not know what to do. No one would laugh. This made it harder, somehow. They would give his small difficulty their full attention. Someone would recognize it. Someone would say something useful, and he would thank them, and afterward he would come home.
His thumb rested against the edge of the phone.
He could call Luis, who had given him his number after the morning meeting weeks ago. Luis answered calls while doing other things. Daniel liked this about him. It reduced the feeling of having convened an emergency. Once Luis had spoken to him from a hardware store and interrupted a serious account of shame to ask an employee where they kept the wall anchors.
He opened their messages.
The last was from Thursday: a photograph of a dog asleep with its head inside a running shoe. Daniel had responded with a question about ventilation. Luis had written, He makes his choices.
Daniel typed, You around?
He looked at it. It was a perfectly ordinary message. He did not need to know what he would say next.
He sent it.
Then he put the phone on the table and went to take the clean towels from the dryer.
There were four bath towels and two hand towels. He folded them carefully, aligning the worn edges. A length of dark hair had wound itself into the binding of one. He worked it free and dropped it in the bathroom bin.
When he returned, there was no answer yet.
He understood that Luis had a life. He had seen photographs of his children. One was learning to drive; the other was still at an age when every school assignment required the parents to buy a particular kind of cardboard. Nine minutes without an answer meant nothing.
Daniel picked up the phone to check whether it had been nine minutes.
It had been four.
He began to think about using with a weariness that made the thought seem less dangerous than it was.
He knew where it led. He could supply the next morning in detail: the sour mouth, the inventory, the effort of remembering what he had said and to whom. He thought of telling Mara. He thought of not telling her, and the days of extra attention that would follow, the questions answered too promptly. He had done all of this before. There was no part of it he needed to investigate.
No, he thought.
He got up and drank a glass of water.
The answer held while he drank it. He rinsed the glass and left it upside down beside the sink. He could go to bed early. People did. They had evenings that failed to become anything and they went to bed.
He turned off the kitchen light.
In the dimness, the rest of the apartment seemed to have been prepared for someone who had not arrived. His book waited. The film waited. There was ice cream, music, clean linen, the good chair by the window. He had supplied the place with things he liked over many years. He knew why each was there.
He turned the light back on.
Later, he would have difficulty deciding when he had made the decision. There were several moments he could choose, and each would put the responsibility a little farther from the others.
For now he was only holding his phone.
There was a name he had deleted months ago. The number remained in an old conversation he had not deleted, because at the time deleting the contact had felt sufficient. He remembered doing it at this table with Mara asleep in the next room. He had felt clean and practical. He had gone to bed afterward and put an arm around her.
He found the conversation.
The last exchange was logistical, almost offensively dull. It could have concerned a borrowed drill. He scrolled upward, saw dates he did not want to see, and returned to the bottom.
He put the phone down.
There was still time to call someone. There would be time after a message, too. Sending a message did not require him to do anything else. The distinction presented itself with the calm precision of one of his own useful thoughts.
He picked the phone up.
He did not want the long, blurred hours he remembered from drinking. He did not want to talk until morning or be interesting to strangers or wake up somewhere else. What came to mind was brief and familiar, something whose effects he remembered as ending quickly. He let that brevity occupy his attention. It left little room for what he knew about beginning again when it ended.
He typed a greeting.
Before he sent it, a notification from Mara appeared at the top of the screen.
Done. Didn’t rush. They laughed at scrappy.
He opened her message. There was a photograph taken by someone sitting close to the front: Mara at a lectern, one hand raised, the green sleeve turned back. She was looking beyond the camera. He enlarged the image. She looked pleased and a little fierce, caught in the act of saying something she meant.
Knew you’d be great, he wrote.
He wanted to add something about the picture, something that would make clear he had really looked. He could not find it immediately, so he sent what he had.
Then he returned to the other conversation.
The greeting was still there.
He sent it.
For almost a minute there was no response. He felt exposed and foolish. Perhaps the number belonged to someone else now. Perhaps there would be no answer until tomorrow, when he would be grateful. He could already imagine the gratitude, and for a moment he wanted it.
Three dots appeared.
The reply was brief. Daniel answered it. Then another question came, and he answered that too.
He remained at the table while the arrangements were made. Once he looked up toward the window, where his own face floated faintly over the dark courtyard. He lowered his eyes.
A message from Luis came through.
Hey. Just got out of a movie with the kids. Can call in ten?
Daniel read it twice.
His first impulse was to say yes. It was so immediate that his thumb moved toward the keyboard before he stopped it. He pictured Luis in the parking lot, children asking for food, one hand cupped over his free ear. He would answer. Daniel knew he would answer.
In the other conversation, someone was waiting for confirmation.
He wrote to Luis, All good. Just saying hi. Enjoy the kids.
Then he confirmed.
He placed the phone beside the empty fruit bowl. He had forgotten apples at the store. Mara had written them on the list, and he had come home without them. Tomorrow he could go out before she got back.
He wiped a small sticky mark from the table with his thumb. He took the dish towel from the oven handle, wet a corner, and wiped the mark properly. Then he checked the phone.
Twenty minutes.
He pulled out a chair and sat down to wait.