I put the O’Jays on and sat in the second chair and let the room hold what Gerald had said.This is the beginning of the thing.Curtis Rawlings, eight years in these walls. Willie Bennett, forty dollars and a decision to stay.
Not the pride of it, though the pride was there. The other thing underneath it that was recognition. The feeling of a man who had been building toward something and had not known until the thing existed.
I had told Marcus I’d put the store first. Build something first worth showing up for before you show up asking for anything. I had been right to believe it.
What I had not understood was that the building was not preparatory. The building was the thing itself. A room on a block that held people who needed to be held.
And Nova was in it. Not because I had built it for her, though I had, at least in part. She was in it because she had heard what it needed before it was built and had told me. Because she had walked through the door the first time with her eyes closed and felt it. Because she had been putting something of herself in the first chair since before there was a first chair, and the first chair had never once been empty.
I had always been in the second chair. That was where I lived in relation to her, one seat to the left, present and steady. I had known that since Norden, since she told me to get a set of chairs instead of just the one I planned to buy and called it resale value with a straight face. She wasn’t talking about chairs and we both knew it. I bought both without argument and spent three days sitting with the fact that neither of us said so. What was different now was that she was in the first one, consistently, with her name on it. I had stopped pretending mine didn’t have one too.
She arrived at twelve oh three, canvas bag over one shoulder, curls loose, and went straight to the display wall without stopping to say hello. I had always liked this about her. She was two records into the rotation when she stopped.
“What is this doing here?” she said.
“What is what doing where?” I came around the counter.
She was holdingSongs in the Key of Life, face out in the third slot.
“This is a foundation record,” she said. “You don’t rotate this. You build around it. It lives in the permanentcollection so everything else can move.” She set it back carefully. “Who put this in rotation?”
“I did.”
“Deion.” She looked at me. “You don’t make people stumble onto Stevie. You let the room arrive there.”
“Some people may not know where to start.”
“They will,” she said. “Through everything that came after him.” She crossed her arms. “Where did you want it?”
“Third slot from the left,” I said.
She held my gaze a second longer, then something in her expression shifted, less correction, more recognition of what I had been trying to do. She turned to reach into her bag. I tookSongs in the Key of Lifefrom the third slot, set it on the turntable, and dropped the needle.
“As” came out of the monitors and into the Archive.
Nova went still. Not the correcting stillness. The other kind, the one where something arrived before she’d had time to manage it. She stood in the middle of the room with the record still in her hands and did not move.
I came around the counter. The song was doing its thing, which was make distance feel like the wrong idea, and I crossed the floor and stood in front of her and she looked up at me and neither of us said anything. I took the record gently from her hands and set it on the counter. She let me.
Stevie Wonder kept going.
I kissed her the way I had been wanting to kiss her all morning, slowly. The way you kissed someone when you were not proving anything and did not need to be anywhereelse. She made a small sound and put her hand against my chest and kissed me back, and the song played around us.
When we came up for air, she looked at me with the expression I had been learning the name of for months. Something open and unguarded and entirely hers.
“Fine,” she said. “You win. This once.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Don’t get used to it.” She reached past me for the record she had brought and looked at it. “Stevie Wonder is a genius, and it belongs exactly where I put it.”
She set the record she’d brought on the counter and looked up at me. “It’s because I love you,” she said, not quite to me, as if she was confirming a fact to herself. “That’s the only reason you’re getting this one.”
“I know,” I said. “I love you too. I’ll always love you.”
She set her record in the third slot, face out, cover toward the room. I watched her stand in the center of the room with her head tilted, eyes closed, feeling where the sound was going. The half degree. The way she was right about everything in this room.
That night I lay in the dark and listened to her breathe and thought about the ring in my desk drawer, where it had been for six weeks.
