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“I know which one, I put a can on it and it tipped.” She didn’t look up. “Helen wrote it on the list. ‘Third shelf. Don’t.’”
“Don’t what.”
“That’s all it says. ‘Don’t.’” She turned a page on the notepad. “I didn’t.”
He stood in his own kitchen with a screwdriver. She typed something. The chart on the wall had a second column since Monday, and a third, and a color. The coffee on the burner was at the level a pot gets to when it’s been rationed all afternoon by somebody who counts.
“I’ll do it anyway,” he said.
“Fine.”
“Might take a while.”
“Nobody’s stopping you.”
He went in the pantry and took a while. It was one screw. It had come out because the wood behind it was soft, and it needed a longer screw and a plug, and he had neither. He stood in the dark among the cans and turned the screw in and out a few times for the noise, and listened to her type, and thought about her hand on that plate, and what her voice had done on I’m not interested. He told himself, very plainly, that he was thirty years old and standing in a pantry with a screwdriver to be twelve feet nearer a woman who’d made a face about him at supper. That if Chase walked in he’d never hear the end of it. It did not get him out of the pantry.
When he came out she had a mop in her hand. She held it out.
“What’s that.”
“It’s a mop. You’ll have seen one. You put the wet end on the floor.”
“I’ve got a shelf.”
“You’ve got a screw in a piece of wood that needs a plug, and you know it, and I know it, and Helen knew it in 2019. Take the mop.” She held it out another inch. “If you’re going to stand in my kitchen for the better part of an hour on a Wednesday, you can do it holding something useful. Under the table. Levi and his lizard were both under there at lunch and only one of them washed.”
He took the mop. Her fingers were on the handle. His went around it above them, and for a second they were both holding it, her hand and then his, and neither of them let go. She looked at his hand. He watched her look. He watched the color come up her throat and wanted to put his mouth where the color was, and she let go first.
“Under the table,” she said, and went back to her laptop, and her voice had that shake in it again, just slightly, and she’d heard it, and she typed harder.
He mopped. Under the table, around the legs, under the old man’s chair, and the whole time he knew exactly where she was, which was at the counter with her back to him and her shoulders very straight. She knew where he was too. She didn’t turn a page for four minutes, and she was not a woman who sat still. He got to the stretch of floor between the table and the counter and she was standing in it.
“Move.”
She moved. One step, without looking. He mopped where she’d been standing, with the warmth of her at his shoulder and her shampoo in his nose, and thought about the fridge, and what he’d have done if she’d said one word different than the word she’d said. Back her into the counter. Find out how far down that T-shirt went. He put the mop in the bucket before he did something about it in his father’s kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon.
“You didn’t ask,” he said.
“About what.”
“Where I was last night when you came down. Or why. Or why I said what I said.”
“You said you couldn’t sleep.” She closed the laptop. “I don’t need to know why you couldn’t sleep. I don’t need to know anything about you at all, Brody, except what you eat and what time you want it, and I’ve got both on the chart.”
“I’m on the chart.”
“Everybody’s on the chart.”
“What’s it say.”
“It says you’ll eat anything and you’ll be late for it.” She picked the laptop up. “You’re done. The floor’s done. Thank you for the shelf.”
She went out. He stood there with the mop and the bucket, and Remi, who’d been in the hall the whole time, said from the doorway, “Oh, this is going to be good,” and he said, “Shut up,” and she didn’t.
Remi got him at the truck, at dark, when he’d gone out to get the day’s well readings off the seat and she’d followed him with her hands in her back pockets and her mind already made up.
“So,” Remi said.
