Page 27

The schedule on the refrigerator says Saturday, seven to ten.

It’s eleven forty.

I stand in my own hallway with my coat on and my bag on my shoulder.

I go into the bedroom, take the heavy blanket off my own bed, and come back out.

He’s a light sleeper. He must be. But I get within two feet of him with a blanket in both hands, and he doesn’t move at all. Up close, his face has gone slack and about ten years younger. There’s gray in his stubble that doesn’t show in daylight.

He doesn’t wake up when I put the blanket over him, or when I take the laptop out from under his hand, close it, and set it on the floor. The cup falls over on the carpet and rolls. He sleeps through it all.

He’s thirty-eight years old and asleep in a hard chair in a coat he didn’t take off.

I stand there. My jaw is tense and I have nothing to do with my hands. I pick the coffee cup up, take it to the kitchen, wash it, and put it upside down in the rack. Then I go to bed without a blanket, lying in the dark and listening to him breathing in the next room.

8

Iwake at ten to six with my neck locked and a blanket over me.

It takes a second to assemble. Hard chair. Coat still on. Laptop on the floor at my feet, which isn’t where I left it.

The blanket is heavy and navy. It smells like laundry soap. Underneath that, like him.

I sit in the dark with it over my knees and don’t move.

Nobody has covered me with anything since I was a child. My mother put a blanket over me at some point before I was ten, on a couch, probably. Then nothing, for twenty-eight years, in eleven addresses.

I take it off, fold it, and place it over the arm of the chair.

Then I put the laptop and papers in the bag. I stand at the sink, drink a glass of water, and rinse the glass. By the time his door opens at twenty past six, I’m at the table with the bag zipped and my coat buttoned.

He comes out in track pants, with his hair flat on one side. “Morning.”

“There’s a car coming for you at seven fifteen,” I say. “You said optional practice was this morning. I moved the call with the licensing people to Wednesday.”

“Okay.”

He goes past me to the kettle. The blanket is on the arm of the chair four feet from him, folded.

Neither of us says one word about it.

He makes tea he doesn’t drink, then stands at the counter looking out at the harbor. The sun isn’t up. A line of orange sits over the far cranes.

“You should get a better chair,” he says to the window.

“It’s not my apartment.”

“No.” He drinks the tea then, one swallow, and puts the mug down. “Car at seven fifteen.”

I pick up my bag and go. On the landing outside his door, I stop with my hand on the rail and stand there for a while like a man who’s forgotten his keys.

Nine years and four months. That’s how long I’ve worked for Vera Lindqvist. I’ve never taken a sick day or lost a file. I’ve never misfiled a number. And I’ve been in this stairwell for a minute and a half because I don’t want to go down it.

Vera is at her desk at seven with her glasses on.

“Thursday.”

“What’s Thursday?”