Chapter 3: What Remains

He rubbed at the dried mark on his sleeve. A flake loosened and landed on the table. He gathered it against his fingertip.

“Do you need the money?”

She could have said yes. There were bills in the drawer, and she was paid for work she could still do. Neither thing was false. But he had asked why she moved her hand after the note was right.

“I wanted to go back there.”

He stopped rubbing his sleeve.

The kitchen seemed to have become very small around the table. There was nowhere to put the lever except into its bag, nowhere to turn her chair without making a business of it. She lowered the tool into place. The cloth stayed folded.

“If there’s something left to do,” she said, “I can ask when it suits them.”

He glanced toward the counter. She followed his glance to the covered bowl, though she could not tell what he had noticed.

“You could ask anyway.”

“To do what?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it.

She had made the question sharp enough that any answer would have required him to offer something on another person’s behalf. She pulled a little crease out of the bag’s lining.

“It isn’t for you to arrange,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“I know.”

She did not know. She knew only that he had gone quiet again, and that she had put him in a position where being kind would take work.

He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “When you ask me to listen, what do you want me to say?”

“What you hear.”

“Even there?”

Her fingers stayed inside the empty pocket.

He went on before she answered. “If it sounds finished, I’ll say it sounds finished. I can’t say I hear something when I don’t.”

“I haven’t asked you to.”

“No.”

His agreement gave her nothing to push against. He looked down at the table, where his fingertip had left a faint brown streak from the mud.

“But if she asks me,” he said, “I need to be able to answer.”

She drew her hand out of the bag.

She could tell him that customers’ questions were hers to answer. She could leave him outside the piano room, holding the bag, and call that a clearer arrangement. For a moment she pictured him on a chair by the front door, listening to her work through the wall.

“You can answer,” she said.

“All right.”

He did not thank her. She was glad of that, though gladness was not quite what she felt in the uncomfortable space beneath her ribs.

She turned the bag so its opening faced him.