Chapter 6: Supper

Nora Bell followed her glance.

“While you’re here, I wondered whether the pedal might need—”

She stopped. Her floury hand rested on the back of a chair.

Ada Mercer kept her handbag open.

“Is it sticking?”

“No.”

“Making a noise?”

“I don’t think so.”

The boy looked down at the saucer. He moved neither toward the piano nor toward the hall.

“Then it doesn’t need a repair,” Ada Mercer said.

The words came out more sharply than she had intended. She pressed the clasp closed, feeling its small teeth meet through the leather.

“No,” Nora Bell said. “It doesn’t.”

From the kitchen came a soft, irregular tapping. Something heating, perhaps, or the edge of a lid. Ada Mercer could not place it. She looked toward the sound, then back at the woman holding the chair.

“I was going to ask you to come on Saturday,” Nora Bell said.

Ada Mercer waited for the rest: to listen, to look, to make sure.

The chair shifted a little under the floury hand.

“For supper. Both of you. Would you like to?”

The tapping stopped.

Ada Mercer felt the weight of her coat at the back of her neck. She had been standing with one shoulder raised, keeping the handbag strap from slipping. She lowered it, and the strap slid into the crook of her elbow.

“I can,” Eli Finch said. “What time?”

“Six, if that works for you.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

He looked at Nora Bell when he answered. Then he stood quietly beside the table. He did not turn to Ada Mercer to make his answer into hers.

She could say she was busy. No one had asked to see her book. She could thank them, take the felt home, put it in its pocket, and have everything where it belonged.

Nora Bell took her hand off the chair.

“You don’t have to decide now.”

That made it harder, somehow. The room gave her nothing to push against.

“I’d like to come,” Ada Mercer said.

Her voice was low enough that she wondered whether she would have to say it again. But Nora Bell nodded, then brushed at the flour on her wrist. It left a white streak on her sweater.

“Good. Six, then.”

Ada Mercer put her handbag on the table and opened it. The mute came up caught against the appointment book; she freed it before laying the book beside the saucer.

She found Saturday. The pen made no mark at first. She tried it at the edge of the page, where a small bead of ink appeared.

“Supper,” she said.

“Yes.”