Emily’s throat tightened. She looked at the blue bowl so she would not have to look at the kindness directly, the way you don’t look at a bright light while you’re driving. “If I taught on Saturdays,” she said, “I would still be here the other days. Hale’s would still have me. I am not disappearing into a conference.”
“Good,” he said. “Conferences never fed anybody soup. Go call the woman or don’t call her. But don’t sit in the middle of the decision until it goes bad, like fruit. You’re my daughter. I know your middle. Your middle is a very well-organized place where things go to be almost done.”
She laughed, and the laugh surprised her, because it was not the laugh she used on the floor. It was younger. She washed the bowls. He dried, the towel moving in his left hand more than his right, a system they had invented without naming it. Before she left for her own apartment, a studio over the dry cleaner’s on Mill, where the coats downstairs lent the nights a faint chemical sweetness, she stood on the walk and looked at the maple keys. She did not sweep them. Some work belonged to the morning. In the car she touched the card in her pocket and did not take it out. The not-taking was not a no. It was a wish to let the day end as a day, with its salt and its ninety-three, and not as the first chapter of a reinvention she had not yet agreed to narrate.
Her apartment was one room and a kitchenette and a window that faced the brick of the next building, which she had chosen because it did not ask her to have a view. On the table by the bed there was a stack of books she still read, not as relics but as books: a volume on elementary number theory with her old notes in the margin, a novel with a cracked spine, a field guide to the trees of the state that had been her mother’s and was now a way of knowing what the maple was doing. She showered the diner off. She put on a sweatshirt that had belonged to the visiting year and had lost its meaning as a souvenir and become only warm. Then she sat at the table and, on the back of a guest check she had brought home by accident, she wrote the problem again from memory.