Episodul 179 · The Call Owed

Zora smiled. Varren found himself waiting for the laugh, then caught himself waiting and shifted the chair in his hand.

Halloran noticed the movement.

— One bed. You’ll have to decide whether you or the furniture gets it.

— It folds.

— So do most of my customers by this time of day. Doesn’t make them any smaller.

He took another armful of wood through the curtain, and Varren could hear him moving about behind it, putting his own room in order without needing anyone to follow him.

Zora fastened her coat.

— Seven, if you come back. You don’t have to be earlier.

— You’re earlier.

— I’m paid to be. Badly, but it’s a distinction.

She waited a moment, not for a promise; she had already started putting her gloves on. He wanted to tell her he would be there. He wanted to make it sound settled, something she could reach for in the morning and find exactly where he had put it.

— I remember, he said.

She nodded and went out through the front, the bell sounding after her. Halloran called good night from behind the curtain.

Varren stayed until she had turned onto the bridge. The voices were still there, farther away than they had been before she came out of the hut. He could not tell when they had moved back.

The bus would leave whether he was on it or not. The shoemaker might have let the room. Those were ordinary uncertainties, and he could settle one of them by walking up the street.

At the door he looked back. Halloran had finished putting away the wood and was sweeping flour from the floor. He lifted a hand without stopping. The cart stood empty beside him, no longer an invitation to anything.

Varren lifted his own hand.

Then he took his chair to the shoe repair shop and asked what the room cost.

The price was more than the bus ticket. He paid it himself. Upstairs there was a bed, a basin, and a window looking away from the river. He left the chair folded beside the bed; it would be needed outside in the morning.

Before the shops closed, he went back down to the depot. At the bait shop he asked for a thermometer with a cord, one that could hang in water. The owner fetched a cardboard tube and named a price. Varren paid that too.

There was nobody there to thank him for it yet.

Back in Soles’s house, on the Saturday the river first warmed, they slept until two in the afternoon wherever they had fallen.

Soles woke on the sofa with Mina’s back against his shins and no memory of lying down. Maxim was in the armchair with his feet up on a kitchen chair and a cushion over his face. Tesa had taken the floor in front of the stove, flat on her back on the rug with her hands folded across her stomach, because, she had said at nine in the morning, it was the only surface in the house that did not have opinions. Krista had the bed. Nobody had argued. Krista had counted all night.

Lucky was the only one who had slept properly, and he wanted everyone to know it.

Soles pushed himself up with both hands. When he settled, his left hand closed again. He did not remember closing it. He opened it on his knee. There was a callus under the second finger, and nothing in the palm at all.

The chair in the light. He had nearly sat down.

He made coffee, which took a long time and most of the kitchen.

By the time it was ready the others were up, with the slow resentment of people who had been awake all night. Tesa sat on the kitchen chair Maxim had been using, which left Maxim’s foot nowhere to go, which led to a short negotiation.

— We can shut a hole in reality, Maxim said, lowering his foot onto Lucky, but getting a chair is apparently beyond us.

— You had two, Tesa said.

— One was for my foot. It’s not trained to stand.

— Then perhaps it can make the coffee, Krista said from the doorway. I’ve done enough counting for one night.

Maxim looked down at Lucky.

— At least he likes me.

— He licks his own ass, Soles said. Don’t let it go to your head.

She came in with her hair still flattened on one side and took the cup Soles held out to her, and her eyes went to his left hand on the table. He opened it. She nodded and drank her coffee.

Twelve hours ago she was counting a thread for me. Now she’s counting my fingers.

He did not mind. He found, a little to his surprise, that he would have minded if she had stopped.

Tarn came as the light was going.

He did not come in. He stood on the step in his long coat with his hat in his hand, and Soles, who had opened the door with Lucky leaning on his leg, saw at once that the man had not slept either and had spent the day being polite to people who outranked him. It was in his shoulders. A man who has been agreeing with things all day holds his shoulders as if they belong to someone else.

— I won’t keep you, Tarn said. I thought you should hear it from me, before you hear some other version.

— Hear what?

— The north. The river.

Behind Soles, the kitchen had gone quiet.

— It’s a small town in a valley. A river runs through the middle of it. It has never once in living memory stayed open past the first frost. Last night it stopped freezing. The temperature went up four degrees between midnight and morning, and it hasn’t come down.

— Last night, Soles said.

He did the arithmetic because someone had to, and there was not much of it. Last night they had been in the washroom with the thread. He looked at Tarn and Tarn looked back, and neither of them said it.

— Who noticed? Krista asked, coming up behind Soles’s shoulder.

— A technician at the river station. She reported it at seven this morning. By noon the council had sent a man with a new thermometer. He decided hers was broken and took both of them away.

— And was it broken?

— No.

He said it flatly, the way a man says a thing he has been forbidden to say all day and has just decided to say anyway.

— There’s a team going north at the end of the week, he said. Not mine. The other branch.

He let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to. They all remembered the man who had walked out of the kitchen wall. They remembered what his branch called a cleared site.

— I’m not asking you for anything, Tarn said. I want that understood. I’m telling you because last night you went into a building I couldn’t go into, and you came out, and so did the man at the gate. That buys you a phone call. This is the phone call.

He put his hat on, nodded to Krista, nodded to Soles, looked down at Lucky and seemed, briefly, to consider nodding to him too, and went down the path to his car.