Chapter Twenty-one: Sunday, Monday

She checked her email before she was properly awake on Sunday morning, sitting on the edge of her bed with her hair still flat on one side and her eyes adjusting slowly to the light from the screen.

Nothing.

She knew there wouldn't be. She'd known that when she sent the emails on Saturday and she'd known it when she woke up at three in the morning and checked the first time too. Clubs didn't sort their booking inquiries on Saturday nights. That wasn't how it worked. But knowing that hadn't stopped her from checking and it didn't stop her now so she put her phone down and got up and went to make coffee.

Sunday had a different quality of quiet than Saturday. Saturday quiet felt like something you'd earned. Sunday quiet had an edge to it, that low persistent awareness of Monday sitting just beyond the afternoon, waiting with no particular patience.

She studied for three hours after breakfast, working through a practice paper at the kitchen table with her second coffee going cold beside her the way it always did. She got twenty three out of twenty five questions right, which was good, which was better than last week, which meant the studying was working even when it didn't feel like it was.

She made herself eat a proper lunch. Not just coffee and toast but actual food, rice and vegetables and something that required more than three minutes of effort, because she'd been running on not enough sleep and too much caffeine for two weeks and her body had started sending quiet complaints that she'd been ignoring.

In the afternoon she called her aunt Renee.

Renee lived four hours away in the same town Asha had grown up in and called every Sunday at three whether Asha called first or not, so Asha had learned to call at two forty five to avoid the specific guilt of making her aunt feel like an afterthought. They talked for forty minutes about ordinary things. Renee's neighbor's ongoing war with the HOA. The church fundraiser that had somehow become a political event. Whether Asha was eating enough, sleeping enough, working too hard.

"I'm fine," Asha said, standing in her kitchen, looking through the doorframe at her bedroom.

At the nightstand.

At the white rectangle sitting on the dark wood exactly where she'd left it two days ago.

"You sound tired," Renee said.

"I'm always tired. I'm twenty three and I work two jobs."

"You sound like your mother when you say things like that." Renee's voice had that particular softness it got when she mentioned her. Not sad exactly. Just careful. Like she was handling something she knew was fragile. "She used to say the same thing. I'm fine, Renee. I'm always fine."

Asha didn't say anything for a moment.

"I'm okay," she said. Quieter. "Really."

They said their goodbyes and she hung up and stood in the kitchen for a while after, the phone still in her hand, looking at nothing in particular.

Then she went back to her textbook.

*********

Monday started the way Mondays started. The alarm at six forty five, the commute that was always slightly too cold on the way there and slightly too warm on the way back, the medical records office with its fluorescent lighting and its particular brand of focused quiet that she'd always found oddly steadying.

She was good at this work. The precision of it, the specific language, the way everything had a code and a category and a correct answer if you knew where to look. Her supervisor Linda had stopped by her desk twice in the last month to mention full time hours after the certification and both times Asha had smiled and said she'd love that and meant every word.

Six weeks.

She ate lunch at her desk because the break room was loud on Mondays and she had a practice paper she wanted to finish. Patricia from the filing department appeared at her elbow around half past twelve and left a cookie without saying anything, the way Patricia did when she'd decided someone needed a cookie and wasn't going to make a whole thing of it.

Asha looked at it for a second.

Then she ate it and went back to her paper.

On the bus home she didn't study. She just looked out the window and watched the city come on in the early evening dark, lights appearing in buildings as she moved through them, all those windows and all those lives happening behind them, ordinary and warm and completely separate from each other.

She thought about Wednesday. The new club. A smaller room, less money, a longer commute each way. Starting over with six weeks left before she didn't have to do any of it anymore. It wasn't the end of the world. It was just one more thing to manage and she was good at managing things. She'd always been good at managing things.

She got home, unlocked the deadbolt, dropped her bag by the door.

Made dinner, rice and whatever was in the fridge, and ate at the kitchen table with her textbook open beside her plate the way she always did when she was trying to make the hours count twice. Read two chapters. Did the dishes. Made her lunch for tomorrow because doing it the night before was the kind of small practical decision that kept everything running when everything was trying not to.

She brushed her teeth. Turned off the kitchen light. Went to her room.

Got into bed and turned off the lamp.

The envelope was on her nightstand, white against the dark wood, exactly where it had been for two days now. She could see the edge of it in the thin light coming under the curtains from the street outside. Her name on the front in that neat unhurried hand.

She looked at it for a moment.

Then she closed her eyes.

She fell asleep facing it, which was not something she was going to think about, and if her last conscious thought before sleep took her was of a man she didn't know standing in a parking lot she couldn't see from her window, well.

That was just exhaustion.

That was all that was.