Chapter Seventy-Seven: Rebuilding, Ordinarily

They kept the rules.

It surprised both of them, a little. For weeks, Tuesday and Thursday came round with the dull, reliable regularity of the bakery ovens, and each time he climbed the stairs at seven with some small, useless offering in his hands. A jar of honey. A paperback with a cracked spine that he thought she might like. Once, with great solemnity, a single lemon. He knocked three times, and waited, and asked if he might come in, and each time she answered that he might, and each time it felt a little less like a ceremony and a little more like a habit.

He asked twice. That was the one she tested first. On the second Thursday she was sitting at the drafting table with her shoulders drawn up, and he said, how was your day, and she said, fine, and he put down his bag and said, again, gently, how was it really, and her face crumpled and she told him the competition jury had asked for a revised site plan, and she had been lying awake with it for three nights.

He did not solve it. He sat on the floor and listened to the whole thing, and at the end he said, "That sounds frightening," and nothing else. She had not known, until that moment, how badly she had wanted someone to leave a problem exactly the size it was.

---

He slipped, of course. He was Damien Cross.

The third Tuesday he arrived with a folder, and when she asked what it was, he said, a little too brightly, that he had looked into the licensing examination, the sequence of tests, the typical timelines, and that he had prepared a spreadsheet with a suggested schedule, three study tracks, and an estimate of the cost of the review courses, which he would, of course, be happy to

"You're solving me," said Ivy.

He stopped. He closed his mouth. She watched him run the whole sentence back in his head, with a look of dawning horror, like a man examining a floor plan and finding the staircase had been drawn upside down.

"I'm putting it away," Damien said, and put the folder behind his back.

"Wait."

He waited.

"I'd like the spreadsheet," she said. "Just not the plan. Tell me the numbers. Then leave them with me and go away and let me decide."

He handed it over with both hands, very carefully, as though it were something that might go off, and she thought that it was possible to love a person for exactly that, for the visible effort of a man laying down the only tool he knew how to use.

---

On the last Saturday of the month he arrived with a flat pack box.

"I'd like you to understand that this was your decision," he said, standing on the landing under the weight of it. "You asked me to bring it. You chose it. I merely carried it. I would like that on the record."

"Noted."

It was a bed frame, plain pine, from a shop on Halsted that she had picked out herself, in her own name, with her own money. She had stood in the aisle for twenty minutes doing sums. What she had asked him for, on Thursday, over rice on the floor, was not the bed. It was the help. Someone to hold the other end.

He read the instructions the way he had once read board packets. He laid out every screw by size on a clean towel. He found the Allen key and held it up to the light like a man inspecting a diamond. "There are forty one pieces," he announced, in a tone of awed dread. "I have built a forty story tower. I do not believe I have ever been so afraid."

They put the headboard on backwards. They discovered it at ten at night, with sixteen bolts tightened, and stood side by side looking at the error, and Ivy began to laugh so hard that she had to sit on the floor. Damien, after a moment of grave resistance, sat beside her and laughed too, quietly at first, then helplessly, with his head back against the frame, a sound she had heard only three or four times in her life.

It took until midnight. When it was finished, he stood and looked at it, plain pine under the ugly lamp, with the expression of a man who has just completed the most difficult structure of his career.

"Well," said Damien, with great dignity. "That's up."

---

"May I stay?" he asked, at the door, when the last bolt was in.

He asked it plainly. There was nothing behind it, no assumption, no courteous arrangement. She looked at him for a long moment and saw that he would take either answer, and would mean it.

"Yes," she said.

Nothing happened that night that could not have been narrated in a church. She lay on the new bed in the dark, listening to the iron shudder of the ovens begin below, and felt the weight of him beside her, solid and warm and asleep. His hand lay open on the blanket between them. She put hers in it. He did not wake, but his fingers closed.

She woke, much later, to light on the ceiling and the smell of warm bread and a quiet knocking at the door.

Mrs. Wozniak stood on the landing in an apron, with a plate. Two rolls, still steaming, under a cloth. She looked past Ivy's shoulder into the room, where a man in a rumpled shirt lay asleep on a pine bed with his arm flung over his eyes, and her eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch.

"For the one who can't read instructions," she said, and handed over the plate, and went away down the stairs without another word.

---

He woke at ten, an unheard of hour, and lay blinking at the ceiling like a man waking in a foreign country.

"What time is it?"

"Ten past."

"It's Sunday," said Damien, slowly.

"It is."

"I have nowhere to be." He said it with wonder. "I have a bank call at nine tomorrow, and a safety audit report on Wednesday, and nothing whatever today." He turned his head on the pillow. "Ivy. I haven't had a Sunday in six years."

"Then this is one."

They did nothing. It was the most extraordinary thing she had ever watched him do. They ate the rolls on the floor with butter from a dish. They listened to the radio, a soft station of old songs that Mrs. Wozniak left on all day for the bread. He read a paperback with a cracked spine, and by noon he was asleep again with the book open on his chest, and she sat on the end of the bed with her mug and her drawings and thought, with a tightness in her throat, that this was exactly what her father had meant.

Not the grand gesture. The boring decision. A man choosing to lie in a plain room on a Sunday for no reason at all.

---

The following weekend, she asked if she might come to the house.

He opened the door himself, which he never did, and stood aside, and she walked into the kitchen where she had stood a hundred mornings, and stopped. Nothing had changed. The counter. The fruit bowl. The tablet, propped where it had always been, face down.

"Would you like coffee?" said Damien.

"Yes."

"I know how you take it." He was already at the machine. "Black. I know. I wanted to ask anyway."

She laughed, and her eyes stung, and she sat at the counter on the stool she had always used. He set down a plain white mug in front of her, uncracked, with a small chip of nothing at all on the rim. She looked at it, and then at him.

"I bought the twin," he said. "Yours lives in Pilsen now, where it belongs. This one lives here. I thought you ought to have one in each place."

"I bought milk," he said. "For myself. I've been experimenting. I do not recommend it."

On the shelf to the left of the window, the second one from the left, there was a single bare board, wiped clean. Nothing on it. She looked at it for a long moment.

"It's yours," he said, very quietly. "Whenever. It'll stay empty as long as you like. I'm not asking for anything."

"I know."

He slid a small brass key across the counter. She did not touch it.

"Not yet," Ivy said.

"Okay." He left it where it lay, in the light, between the cups.

The front door opened, and Priya came in with a folder under her arm and her coat half off. She took in the two of them at the counter, the steaming mugs, the fruit bowl, the soft morning light, and stopped.

"I came in for a signature," she said, "and I have walked into an orange juice commercial."

"You said that before the worst month of our lives," Ivy said.

"I am hoping," said Priya, dropping into a chair and reaching for the pot, "for better results this time."