Chapter 40: ch.40 [Please Tick One]

The note was waiting under the little crowned queen.

Seth found it with the fridge door open and one hand around the milk.

A white card. Square. Black ink.

Saturday. Park at nine. Home by one. – A.

He read it in the cold light of the fridge.

He read it again.

Nothing in it was unkind.

His stomach had noticed that before his eyes finished.

Dinner is in the freezer. Don’t wait up. – M.

Same bones.

A fact. A time.

One letter at the bottom, like a door pulled shut.

The handwriting was not cold.

It was the most beautiful he knew.

It had the same shape anyway.

He closed the fridge.

He stood there with the card between two fingers, and the compressor hummed, and nobody told him what to do with it.

? ? ?

The basement smelled of chalk.

He set the brass clock on the shelf by the bowl, flag up, the way it had left.

"Monday," said Seth.

"Monday."

Astrid stood at the rack with her braid down her back and her hands wrapped.

She looked the clock over like a relative back from a long trip. It passed.

Then she saw the card.

He held it out.

"This one’s an order."

She took it.

She read it once.

Her eyes stopped on the A, the one with the small tail like the end of a receipt.

She went still.

"I wrote it at one in the morning," said Astrid.

"I know."

"I did not ask."

"No."

"There is no question mark." Her voice was very even. "There is no verb that asks."

"It’s a schedule."

"It is a schedule that moves your Saturday."

"Yeah."

He did not say what it had reminded him of.

He kept his hands loose and open at his sides, the way she had taught him to carry a bar he could not yet lift.

"Why did you bring it down?" said Astrid. "You could have put it in the bin."

"I thought you’d want to see what it looks like from my side."

She did not answer.

She turned the card over.

A pen lay on the shelf beside the chalk, the one they used for score sheets.

She uncapped it and bent over the wood and wrote, and her hand did not slow.

Two lines. Two small squares.

She gave it back.

May I have your Saturday, from nine until one?

I will not say why.

? Yes ? No

Astrid

All of it. Not the letter.

He looked at the name longer than he looked at the question.

Two boxes.

I have done this one before. I turned it face down.

"There’s only two," he said.

"There are two."

"Okay."

He took the pen.

He drew a third square at the bottom. It came out crooked.

? Ask me again Friday.

Astrid read it. Something in her jaw adjusted.

"That is not an option on the card."

"It is now."

"The appointment is for Saturday morning. If you refuse on Friday, I will have arranged nothing."

"Then I’ll know you didn’t need it that much."

It came out sharper than he meant.

He watched it land.

He did not take it back, and he did not leave it there either.

"I don’t mean it like that," said Seth.

"I mean I can’t undo this one. If I say yes to a blank, it’s yes. I want the time."

Slow when I can’t undo it.

It was his own page.

She had copied it.

She heard her own pen come back to her in his hand, and he watched her hear it.

"Friday," said Astrid.

It cost her. He could see the sum.

Four days of not knowing, from a woman who solved a thousand positions before breakfast and had just agreed to stand in front of a blank.

She held out her hand for the card.

He kept it.

"You’ll get it back," said Seth. "Face up."

? ? ?

On Friday, at breakfast, he ticked the first box.

He did not turn the card over.

He slid it across the walnut, past the toast and the cold tea, and watched her read.

She read the question. She read her own name.

Then she kept looking at the tick, long after there was anything left to read, as though it were a clause she had not drafted and could not find the end of.

She did not square the card to the table.

She picked it up and held it.

? ? ?

Saturday, a little before ten.

Two streets behind Meridian Hall, a door with no sign.

A bell.

A bench under a lamp.

A woman in a canvas apron, one eye magnified to the size of a plum.

Astrid stood in front of her in a black coat, a gray scarf tucked down out of sight.

She had walked here.

No car. No Oskar. Nobody had asked.

"I would like something made," said Astrid.

"What?"

She lifted her right hand.

She set her thumb against her forefinger, and left the gap open.

The woman looked at the gap.

"Ring?"

"No."

"Pendant?"

"No."

"Then I’ll need more than your thumb."

Astrid told her.

It took four sentences, and the woman did not interrupt once.

Somewhere in the third, the plum of an eye narrowed.

"That’s small."

"Yes."

"That’s very small, for what you’re asking."

"I am aware."

"Who’s it for?"

"Someone."

"That’s the usual," said the woman, and slid a slip of paper across the bench. "What goes on it?"

Astrid took the pen.

It was a cheap pen.

She held it as if it were loaded.

Her hands had carried a trophy as tall as her ribs and a plate with a blue line around the rim, and they did not know what to do over a blank slip.

She wrote.

She curved her left palm over the words as she did it, the way a child hides a test answer.

"Characters?" said the woman.

"Fewer than twenty."

"By when?"

"The end of February. I will not risk March."

The loupe came down.

The woman wrote a number and turned it around.

Astrid paid half, in cash. She counted the notes twice.

"Name for the receipt?"

A beat.

"Lind."

The woman looked at her for the length of one breath.

The eye behind the glass did not change.

"Receipt’s Lind," she said, and wrote it, and asked nothing else.

Astrid folded the slip once and put it in the inside pocket of her coat, over the place where a pulse would be.

? ? ?

The side hall of Meridian Hall had been given to the Federation’s winter camp.

Folding tables. A banner in blue felt.

Seventeen girls between eight and twelve, hunched over boards with the grim ferocity of small judges.

At the front, a woman in a green cardigan was lining up pencils on a table by length.

Shortest first. Left to right.

Astrid stopped in the doorway.

A girl with a gap in her teeth looked up from a rook ending and froze with her hand in the air.

"Miss Lina," she whispered, in a voice built for a different room. "That’s her."

"It is."

"Is she lost?"

"Probably." Lina did not look up from the pencils. "Give her a minute."

"I am not lost," said Astrid.

Seventeen heads turned.

Lina smiled at the pencil in her fingers and set it down.

"Girls. Position nine again. I’ll be at the window."

? ? ?

The window looked out on a loading dock and a pigeon.

Click.

The pen came out of her curls, and went back in.

"Astrid."

"Lina."

"You came to a room with seventeen children in it. I’m impressed."

"I require a favor."

Lina’s eyebrows rose, very slowly, to the line of her hair.

"In twelve years you have never asked me for anything," she said. "I wrote a speech for the day you did. It was mostly about a rook."

"I did not know there was a speech."

"It was very good."

"I would like to hear it afterward."

"You won’t." The blue eyes were bright. "Go on."

Astrid folded her hands in front of her.

She had rehearsed on the walk.

She had rehearsed it twice in a mirror and once on a street corner, under a shopfront, to nobody.

"In March, I would like you to give Mr. Pawn one evening. Not a lesson. An answer. To the question on the back of the card."

"He hasn’t asked it."

"He will."

"How do you know?"

"He wrote it down. He writes things until they are ready to send."

Lina’s gaze did not move off her face.

"And you want me to hand him what you can’t."

It was gentle. It went in clean.

"Yes," said Astrid.

"It’s generous." Lina turned the pen in her fingers. "It’s also very like you. You find the thing you can’t give, and you put it in somebody else’s hands, with a bow."

"It has no bow."

"Everything you do has a bow. The wrapping is just very plain."

Astrid did not move.

She had expected the knife.

She had not expected it to be accurate.

"Why March?" said Lina.

Silence.

Then a small, dry sound, almost a laugh, the sound of a woman who has seen an answer on the back of a page.

"He turns twenty in March," said Lina. "It’s in the wiki. Section four."

"I am aware of the wiki."

"I know you are. You’re the only person in the world who had to be told a birthday and still got there first."

She said it kindly.

Astrid’s ears were not red.

They were not that kind of ears.

Something at the base of her throat gave away the rest.

"Two conditions," said Lina.

"Name them."

"One. He asks me himself. I won’t be arranged. I’ve been arranged since I was nineteen, and I didn’t care for it."

Astrid nodded, once.

She had planned for the first. It was fair.

It was Seth’s, and she had been forbidden to touch it.

"Two. Whatever he asks, I answer. Truthfully. Not the pretty version." The pen stopped. "And you never ask me afterward what was said."

The pigeon on the dock took off.

Whatever he asks.

A gray box on a phone, under a name.

Did she ever make you feel like you couldn’t say no?

She had read it standing at a window with her thumb on glass.

She had told no one.

She had not asked him what it meant, because he had said not yet, and she had agreed, and she was still holding the agreement in both hands like a full cup.

If he sent it to the wrong person, she would be the only one in the room who knew what the answer was about.

"Whatever he asks," said Lina again, watching her. "Even if it’s about you."

Astrid breathed in.

It took a moment.

"Especially then," she said.

Lina looked at her for a long time.

It was not the look of a rival.

It was nearer to a tailor’s, at the exact place where a body disagreed with its clothes.

"You went somewhere," said Lina, "before you said that."

"I considered the position."

"And?"

"It is not a position I would choose to be in."

"But you said yes."

"I did."

Lina nodded, slowly, as though she were closing a book she had only half expected to finish.

"Then I’ll wait for his letter."

She went back to the pencils.

? ? ?

At the bottom of the steps, the street was gray and cold and held nothing at all.

Astrid stopped.

Slow when I can’t undo it.

She had said it to a boy across a card with three boxes.

She had agreed to wait four days to learn his answer.

She had not waited four seconds for Lina’s.

It was the first move she had ever played that she could not take back.

She stood very straight and did not count her pulse, and the pocket over her heart held a receipt with her family name on it.

Her phone lit in her hand.

Not Ingrid. Not Seth.

There is a third condition. I will tell you when he writes. — L.