Chapter Eight — The Things We Ask For (continued)

By five-thirty, the library smelled of floor polish, rain-damp coats, and the supermarket flowers somebody had arranged in jam jars along the exhibition tables.

Luna had moved the same unmarked folding chair three times.

"It isn't going to hatch," Priya said, catching her in the act.

"It was blocking the walkway."

"It was six inches from where you put it five minutes ago."

Luna tucked the chair back at the end of the second row, beside the family seats. From there Asher would be able to see the photographs and the people whose voices she'd spent months collecting. She wasn't expecting applause from him. She wanted him to know what she did when he wasn't looking.

The doors opened. A woman arrived carrying a photograph of her father outside his cabinet shop, carefully protected inside an envelope. Two children went straight to the listening station and asked whether they could hear the man who fixed the drawers. Priya showed them how to lift the handset and wait for the recording to finish. This time the machine obeyed.

Luna caught the woman's expression when her father's laugh emerged from the little speaker. That was why the exhibit existed. For a moment, the empty chair didn't matter.

Across town, at 4:35, Asher had watched the rehearsal clock slip past the time printed on his call sheet.

The mirrored entrance they had fixed at the warehouse was behaving. A different transition was not: the moving scenic wall cleared his path at walking speed, then left too narrow a passage when the lighting sequence ran at show tempo. Imani stopped the run before anyone tried to squeeze through. The technicians checked their travel limits and proposed a revised cue. Nico wanted it tested with the performer in position before they signed it off for Tuesday.

Asher agreed. The people who would move through that opening in the dark deserved more than his convenient guess about clearance.

At 4:50, he thought he could still get away with a quick reset. At 5:05, the second test showed the cue needed more work. At 5:17, he stood behind the taped safety line watching the crew work and glanced toward his phone on the equipment case.

He should have called Luna then.

Instead he told himself he could give her a better answer in ten minutes. Ten became twenty, and the answer didn't improve.

At 5:38, Luna's phone vibrated in her jacket pocket. Asher calling.

She stepped behind a display board, pressing the phone to her ear. "Are you outside? There's a side door by the courtyard if you can't find—"

"Luna. I'm still at rehearsal."

The sentence was so unlike the one she had expected that she didn't answer immediately.

"The setup's running long," he continued. "A safety cue isn't clearing properly. I thought we'd have it sorted, but I can't get out yet."

She looked at the clock above the library's returns desk. Seven minutes until the time he'd promised to be here.

"You knew it was running late?"

"I knew we were behind. I didn't know I wouldn't make it until just now."

"You said you'd tell me if it started slipping."

"I kept thinking we could finish the next pass."

A little girl emerged from behind the display board holding a program upside down. Luna turned the phone away long enough to direct her toward the children's table, then returned to the call.

"Asher, I don't need you to explain stage equipment to me. I needed you to tell me before I was standing here waiting."

He exhaled. Behind him a voice called for the lighting operator to hold a cue. "I know. I should've called earlier. Listen, the chair can still have a spectacular evening without me. Maybe I can make the after-party portion and admire the drawers then."

It was the sort of joke she would normally have enjoyed. Tonight it sounded as though she had invited him to watch furniture.

"It's not about the chair."

"I know that. I'm trying to stop this from being a disaster."

"Then stop trying to make it funny."

Silence travelled down the line. Asher spoke again, sharper than before. "I'm dealing with something that can actually hurt people if we do it wrong. I can't just walk off the floor."

"I didn't ask you to," she said. "I asked you to let me know."

He was quiet. She could hear him moving away from the equipment and from whoever was calling instructions.

"I'm sorry I won't be there for six," he said finally. "I mean that."

Luna stared at the three index cards in her hand. She had spent hours on them because she was afraid of stumbling over words that belonged to other people's families.

"I have to go," she said. "They're starting to seat everybody."

"Can we talk when you're done?"

She wanted to say yes. She also wanted to tell him exactly how awful it was to hear her work reduced to something he could drop into after the important part was over. Both answers were too large for the narrow space behind the display board.

"Later," she said, and ended the call.

Priya found her a moment later, standing with the phone in her hand.

"Is he coming?"

"Not for the introduction."

Priya didn't offer an invented explanation or ask Luna to make herself cheerful. She glanced toward the crowd. "The cabinetmaker's daughter is here. She asked whether she can sit close to the recording. I said yes. Do you want me to move the chairs?"

Luna looked at the unused place beside the family section.

"Give her that one," she said.

Together they moved the chair and made room for the woman's photograph on the seat beside her. Priya checked the microphone. Luna put her phone in her bag. The children had settled with their programs, and the room was full of people who hadn't come to hear about Asher's absence.

At six o'clock, Luna stepped to the front.

Her first sentence came out a little thin. She began again, slower, talking about ordinary voices and the ways a neighborhood could disappear without ever moving away. She told the audience about the seamstress who taught apprentices to save a torn jacket, the transit mechanic who practiced names so he'd get them right, and the father whose instructions about a drawer had survived because somebody loved the sound of him laughing.

She wasn't magnificent. She stumbled once and lost her place on the second index card. The cabinetmaker's daughter smiled at her anyway. When Luna invited everyone to listen, the woman lifted the handset and held it for a moment without pressing play, as though she needed to prepare herself.

Then her father's voice filled the small receiver.

The applause afterward was warm and brief. People rose to move among the stations. Priya caught Luna's eye from across the room and gave her a quick thumbs-up before answering a question about transcript copies.

Luna smiled at the families, guided a child toward the right exhibit, and went on doing the job she'd promised to do.

At the end of the second row, the chair was occupied. It was exactly where it needed to be.

That didn't make Asher's absence hurt any less.