Fiona is home early.
This is not how Tuesdays usually go. Tuesdays she is at the library until six, sometimes six-thirty if someone needs help with the catalogue or the printer or the particular loneliness of not knowing what to read next. She is good at that; at standing in the stacks with someone and asking the right questions until the right book arrives. It is not a complicated skill. It requires paying attention. She has always been good at paying attention.
The funding was cut. Not all of it: enough. Enough that the Tuesday afternoon hours are gone for now, pending review, which means pending a decision nobody wants to make out loud. She came home at two. She made tea. She lost her place in the same paragraph three times and put the book down.
Now she is in the kitchen doing something with her hands because her hands need something to do. The window is open. The garden is the specific colour of late afternoon in a year that has been mostly ordinary. She is thinking about the budget meeting. She is thinking about whether Elena mentioned finishing something new; she said something on the phone last week, something about a series of paintings, a problem she'd been working on for months, and Fiona had listened and not understood the technical part and understood everything else. That is usually how it goes with Elena.
Gregoir will be home at six. He has a four o'clock and a five-thirty and then the drive back, which he uses to decompress, windows down even in November, music he's embarrassed about, the specific ritual of a man who spends his days inside other people's pain and needs twenty minutes of highway to come back to himself. She knows this about him the way you know the weather — not by studying it, just by having lived inside it long enough.
She thinks about calling. Not Elena; she called last week, she doesn't want to crowd her. Her son. She thinks about calling her son. He is working hard, she knows this, he is always working hard, the travel and the schedule she never fully understands because he has never quite explained it. Sports, he says. I work in sports. I travel. He says it simply and she receives it simply because he is her son and he is fine and the money arrives and he sounds well when she hears his voice even if she doesn't hear it as often as she'd like.
She doesn't call. She will call Sunday. Sunday is when she calls.
The house is quiet in the way houses are quiet when they were built for more people than currently live in them. Not an unhappy quiet. Just spacious. Room for the memory of two young people who ate at this table and argued about nothing important and left their shoes in the wrong place and are somewhere in the world now doing things she is proud of without always knowing exactly what those things are.
She finishes what she's doing with her hands. She makes more tea. She finds her place in the paragraph again, and this time she stays in it. The garden light shifts. Somewhere in the city, Gregoir is listening to someone name something they have never named before, and his hands are still in his lap, and his face is open, and he is giving them the specific thing he has always been best at giving; the room to say it.
Sunday she will call. He will pick up. He always picks up.
He always picks up.
— — —
six-fifteen
She hears the car before she hears him. The specific sound of the engine cutting out, then the pause — he always sits for a moment before he comes in, she has never asked why, and he has never explained it, and that is fine. That has always been fine.
The door.
"You're home."
"I live here."
"You're home early."
"So are you."
He sets the groceries on the counter: bread, something wrapped in paper from the butcher, a bag of clementines he definitely didn't need but bought anyway. He does this. He buys clementines the way other people buy flowers — without occasion, without announcement, just because they were there.
"The funding," she says. "The Tuesday hours."
"Ah."
"Pending review."
"Which means—"
"Which means pending a decision nobody wants to sign their name to."
He makes a sound that means I'm sorry and also bureaucracy is a specific kind of cowardice, and also I brought clementines. He starts putting things away. She moves slightly to make room, and he moves slightly to fit, and they do this without looking, the choreography of a kitchen shared for a very long time.
"How was yours?"
"Good. Mostly good. One of my regulars —" she stops, she laughs a little — "he told me today that he'd been doing the exercises wrong for three weeks. Not a little wrong. Completely—"
"Wrong."
"Completely wrong. Mirror image. Every single one."
"And?"
"And he said —" she is already smiling — "but I feel better though. So maybe this is just how my body works."
Fiona laughs. A real one — the kind that arrives before you decide to let it. Gregoir looks pleased with himself in the way he always looks pleased with himself when he's made her laugh, which is the same look he's had for thirty years and which she has never once found annoying.
"Maybe it is," she says.
"Maybe it is," he agrees.
They settle. The kitchen does what kitchens do at six-fifteen; it fills with the sounds of something being made, the low specific warmth of two people who know how to occupy the same space.
"I was thinking of calling him Sunday," Fiona says. Not urgently. Just ... it's been a few weeks.
"He's training," Gregoir says.
"He's always training."
"That's because —"
"That's because he works hard, yes, I know, your son works very hard."
"My son." He raises an eyebrow. "When he's working hard, he's my son."
"When is he not working hard?"
"Christmas, maybe. Half of Christmas."
She smiles. She will call on Sunday. He will pick up, he always picks up when she calls, even busy, even tired, even from wherever he is in the world, which she pictures vaguely as a gym somewhere, a city she couldn't place on a map.
"Elena called last week," she says. "About a new painting. Something she's been working on for months, a problem she finally — I didn't understand the technical part."
"You never do."
"I understand everything else."
"You always do," he says. Simply. True.
The garden goes dark the way gardens go dark in November; gradually, then completely, without announcement. Gregoir cuts the bread. Fiona finds plates. The house holds them the way it has always held them; quietly, without asking anything.
> Chapter complete. The house holds them. Sunday she will call. Continue to Chapter 47? [Y/N]