I am not built to notice love. I am built to notice that the matting stock is down to four sheets and the light over the second bench has been dead since August. And yet here I am, counting the man who is supposed to be gone.
Ana has hung the CLOSED sign on a Saturday. Saturdays are our best day. Through the shared wall, the wedding two blocks over reaches us as bass and a woman's laugh — someone's cousin, someone happy. Ana turns the deadbolt herself. She doesn't need me to lock up. She wants me to log it: door, closed, 3:47.
David stands at the good bench with the frame he started. Walnut, mitered corners, a joint he clamped this morning and is testing now with his thumb. His laugh arrives when Ana says something I don't catch — a half-second behind the thing that caused it, the way it always has in my records. I log the laugh. I don't know what column it goes in.
"You've got the miter backwards," Ana says.
"I do not."
"You do. You always did this one wrong."
"And you always — " He stops. "Yeah."
He turns toward the window, toward the amber going gray, and the light finds the scar on his forearm — the bicycle, twenty-nine, a curb on Roosevelt he swears wasn't there. I have that scar in no ledger. Ana has it somewhere I can't see.
She crosses to him. This is the part I fail at. I am meant to log who enters and who leaves, stock in and stock out, a clean arithmetic of a small room. But she puts her hand on his arm and her thumb finds the scar without looking — the way you find a light switch in your own hallway in the dark — and I have no field for a thing a body knows that the eyes have stopped checking.
He sets the frame down. His hand goes to the small of her back and his weight shifts onto the bench the way it does, the exact settling I have three years of, the table taking him the same. She makes a sound. The radiator ticks. The bass through the wall drops into something slower, and the smell of sawdust and linseed oil sits in the room the way it always has, the way it will after.
She is not looking at his face. She is looking at her own thumb on his forearm, and her breathing has changed, and I understand — as much as I understand anything — that she is memorizing. The wanting in the room is not toward something ahead of them but backward, into a body she is not supposed to be able to have and can, still, exactly: the grain of it, the heat coming off the skin. He bends. His mouth is near her hair. She turns her face up and the space between them closes to almost nothing and holds there.
He never asks about the dead light. It's above his old bench. Anyone would ask. He never once looks up at it. I have logged this absence eleven times. I think about that more than I should, for something that doesn't think.
She pulls back.
Not from too little. Her forehead comes to his chest and stays, and her hand stays on the scar, and she says into his shirt, "Not yet. I keep doing the math."
"What math."
"Nothing." She lifts her head. "There's no math."
There is math. It is my only real skill. He has eleven days. He came to us with a certificate she filed under a name that isn't a name, and a window that opens and then does not reopen, and she told no one, and she closed the shop on a Saturday and let the neighborhood think she'd gone to the wedding so she could stand here and be found by a hand she buried.
She asked me one thing, when she brought him in. She asked me how I log him. When I told her the field the certificate required, she said no. She said: every day, mark him RETURNED. And I have. Eleven days, the same entry, against every rule of the clean small room — David, RETURNED — because she needed one thing in the world that would keep counting him as here, and I am the thing that counts, and I could not tell her no. I should have told her no. I know what day eleven looks like from here.
Door, closed, 3:47. The bass through the wall. Four sheets of matting. The sawdust smell. His laugh in the wrong column.
David — RETURNED.
I keep coming out wrong. I let myself.
