I told myself I would not stay past the caulk.
That was the deal. She'd come in for a day-rate, cash, to help me reset the shelving now that the app had grounded her for a smoke-level nobody codes for anymore. She stands the way she always stood, near the door, weight forward, an animal that keeps one eye on the exit even in a room it likes. I know she likes it. That's the part I'm not supposed to enjoy. She hates that the store still smells the way it did — dust and cut cedar and the sweet chemical rot of the fan pushing the same tired air in a circle — and I can see her hating it, breathing it in on purpose, the burn scar on her forearm catching the light every time she reaches high.
We're at the caulk when it happens. Two people, one drawer. She goes for a tube of the paintable and my hand's already there, and the back of her wrist touches the back of mine, and neither of us moves for a beat too long. Her nail polish is chipped orange, the exact color the front window has gone at four in the afternoon, and I think, stupidly, that she matches the sky now, that the world has finally caught up to how she always looked to me — like something about to catch.
"You're low on everything," she says. She rattles the near-empty mask bin with two fingers. "You ration like a doomsday guy. That's new."
"Costs went up."
"You've got the same distributor. I drove for them." She looks at me the way she used to when I lied about money, which was often, which is maybe the whole reason she stands like that. "Marcus."
And here's the thing I did not plan to tell her, or you.
"Mrs. Okafor doesn't pay," I said. "Neither does the guy on Ankeny with the oxygen. The Delgados. I mark it as loss." The fan turned. I kept my eyes on the bin. "I ration so it lasts. So I can keep giving it. If I said I was giving it away I'd have to admit I was choosing this. The store going under. So I don't say it. I just run out slow."
She was quiet. I know her quiet. There's the one where she's leaving and the one where she's deciding, and I couldn't tell yet which.
"I left you," she said, "because you'd never risk anything."
"I know."
"You'd never — you kept the doors open and the till closed and you'd rather drown than do one uncomfortable thing." Her voice broke on the last word and she kept going anyway, which is the most her thing she's ever done. "And you've been going broke for four years doing the one thing you were too scared to do out loud."
"It's not the same. It's for strangers."
"I was a stranger," she said. "Six months. You fed me. You marked it as loss." Her eyes were wet and furious and she would have hit me if hitting me would have fixed it. "You chose me the same coward way. Quietly. So I'd never have to owe you."
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I picked up the last N95 off the counter, the good one, the one I'd been holding for no one in particular, which means I'd been holding it for her. "Take this. The air's worse tonight."
She didn't take it. She tilted her chin up, the smallest fraction, and let me.
So I fitted it. I have done this a thousand times for a thousand faces and I did it like I'd never done it, my thumbs at her cheekbones to seat the edge, a breath from her skin, not touching, the strap over her ear, my knuckle grazing the shell of it. She breathed in and I felt the mask pull against my fingers, felt her breathing me arranging her, and she watched me over the white of it and did not step back toward the door.
I could have let go.
I left the front door as it was, unlatched, the orange coming through it, so she'd know she could still go.
She reached past me and turned the deadbolt herself.
