Chapter 1
Take the Next Hanger
The light on the answering machine was going when Brenda came up the office stairs. She left it going. Messages kept. A room did not. Not with the biggest rental of the year seven days off and nothing yet where it needed to be.
She hung her coat on the hook behind the door and took the rental sheet down.
KESSLER, in her own capitals across the top. A hundred and forty for lunch, the long tables end to end, fourteen to a table. The kitchen wanted from first thing. Under her writing was a rounder hand. The letters leaned the way a person leans who has more to say than room to say it in. Opal Kessler had reached across this same desk for the pen. Beef and barley. Our pot. Hannah does coats with you.
"Our pot," Brenda said, to nobody. It was the voice of a woman quoting somebody who would be offended to hear it read back.
Arnie came up behind her one stair at a time, the unhurried arithmetic of a dog who has decided each step will still be there when he gets to it. He went under the desk to lie across her foot. He weighed more asleep than awake, and she had never worked out why that should be true.
The office had one window, and it looked at the lot. Snow had come in the night, not much of it. It was already turning the gray of old lace at the edges where the plow had shoved it into a ridge. Two cars sat below: hers, and Dale's truck. It was backed in by the fire door, the way he always backed it in.
She carried the sheet down and left the light blinking behind her.
The main room was cold in the particular way an unheated building is cold before ten in the morning. It had a clean, mineral cold to it, nothing lived-in about it yet. Under that sat the smell she had stopped noticing years ago and could still have named if pressed. Floor polish. Old coffee, gone bitter in the urn from Friday. It had settled into the plaster the way a scent settles into good wool and never quite leaves.
She did the chairs first. A rental tells you early whether it will go right. Chairs tell you first of all: whether the count is honest, whether the stacks came out straight or thrown.
She brought them eight at a time on the dolly. Its left wheel had pulled left since before she took the job, the way a shopping cart's does in every store in the country. She had long since stopped fighting it and learned to steer into the drift. A hundred and forty along the wall. Ten more were set aside for the ones who come without being asked. Somebody always does. It is usually a cousin.
The tables came next, ten of them end to end in two lines with an aisle down the middle. That left the family's own table to sit crosswise under the stage, where everyone coming in would see it first. The fourth table's legs had stiffened over the summer. She put her knee to the hinge and leaned until the joint gave. It made the small, satisfied clunk old iron makes when it finally agrees with you.
The cloths stayed folded in the linen press. Hannah would want a say in those.
The coat room last, always last, because it asked the least and rewarded the most attention.
It opened off the lobby, a square room with one window. Under the window stood the old cast-iron radiator, its fins gone soft-edged under thirty coats of paint. It knocked twice when the heat came up, settled, and said nothing more all day. A rail ran around three walls at shoulder height, hung with a hundred and sixty of the hall's hangers. They were the old heavy wooden kind, a bar across the bottom and, on every bar, a number in white paint. Some of the numbers had been painted twice, by somebody years back who had not quite matched the first attempt. A faint ghost of the earlier figure sat behind the second, like a word somebody had almost managed to take back.
She started at the door end and walked the rail. One, two, three, in order, the way order is supposed to work and rarely does past the first handful. Fifty-one had wedged itself between sixty-eight and sixty-nine. Somebody had left it there, closing up in a hurry after the last rental. Ninety-four had wandered clear over to the far wall and taken up with the hundred-thirties. She lifted each one off as she reached it and carried it home.
The hangers went out in number order from the door end. The rail emptied from the same end it filled from. At the close of any day the used hangers stood together and the empty ones stood together. Anyone in the doorway could count, at a glance, how many coats were still in the building. Nobody got a paper ticket. You remembered your number or you remembered your coat. In this town, people remembered their coats the way they remembered whose truck was whose. At a big event she walked the whole rail during the meal. She wrote the count on the rental sheet, with the numbers of the coats she knew on sight. If one was still there at the end, she knew whose it was, and who had not gone home.
She had settled on all of it her first winter. It came after a funeral lunch that closed with three people in the lobby. Each held a coat that was not quite theirs, and none was willing to be the one who said so.
A hundred and fifty-nine. A hundred and sixty. She stood at the far end and looked back down the whole rail. It was right, the way a column of figures is right when every line under it agrees with the one above.
She brought the same gravity to a coat rail that other people reserved for a will or a property line. If anybody in this building had ever found that funny, nobody had said so within her hearing.
Dale came through with a bucket of rock salt for the front steps and stopped in the doorway.
"You do this every rental," he said.
"Every rental."
"Nobody's lost a coat in here since you came back."
"That's the whole point of it."
He looked down the rail as though it might have something to add on its own behalf. It didn't. He carried the salt out to the steps, where she heard it going down in handfuls.
The coat table lived folded flat behind the door the rest of the year. She stood it up in the lobby beside the coat room. She pushed it square to the wall with her hip, both hands full.
The old card was still in the drawer, gone soft at the fold from three winters of hands. The last word had worn down to nothing, so that it read, now, Please take the next hang. It was a sign that had been asked to do one job for three years. It had finally, the way most things eventually do, run out of word before it ran out of use. She dropped it in the wastebasket without much ceremony.
Upstairs for a new card and the marker, and down again with both. She lettered it standing at the lobby table, in capitals, square, every letter the same height across the whole line. A card that looked careless got treated carelessly. PLEASE TAKE THE NEXT HANGER. She folded it down the center so it would stand on its own. Then she set it at the front edge of the table. Nobody coming in out of the cold could miss it there.
The card existed for the stretch when nobody was minding the table, and there was always a stretch. With the card there, people took the next hanger on their own. The order held anyway. It was the way a good system keeps working, after everyone in the room has stopped thinking about it.
She looked at it from the doorway. It would do.
The light was still going when she came back up. Four messages waited on it, the way four messages generally did on a Monday.
She sat, and Arnie resettled against her ankle with the small effort of an old joint finding its spot. Then she pressed the button.
The first was the county, a clerk's-office voice, unfailingly polite. It was asking for the building's rental numbers in the usual form. Brenda wrote county, numbers on the pad by the phone. The county wanted figures, never a guess, and she had learned years ago never to give them one.
The second was the tai chi class, wondering whether the heat could come on half an hour earlier on Tuesdays. The floor was cold underfoot. Two of them had said so out loud now instead of just wincing about it. Heat, Tues. Under the county.
The third was Opal Kessler, who did not give her name. In thirty years she had never once needed to.
"The pot's coming in this week, and Hannah's doing a test batch," Opal said. The volume suggested the telephone was a mild inconvenience standing between her and the person she actually wanted to talk to. "And don't let anybody tell you it won't fit the big burner, because it was going on that burner before you ever came home, and it has not gotten one inch bigger since."
She did not say goodbye. The line simply stopped. It was the way a conversation stops when the speaker has finished and sees no reason to announce it.
The fourth message opened with a gap long enough that her hand had already started toward the button. She was certain it was a hang-up. Then a man's voice came in under it.
"I'm looking for somebody." A breath. "This is a message for the lady with the Tuesday booking." A longer pause, the machine hissing patiently through it. "Linda."
The hiss went on a moment more.
"I'll try again."
Nothing after that. No number left behind. No name of his own offered up.
She played it a second time. An older man, going by the sound of him. A road was audible somewhere behind his voice, the low highway hum that means a window cracked an inch. He said each word the careful way a person does when he has already written it down once. He did not want to lose the shape of it twice. It was not a voice she could put a face to. Most of the voices on this machine were ones she could.
She ran Tuesday through her head, the fullest page in the book. It held tai chi in the morning, the seniors' lunch, and the bridge four who wanted no radio. It held piano lessons on the stage, children in and out of their music folders. It held the quilting circle too, at the long table by the windows. Five bookings. She could have named every soul who came through the door for any one of them.
Not one Linda among them. She went through it again to be sure. The seniors she knew cold, because she took the head count for the lunch herself.
She knew what the Tuesday people took in their coffee. Where more than two or three of them had lived before Renfrow, she could not have told you. Nobody in this town asked that of anybody. It was one of the things that had made it easy to come home to.
"There's no Linda," she told Arnie.
He lifted his head off her ankle in case the sentence had food in it somewhere. It didn't, and he put it back down.
A wrong number, then. Other towns had halls, and other halls had Tuesdays. Somewhere a man had the right county and the wrong building. She wrote it on the pad, under Heat, Tues: Man, for the lady with the Tuesday booking — Linda. No number.
And beneath that, wrong number? She left the question mark standing. She did not know yet that it was a wrong number. She only knew, so far, that there was no Linda.
She set the pen down beside the pad, squared to it, and went back to the rental sheet. The tables still wanted their cloths measured, and the day, unlike the message, had a great deal left to say.
