Last Call at the Karaoke Bar

Leah was thirty-five the winter the snow came early, and she still counted herself lucky every Thursday when she walked out of her studio with wool dust on her sleeves and the whole cold evening ahead of her. The Void was three blocks down from the frozen river, past the shuttered bike shop, under a neon sign that had lost its V years ago so everybody just called it the oid. She'd stopped noticing. Rituals had that quality, she figured. You stop noticing them right around the time they start holding you up.

She and Dean had started the Thursday thing fourteen months ago, almost to the week. Her textile show had been at the little gallery by the library, the one with the bad radiators, and afterward Sunita had dragged her to the Void for what Sunita called professional recovery. Dean had been there with Donny from work, still in his call-center lanyard, singing some old pop song with total commitment and zero talent. Leah had laughed so hard she'd knocked her own drink over.

"Did I do that?" Dean had asked, mopping the table with a napkin.

"You did that," she'd said. "That was terrible. Do it again."

He'd done it again. And then he'd walked her to her bus stop through a light snow, hands in his pockets, and asked if Thursdays were maybe a thing they could keep.

So they kept them. Every Thursday he finished his shift at the call center at seven, and she locked up the studio at seven, and they met at the Void by quarter past. She always ordered the beetroot burger because it was the only thing on the menu that wasn't gray. He always ordered the fish, which he admitted was a mistake every single week and corrected the next week with the same hopeful expression. They never signed up for karaoke anymore, which Sunita, who hosted on Thursdays, took as a personal insult.

"You two are domestic," Sunita told her that night, sliding the beetroot burger onto the table. "Domestic before you're even anything. It's disgusting. Sing something."

"We're something," Leah said. "We've been something for over a year."

"Then sing something, something."

Dean came in while she was still laughing, snow in his dark hair, cheeks red from the walk from the bus. Thirty-four years old, call-center supervisor, weekend helper at his parents' bird shop, a man who owned four identical gray sweaters and rotated them without shame. He dropped into the booth across from her and blew on his hands.

"It's really coming down," he said. "Donny says the plows haven't gone out yet."

"Donny says a lot of things."

"Donny is wise. Donny has a seventeen-year marriage and a hockey league. He knows weather."

The fish arrived. He ate it, admitted it was a mistake, and Leah laughed, and outside the window the snow thickened from a drifting sort of snow into a serious, businesslike snow, the kind that fell straight down in fat flakes and made no argument about it. By the time they'd split a plate of fries the streetlamps had gone soft and the cars in the lot had turned into white lumps.

"You should just stay at mine," Dean said, easy about it, the way he was easy about most things. "I've got the spare toothbrush. The good one, the blue one you like."

Leah looked at the window. Her house was a twenty-minute drive out along the county road, past the river bend, up where the woods started. The studio sat a few minutes short of that, in an old mill building with a cot in the back room. It wasn't far. It was never far.

"I want my own bed tonight," she said. "Big warp to thread in the morning. If I don't start early I lose the whole weekend."

"Okay," he said, and he didn't push, because he never pushed, and she loved him for it and sometimes, quietly, wondered if she shouldn't love it a little less.

He walked her to her car. The snow was over her ankles already. He brushed the windshield off with his sleeve while she scraped the back window, and then they stood there for a second in the falling white, two adults in their thirties saying goodbye like it was trivial, as if they'd do it again Thursday.

"Text me when you're home," he said.

"Obviously."

She got maybe four kilometers before she understood. The wipers couldn't keep up. The road had gone from gray to white to a kind of rumor of a road, and then the headlights caught the blinking orange sign at the river bend that she had driven past a hundred times without reading: VÄG STÄNGD. Road closed. She pulled over at the pull-off by the old boathouse and sat with the engine running and the snow coming down like the sky had made a decision.

The county road closed maybe twice a winter, sometimes not at all. When it closed, it stayed closed until the plows got through, and when the snow fell like this the plows didn't get through for days. She called Dean from the pull-off, hands cold, engine idling, snow piling on the hood like a blanket somebody was laying down with care.

"Hey, did you make it?" he answered.

"There's a closed sign at the river bend. The road's shut, Dean. Both directions, I think. I can't get home and I can't get back across the bridge to you either, the way the wind's blowing on the bridge stretch."

There was a pause. "Where are you right now?"

"Boathouse pull-off. I'm fine, the car's warm. I'm going to turn around very slowly and go back to the studio. There's a cot in the back room and about nine kilos of undyed wool I can sleep on like a dragon."

"Okay. Okay, that's good. Text me when you're locked in. And Leah? Don't drive anywhere tomorrow either, until we hear the plows went out. Donny will know. Donny knows everything about roads and nothing about fish."

She laughed, and the laugh came out shakier than she meant it to. Fourteen months of Thursdays and they'd never once been stuck on opposite sides of a closed road. It shouldn't have mattered. It mattered.

* * *

The studio was cold until she got the little stove going, and then it was just cold in the corners. She changed into the sweater she kept in a drawer for emergencies and made tea and texted him, and then, because neither of them seemed ready to hang up, the texting turned into a call, and the call went on so long her tea went cold and she made new tea.

"I saw a hawk this morning," Dean said. She could hear him shifting around on his couch, the creak of it. "Out my bedroom window. Right there on the fence post by the feeder, bold as anything."

"What kind?"

"No idea. Brown, streaky chest, yellow on the beak maybe? It sat there for ten minutes while the sparrows hid in the hedge. My mom would've known in one look. She'd have had the Latin name."

"You could call her."

"It's eleven at night, she'd love it." He laughed, low. "Honestly I just sat on the end of the bed and watched it. Didn't even get my phone. Just watched. It turned its head all the way around like the fence post was rotating, and then it dropped off the post, one wingbeat, and had something from under the snow. Vole probably. Then it was gone over the roofs."

"You got up early for that?"

"Four thirty shift change coverage. You were asleep."

"You don't know that."

"I know you text like someone who's asleep. Full stops and nothing else."

Leah pulled her knees up on the cot, phone against her ear, and looked across the dark studio at the birdcage.

It was a big old thing, taller than she was, iron, bought at a flea market years ago for almost nothing because nobody wants a birdcage that doesn't open. The door was rusted shut, had been since before she owned it. She kept it in the corner by the north window, and every winter, without ever meaning to make it a ritual and without ever explaining it to anyone, not even Sunita, she wrapped it. Unspun wool, raw fleece right off the batts, wound around the bars in fat soft bands until the whole cage looked like something a bird had dreamed instead of built. By spring the wool was gray with dust and she took it all down and spun most of it and the cage stood bare all summer, black iron and empty, waiting for winter again.

"What's it for?" Dean asked, when she'd tried to describe it. The line was quiet. Snow-static, almost, though it was probably just the call.

"I don't know," she admitted. "That's the honest answer. First winter in the studio I wrapped it because it looked cold. That's it. That was the whole reason, and I've never told anyone because it sounds insane."

"It doesn't sound insane."

"A grown woman dressing a birdcage in a sweater every winter because it looked cold."

"Leah." She could hear him smiling, she was almost sure of it. "I sing karaoke badly on purpose to keep a Thursday. We're not a sane pair."

"No," she said, "we're not."

The stove ticked. Outside the window the snow kept coming down, patient, enormous, closing the world between them like a hand closing over a coin.

"Next Thursday's probably canceled," he said.

"Next Thursday's probably canceled."

"Unless the plows are heroes."

"Unless the plows are heroes."

She fell asleep that night on nine kilos of wool with the phone still warm beside her ear, and in her head the hawk dropped off the fence post, one wingbeat, gone over the roofs, and somewhere across the closed road he was sleeping too, and the cage stood in the dark wrapped in its winter coat, holding nothing, holding everything, waiting.

* * *

Friday afternoon, around two, Dean texted her: break in 10. Video?

Leah propped her phone against the teapot on the worktable and angled it so he could see the embroidery frame. When his face popped up he was already chewing.

"What are you eating?"

"Vending machine sandwich." He held it up to the camera like a trophy. "Egg salad. It's been in there since, I want to say, October."

"Oh, gross!"

"It builds character." He took another bite. "Donny had the tuna one yesterday and said it tasted like a wet tennis ball. He ate the whole thing, mind you. Complained every bite."

"Donny sounds like a whole experience."

"Donny is my hero." Dean leaned back in his chair, and behind him Leah could see the break room, the humming vending machines, somebody's forgotten umbrella dripping on the floor. "So show me what you're doing. You promised."

She turned the frame toward him. She'd been working on a piece all week, a big oval of dark gray linen with birds stitched in red thread, strung out along a wire like notes on a staff.

"Okay, that's not fair," Dean said, pointing at the screen with his sandwich. "That's actually good. How long does one bird take?"

"An hour? Maybe more. The wings are fiddly."

"You did what, nine of those since Tuesday?"

"Eleven."

"See, this is what I mean about you. I cover one shift change and I need a nap for three days."

They talked about nothing for a while. He told her about the new supervisor, a guy named Marek who'd transferred in from another site and who did not understand call-center humor at all.

"So Donny says to him, dead serious, 'You have to log the vending machine temperature every two hours or corporate flags it.' And Marek, this grown man, forty years old, wrote it down. Wrote it down on a sticky note and stuck it to the monitor."

Leah laughed, and then she kept laughing, the kind that sneaks up on you and takes over your whole body. She put the embroidery down because her hands were shaking.

"He wrote it down?"

"He wrote it DOWN. And then he asked Donny where the thermometer was, and Donny said, 'Maintenance has it,' and there is no thermometer, Leah. There's no such log. Donny invented it out of thin air because Marek rescheduled his lunch."

"Your whole job is fake!"

"My whole job is fake. I answer phones so people don't have to." Dean was grinning, that crooked grin she could pick out of a crowd of thousands. "Anyway Marek still logs it. Every two hours. It's been three days. Donny checks the sticky note every morning like it's his pension."

"Donny deserves a raise."

"Donny deserves a statue." He finished the sandwich and balled up the wrapper. "Okay, they're paging me back. Text me a picture of bird twelve when it's done."

"Deal."

"And Leah? Eat actual food tonight. Not wool."

"One time I got filament on my sandwich, and it was ONE time."

She hung up and sat there grinning at the embroidery frame like an idiot. Eleven birds since Tuesday. She'd work better if she could see his face. That was a fact she hadn't planned on learning about herself, and it sat in her chest all afternoon, warm, like a stone from the stove.

* * *

The road stayed closed. Saturday it stayed closed. Sunita texted her a picture of the Void's sign, the one missing its V, buried up to the O in snow, with the caption RIP THURSDAY, which, without the V, was a lot funnier than it should have been.

Leah spun some of the undyed wool and dyed a small batch with the last of her madder root, a red so deep it went almost black at the edges of the skein. She thought about birds. She thought about a certain crooked grin. She made dinner for one and it was fine, actually fine, and that was its own strange discovery, that she could be fine and still miss him, that the missing didn't have to be an emergency.

Sunday night she was rinsing dye out of the skein in the little sink when her phone buzzed.

It was a photo. Just a photo, nothing else. Dean's hand, flat on his kitchen counter, palm up, fingers relaxed. The kitchen light behind it was the warm yellow she knew from a hundred Thursday-night dinners, and beside the hand, out of focus, was the corner of a fish-something, the pan, maybe. His palm looked warm. His palm looked like it was holding out.

Leah stood there with wet red dye up to her elbows and looked at that photo for a long time.

She knew what it was. Fourteen months of Thursdays taught you a language without either of you ever announcing you were learning it. A palm up like that was a question. Come here. Whenever you're ready. No rush, but I'm here, and I'm asking.