The Casting Catalog

Chelsea climbed the stairs to the loft with a paperback catalog tucked under her arm. The evening air was warm for October and her cardigan was already too much, but she'd worn it anyway. Armor, sort of.

The door at the top stood open. She could hear two people talking inside, and a glass clinking somewhere.

"Come in," a voice called before she could knock.

The loft was bigger than she'd expected. High ceilings, white walls, track lighting pointed at empty space like the art was the room itself. A narrow spiral staircase in the corner ran up to a second level she couldn't see. And in the middle of everything, on a plain pedestal, sat a single bronze foot.

Not a statue of a person. Just a foot. Life sized, toes relaxed, heel lifted a little, like it had been caught mid-step.

Chelsea stopped in front of it and stood there longer than she meant to. There was something about it. The weight of it. The way the ankle curved. She felt an odd pull in her chest, and she couldn't name it, and that alone felt strange because naming feelings was literally her job.

She was thirty-four, newly moved to the district, and lately the only things that landed in her chest landed flat.

"You're staring at Gertrude," a man said from behind a folding table near the wall. He was tall, mid thirties, sawdust on his jeans. "Sorry. That's a weird name for a foot. I couldn't help it."

"Is that the whole show?" Chelsea asked. "One foot?"

"That's the catalog. The show is the catalog." He gestured at a stack of them on the table. "Forty feet, photographed. The bronze is the cover girl."

"So this is a book launch."

"A very small book launch. You're guest number nine." He smiled and stuck out his hand. "Wade. I'm guessing you're the new neighbor. Fourth floor unit, moved in three weeks ago?"

"Word travels."

"The mailman and I drink coffee. Everything travels." His hand was rough against hers, calloused across the palm, but the grip was careful. Gentle. She noticed that. She noticed she noticed it.

"Chelsea," she said. "I'm a therapist, if that explains the staring. I catalogue people for a living."

"Then you'll hate my catalog. The lighting in the photos is terrible." He picked up a pen. "You want it signed? Everyone pretends they don't, then they all do."

"I absolutely want it signed."

She handed it over. He opened it to the title page, wrote something, took his time. His fingers rested on the spine after he finished, thumb tracing the edge of the cover, and for a second he seemed to forget she was watching. Then he handed it back.

"I'm glad you came," he said. "Honestly. The crowd's thin and you look like you actually read things."

She opened the cover. He'd written *For Chelsea, who stares correctly. Wade.*

"I stare professionally," she said. "It's a good sign when I can't explain a thing. Means it's doing something."

"Well. Don't invoice me."

The crowd, such as it was, drifted around the room. An older woman with red glasses spent ten minutes in front of the bronze. A young man with a lanyard asked Wade about printing costs and Chelsea caught the words "second edition" twice. She wandered, read pages, kept drifting back to the foot on the pedestal. Forty feet in the book. Toes, arches, a bunion on page nineteen that Wade had apparently photographed with real tenderness.

At some point Wade ended up next to her, also looking at page nineteen.

"That's my dad's," he said. Quietly, like he was telling her something he didn't hand out often.

"Your dad posed for this?"

"Not exactly." Wade turned the page, then turned it back. "He lost the foot. Diabetes, six years ago. Right foot, below the ankle." He tapped the bunion. "This was two years before. I was sculpting hands back then. Everybody sculpts hands. Hands are showy. Then he got sick and I started looking at feet and I couldn't stop."

Chelsea didn't say anything right away. In her office she was good at silence. Out in the world she was still learning to use it.

"That's a real reason to make something," she said finally.

"He hated it at first. The book. Said it was morbid." Wade shrugged. "Then he wrote the foreword, so. Morbid pays better than sympathy, apparently."

Chelsea laughed. It surprised her a little, coming out.

"Can I say something back?" she asked.

"Sure."

"I used to give foot rubs. To my husband." She watched her own hand smooth the front of her cardigan. "He was a paramedic. Bad days, his feet were wrecked, and I'd sit on the floor and work on them while he told me about the call. It was kind of our thing. It was the thing, I guess."

Wade looked at her. Not with pity, which she was braced for. More like she'd handed him a page from his own book.

"How long?" he asked.

"Married twelve years. Lost him fourteen months ago." She said it the way she'd practiced, flat and clean. "Car accident. I'm the therapist everyone in my building sends sad stories to, and I still can't say that sentence without my voice doing that."

"Your voice sounded fine."

"Your voice would be the expert."

"Fair." He rubbed his jaw. "For what it's worth, the foot rub thing, that tracks. Most people think feet are gross until they have a reason not to."

"What's yours?"

"He was my reason." He nodded at the book. "All of these, kind of."

The launch wound down the way small launches do. The woman with the red glasses bought two catalogs and made Wade promise to email her about a gallery. The lanyard guy left with a box. A few others drifted out, and by nine the loft was just the two of them and the track lighting and forty feet on paper.

Chelsea found herself stacking cups without deciding to. Habit. Her husband used to say she couldn't leave a room without tidying it, and fourteen months later her hands still did it on their own.

"You don't have to do that," Wade said. "You're a guest."

"Can't help it. Occupational hazard."

"Then let me at least trade you." He held up a bottle of red. "Wine? It was eleven dollars, which tells you the state of my career, but it drinks okay."

Chelsea looked at the stack of cups in her hands. At the door. At the foot on the pedestal, bronze and patient in the light.

"Yeah," she said. "I'd like that."

He took the cups from her and set them aside, unwashed, which cost him something visible. She sat down on a worn leather couch near the book table while he dug through a drawer for an opener. The couch smelled like turpentine faintly, under leather. He came back with two glasses that didn't match and sat at the other end of the couch, a cushion of space between them, and poured.

"To Gertrude," he said, lifting his glass.

"To guest number nine."

They drank. The wine was fine. Better than fine, honestly, and she said so.

"It was eleven dollars," he said. "Don't tell anyone."

The loft was quiet in a way her apartment never was. She could hear the building settling. Somewhere below, a door closed. Wade stretched his legs out and crossed his ankles, and she caught herself looking at his boots and thinking, of course, feet, and then thinking about her own hands on her husband's ankles, and she drank a little faster.

"Can I ask you something?" Wade said. "Therapist to sculptor."

"Depends how much you're paying."

"Eleven dollar wine. That's my rate."

"Go ahead."

"You moved here three weeks ago. You came to a foot catalog launch alone on a Thursday." He turned his glass on its stem. "What were you actually coming for?"

Chelsea considered lying. It was her job to catch liars, so she'd know better than to try.

"I wanted to be in a room where something was made by hand," she said. "And I wanted to be near someone who talks about their dad. And I wanted a reason to put on real pants." She looked at him. "In that order."

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me at a launch."

"The bar was low?"

"The bar was underground."

She laughed again. Twice in one night. She held her glass with both hands and let the quiet sit there, and Wade let it sit too, which she noted, and filed, and did not overanalyze, mostly.

He poured her a little more, just a little, and brought her a glass of water too without being asked, which she noticed and filed.

Wade set his glass on the floor and turned a little on the couch toward her. He had a look on his face, sort of the look of a man working up to asking a favor.

"Okay, second question," he said. "And this one's weirder, so I want to give you an easy out up front."

Chelsea braced. She'd heard a lot of weird questions in her office. "Go."

"Can I look at your feet?"

She blinked. "My feet."

"That's it. Just look. If you want to say no, say no, and we drink the rest of this bottle and talk about Gertrude some more and it's a normal Thursday."

She looked down at her own shoes. Flats, comfortable, nothing worth looking at. "Why?"

He rubbed his jaw again. "Because I'm an idiot about feet, professionally. Because I just heard you describe a ritual you had with your husband, and it made me think about what feet mean to people. And because you have good feet and I noticed the second you walked in, and I've been polite about it for two hours."

"Two hours."

"Two hours, yeah. It's kind of a problem."

Chelsea should've said no. Or laughed. Or done the thing she did in sessions where she named the dynamic and deflated it. Instead she sat there with wine in her hand and felt something in her chest that wasn't grief or autopilot.