The Shift

I lasted forty minutes at Greta's friend's housewarming before I found the balcony. The door stuck and I had to shoulder it, which felt appropriate somehow. Out here the noise dropped to a mumble and the city did its thing below, all brake lights and lit windows.

"Mara?" Greta leaned out after me, drink in hand. "You're not escaping, are you?"

"I'm getting air."

"You've been getting air for twenty minutes."

"Well, I'm efficient at it."

She came out and stood too close, the way she does. "There's someone inside I want you to meet. Devin. He works in finance, he's tall, he asked about you."

"Greta."

"He asked about you. That's basically a marriage proposal in today's market."

"I came here to stand near a railing. That was the whole plan."

"Fine, fine." She didn't move. "Ten minutes. Devin. Then I'll never bother you again."

"You've said that about four guys, a book club, and a funeral."

"A funeral was different and you know it." She squeezed my arm and went back inside, trailing noise the way a slow leak does.

I counted to a hundred, then shouldered the door the other way and went for the stairs. Down in the lobby I pulled out my phone. It was Friday, October the eighth, and I had nowhere to be, which is the best kind of nowhere.

* * *

I texted Greta from the bus. Left early, sorry, tell Devin I said hi and also nothing.

Her reply came fast. Rude. You owe me one housewarming of attendance.

I'll attend one of yours. You don't throw any.

Working on it. Then a thumbs up, then, unprompted, You should get out more, Mara. Not a question, just a verdict, and I put the phone face down on my knee.

* * *

The art show was two Saturdays later, at a gallery on Dill Street that used to be a laundromat. I only went because it was Nadia's show and Nadia had fed me empanadas at work for a year and I figured I owed her. The space was hot and crowded and smelled like wine that had been open too long.

I found Nadia near the back. "Mara! You came."

"I said I would."

"People say they'll come to things all the time. It's basically lying with extra steps." She hugged me, then pointed at a canvas of a bus depot at night. "That one's yours, sort of. I painted it after you told me about your shifts."

"It's very orange."

"It's very five a.m., is what it is."

I drifted after that, the way I do at things, half looking, half calculating how long politeness required. That's when I saw the ceramics. Small shelf in the corner, badly lit, easy to miss. Cups and bowls and one odd lidded jar with a face pressed into the clay, eyes closed, like it was listening.

"This is the worst spot in the whole gallery," someone said behind me. "They always put the pottery where the painters want it, which is nowhere."

She was standing by the shelf with two plastic cups of that same bad wine. Short dark hair, paint on one wrist that had dried and cracked. Somewhere over thirty, hard to pin down.

"Are you the ceramicist?"

"I'm the ceramicist. Sera." She handed me a cup. "You looked at the jar for a long time. People either love that jar or they walk past it like it's a fire hydrant."

"I like it. It looks like it's mid-thought."

"That's exactly what I was going for, and I'm going to be smug about it for a week." She smiled, and something in my chest did a small unfamiliar maneuver. Not fireworks. More like recognizing a song from two notes in.

"Mara," I said, though she hadn't asked.

"Mara. Is that short for anything?"

"Short for just Mara. My mother lost the naming energy after that."

"Fair. Mine gave me a name from a book she hadn't finished."

"Which book?"

"The Count of Monte Cristo, sort of. She got it half from the title. Hence Dantès, minus an accent, because the paperwork office in 1990 had never met one."

"Sera Dantès."

"Don't say it like that, I'll start believing I'm interesting." She refilled my cup without asking, which should have been pushy and wasn't. "So what do you do, Mara, short for just Mara?"

"Data. Transit data. Night shifts mostly."

"Numbers for buses."

"Schedules, delays, ridership. I tell the city where its buses actually go versus where it pretends they go."

"Oh, that's a great job to complain about. I bet you have material."

"I have so much material."

But then Nadia appeared with news about a sold painting and a cluster of people followed her, and the crowd bent between us like a river around a rock. I said something I didn't even hear myself. She said something back. And then I was at the door with my coat, and she was across the room, and the moment was gone the way those moments go, which is completely and without an appeal process.

* * *

Two days later, Monday, my phone buzzed at work.

Unknown number: This is the ceramicist from the worst spot in the gallery. Nadia gave me your number, which I understand is a crime. I need you to know I didn't hear a word you said before you vanished.

I stared at it through two columns of ridership data.

Me: I said something like "well, the light's bad everywhere in here."

Sera: That is a deeply forgettable sentence and I'm glad I missed it. For the record I said "one day I'll get a good shelf."

Me: Did you get a good shelf?

Sera: I moved the jar two inches to the left. A man then spilled sangria on it. So no.

Me: That jar has had a hard month.

Sera: It knew what it signed up for. It has a face, it accepts consequences.

Me: How did Nadia have my number?

Sera: She said, quote, "Mara works nights, she'll answer anything after midnight." I tested this. It's 12:40.

Me: It's accurate and I resent it.

Sera: I'm a ceramicist who paints on the side and I'm bad at both, and you tell buses where to go. Between us we almost make one functional adult.

We went back and forth until almost two, which was stupid, because I had a six a.m. report due and I did it anyway, bleary, smiling at a screen that had never made me smile before.

* * *

Thursday I had the kind of day that ends with a supervisor saying "let's circle back" about a problem that was, in fact, my supervisor's problem. I walked out of the transit office at nine at night wanting nothing but grease and silence. The Golden Fork on Halberd is open all hours and never asks questions.

She was at the counter with a mug and a sketchbook.

I stood there a second too long, because what do you even say, hi, I'm the woman who fled a gallery at you.

She looked up. "Oh no. It's the jar person. Sit down before I make a scene."

"Is that a threat or an invitation?"

"With me it's usually both." She kicked a chair out from the counter. "I'm here every Thursday. This is my night. I draw the people who come in and give them fake backstories."

"What's my fake backstory?"

"You haven't sat down yet, so right now you're a mysterious stranger who drinks coffee and leaves. Don't ruin it."

I sat. The waitress, who had seen me three hundred times and never learned my name, said, "The usual, hon?"

"Please."

"She has a usual," Sera said, delighted. "You're not mysterious at all. You're a regular at a diner. Your backstory is toast."

"It's a grilled cheese, actually, and I won't apologize."

The food came and we talked over each other about nothing, her painting, my buses, the coffee, which was bad and which we both drank anyway. Then it slowed down some, and she turned her mug in her hands, and her voice dropped a little.

"Can I say something kind of honest? You fled that gallery pretty fast."

"I did. Crowds. I'm bad at them. Not a you thing."

"Good, because I stood there like an idiot holding two cups of wine." She laughed at herself. "I texted you instead of just asking you out like an adult. That's also a me thing."

"That was you asking me out?"

"Twelve forty in the morning, Mara. What did you think that was?"

"I thought it was banter."

"It was banter as a cover story." She looked at me straight, no joke on her face. "So. I'm asking now. Coffee that isn't this coffee, sometime. You, me, no sangria."

"Yes," I said, too fast, and then, because I'm me, "also yes at a normal speed."

* * *

Saturday we walked the river path because it was free and because she said she liked watching the water do its one job. Our hands knocked together twice on the third lap before she just laced her fingers through mine and said, "There. Took us long enough."

"You could've warned me."

"Where's the fun in that?"

"Is this a date?" I asked, and immediately heard how that sounded. "I mean, a real one. Officially."

"Mara. I'm holding your hand and I bought you a churro. Yes."

"Okay. Good."

She stopped by the railing. "I should tell you things up front, probably. I'm a ceramicist, mostly. The painting pays the rent when the pots don't. I do markets and fairs and one gallery that treats me badly. I'm thirty-one. I've been on my own a long time and I'm set in my ways like a woman twice that."

"I'm twenty-nine and I take the same bus every night on purpose."

"So we're both a little rigid."

"A little."

"Good," she said. "Rigid people are reliable." And she pulled me by the hand toward the churro cart, and I let her.

* * *

Her studio was above a dry cleaner on Cobb Street, up a staircase that smelled like starch and clay. She'd warned me it was a mess, and it was, but it was the kind of mess where you could tell everything had a place and it had just all been knocked over at once.

"Careful, that one's wet," she said, steering me by the elbow. "Everything's wet. It's a studio."

I was looking at her shelves. Rows and rows of small figures, maybe six inches tall, all of them women, all of them mid-motion. Walking, reaching, turning around. None of them finished.

"These are all the same woman," I said.

Sera didn't answer right away. She put the kettle on a hot plate like this was a normal thing to be asked.

"Yeah," she said finally. "They're all me. Or versions. I've been doing the series for four years."

"Four years."

"I'm slow. Or stubborn. Probably both." She handed me a mug that said BEST GRIEF. "Sit anywhere that isn't clay."

I sat on a paint-stained stool and looked at