Page 85 of The Forbidden Center

She is at the table with one sock on and her hair gathered over one shoulder, eating dry cereal out of her palm while she reads.

“The milk is directly behind you.”

“This is faster.”

“You have been on the same page for four minutes.”

She turns it. “Now I’m not.”

I set water to boil and move the listing off a ring of condensation, and the kettle clicks off, and I make tea.

Away from here.

He said it on Friday night, and I did not answer him, and I have not answered him since, and he has not asked again. Two days of that. He is either the most patient man I have ever met or he has decided to let me arrive at it on my own, and I do not know which.

Tova closes her book around one finger. “If the desk is under the window, can I put a lamp on the other side?”

“That depends on the outlet.”

“There’s one beside the radiator, but it’s the kind with two holes, not three, so it’s probably old, and Mormor says old outlets are how houses burn down.” She says this without any apparent concern about houses burning down. “I’d put the lamp on the floor first and see. And the bookshelf can’t go on that wall because of the window, so it goes beside the door, which means you see the books first when you come in, which is better anyway.”

She has enlarged the photograph on my phone often enough to know that wall better than I do.

“Then yes.”

“And you’re still doing pickup today?”

“Yes.”

“Not Gabi.”

“Me.”

Her shoulders come down by an amount most people would not see.

“I will be there before the doors open.”

She nods and goes back to her page with her left foot up on the chair rung and the bare right one swinging under the table.

I find the missing sock beside the sofa and put it in her lap.

“You’re alarmingly good at that.”

“I have training.”

The listing stays on the table when we leave. I consider putting it back in the drawer and I leave it where it is.

The repaired supply cart crosses the threshold into Room 2 so cleanly that I look down at it.

Gabi is pushing it with one hand and balancing a coffee in the other, and the left front wheel goes over the metal strip without turning sideways.

“Show-off,” she says to the cart.

“It has earned this.”

“It got one new screw.”

“And competent installation.”