IN THE DAYS AFTER THE STROKE, delirious and sleep-sodden as he was, Thomas hadn’t always been sure that Edith’s voice was actually there, outside his door, muttering in circles about her small offerings. Stacked on the worn sandy carpet that ran the length of the hall, the things she had left confirmed it: plates of cheddar mashed potatoes and roasted chicken and dark greens, just cooked, the steam finding a way through the tinfoil; recent New Yorkers and puckered crime novels taken from her own shelf; six-packs of soda water; his mail; a lily in a cracked ceramic mug; a scarf knit into a loop, the signature merchandise of a stormy-faced vendor who was always outside their subway station.
He would be on the couch, chasing a nap despite having been awake only two hours, and hear the clearing of her throat, the sound in two parts.
“Okay,” she would say, with the voice of someone speaking to a colleague about a routine procedure, an issue with the copy machine or a slight change in schedule. “I’m leaving a few things here. Something for eating and something for reading and something else just because. They’re just out the door to your left. I know you probably have silverware but I put some in there because what the hell. All these things are only if you want. The vegetables are a little swampy. Can’t ever seem to avoid that hellish feature. It’s food. It’s definitely food. All right, I’m headed back to my pensioner’s grotto now.”
After a week of that, her odd discursions often the only points of amusement in his otherwise black days, he heard the shuffle of her approach and startled her by opening the door. It was he who should have been embarrassed, he thought, he who had not bothered to crawl even briefly from his depressive hole and leave a note of thanks, but as she entered, she kept her sight fixed on the tray she had brought, reddening like someone allergic.
“Well, I know I’ve been a busybody,” she said, her eyes scanning the room for a place to set the platter down.
“Anywhere is fine. Here, on the counter. You haven’t at all. You’ve been some kind of magic post-catastrophe elf. And I haven’t paid rent.” He gestured for her to sit at the bare kitchen table, and she gripped her hands on its edge to lower her stooped frame into a chair. Her hair was carefully curled, the stiff white reminiscent of a subaquatic reef formation, and her wedding ring sat bright but noticeably off-center on her diminished finger.
“Elves are meant to be a little quieter, probably.”
“It’s true I could hear you bustling out there.”
He laughed for the first time since his injury, and it surprised his voice, which strained at the exertion. She had the kind of older face that hinted at its young features, as though it were a hologram that could be tilted, the murky slate of the eyes restored to their former inquiring blue, the wattle of the neck tightened to reveal the stark line of the jaw.
“Never my strong suit. Never a suit at all, in fact. Not even hanging in my closet.”
He carried them over one by one, the teapot, the mugs, a jar of almonds, and Edith knew not to offer her help, not to watch as he arranged the things on the table. She drank the still-warm tea gratefully, as though she hadn’t prepared it herself, thanking him, looking around and complimenting the large wooden blocks he used as coffee tables, the bright teal of the couch, a series of octagonal shelves he had mounted on the longest wall. She didn’t mention the vestiges of his work, which infested the sizable corner of his space where a tarp lay to protect the floor.
And then she barked out the question, the one nobody else had posed alongside the stilted condolences they’d e-mailed. She offered it without the upward lilt at the end, like an appraisal of something obvious, a foul smell or a probable rain.
“And how are you.”
“I’m shit,” he said. It was a relief to say so.
“Can’t say I expected anything else. You were handed some misadventure. Is this retribution for some former crime of yours? A nun you robbed?”
He smiled modestly, as though afforded a compliment, grateful under the generous cover of her humor.
“At nun-point,” they said, nearly at the same time, their embarrassment about the weak pun turning to delight in the coincidence.
“About the rent,” she said. “You shouldn’t—”
He put his hand up, let the unkempt line of his amber hair fall over his eyes.
“I should,” he said. “And I will. I’ll get you a check—”
“But how are you going to—”
She stopped, immediately aware her brash tongue had taken her for the wrong turn, and communicated her apology by tapping a hand to her mouth and cringing.