The Place at the Table

Rafi asked on Monday whether Felix would still have a key to the shop while I was away.

We were standing in the fitting room with the door propped open, measuring where her mirror would go. It was a practical question. Felix had let himself in to fix the old back door often enough that I could see why she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ll keep one, and you’ll have yours.”

“I wasn’t asking because I mind him coming in. I need to know who else can.”

“He and I are together,” I said. “He doesn’t need a shop key for that.”

Rafi marked the wall with a pencil. “Good. Then the list is you and me.”

It was the first time I had said together to someone who had not been in the room when we chose it. I had expected a question. Rafi wanted to know whether she could place her press under the new mirror. I liked that she did not treat the news as a change to the terms of our agreement. I still wanted to tell someone who knew what it had cost us to say it.

Felix’s father invited me to supper on Wednesday. The florist from the corner would be there too. She had brought him a flowering plant after his radio was repaired, and he wanted to send her home with cuttings from something that had survived his windowsill for eight years. Felix told me this over the phone.

“Does your father know about us?” I asked.

“I told him on Sunday. You said I could.”

“I remember. I just hadn’t heard what he thought.”

“He asked whether I’d told you where the spare kettle is.”

“Have you?”

“No. I don’t have a spare kettle.”

I could hear his father in the background, insisting there was one in a cupboard he had given Felix. Felix went to look. For a moment I listened to the movement of two people searching a kitchen neither of them understood as well as they thought. Then Felix came back.

“There is a spare kettle,” he said. “He’s pleased with himself.”

“I would be too. Tell him I’ll come.”

· · ·Scene break

His father’s table was a narrow one, set beside the window. He had put four places around it and moved the radio shelf so the fourth chair had room. The florist arrived with bread, and I came with a jar of jam from a client who had overpaid me in plums. Felix carried two hot dishes from the stove and looked as though he had forgotten which was meant to go first.

“The heavier one,” his father said. “Then nobody can pretend to have come for the salad.”

We ate too much of both. The florist told a story about a customer who had ordered roses in a colour that existed only on the screen of her phone. Felix’s father described the radio announcer whose voice had made the old set worth repairing. I sat beside Felix, under the table close enough to feel the warmth of his leg, and found that none of it required me to perform being his new girlfriend. The people at the table had known us separately for years. They could learn this new thing at the speed of supper.

When I reached across him for the bread, Felix moved the plate toward me. His father saw it and looked away with the tact of a man who had watched us pass plates before. The difference was not in what Felix did. It was in the pleasure I took in letting my hand rest briefly at the back of his chair afterward.

The florist described the sign bracket that had come down in the wind. Felix had sent her a quote; she had accepted it.

“It can wait until you’ve finished the children’s tables,” she said. “The painted sign itself is safe inside.”

“I can fit it next week,” Felix said.

“I might need another pair of hands to lift it when it’s ready. You two are usually passing my shop on Saturday mornings.”

I opened my mouth to say we would be there. I had a fitting that Saturday and Felix’s library drawings covered most of the morning, but we had passed her shop together often enough that the old answer was waiting in me: of course, we’d make it work.

I looked at Felix before I said anything. He looked back, not with a plea to be spared, but as though he wanted to know what I would ask.

“I can help if I’m free,” I told the florist. “Felix will have to tell you for himself.”

“Fair enough. I know how to lift a sign. I was being sociable.”

She broke another piece of bread. The conversation moved to the small ironwork above her shop window. Nobody had been harmed by the pause. Under the table Felix’s knee touched mine once, deliberately.

After supper his father offered to show me the old radio. He tuned between stations until a distant orchestra came through, then turned the dial back a fraction and let the sound settle. Felix and the florist washed dishes in the kitchen. I stood by the shelf with his father and thought about the years I had spent at his house receiving bowls of supper for which he had never asked payment.

“You don’t have to tell me if this is still new,” he said, adjusting the volume.

“It is new.”

“Then I’ll ask about the shop. Is the woman taking it good?”

“She’s better at half of it than I am.”

“That ought to make leaving easier.”

“It makes coming back interesting.”

He nodded, accepting the second answer instead of correcting it. In the kitchen Felix was laughing at something the florist had said. His father did not turn to listen. He could hear that his son was at ease.

· · ·Scene break

Outside, the florist went one way and Felix walked me toward mine. The night was clear. His father’s radio played faintly behind the closed window, a tune I could almost remember.

“I nearly said you’d come help her lift the sign,” I told him.

“I saw.”

“Would you have?”

“Probably. I might still.”

“Then what difference does it make if I say it first?”

He stopped by the wall where someone had planted herbs in broken pots. We had reached the kind of question that used to stay between us because neither of us wanted a good evening to end with work.

“If I choose it,” he said, “I can say yes knowing what I give up. If you offer me, I have to disappoint you as well as the person asking.”

“I don’t want you to think I’d be disappointed if you said no.”

“You looked disappointed on Tuesday when I needed to work alone. You were kind about it. Both things were true.”

I wanted to tell him that his answer had not hurt, only surprised me. That would have made the surprise his responsibility. I thought instead of how ready I had been to turn his Saturday into evidence that we were a couple in front of his father and our neighbour.

“I wanted them to see us doing something together,” I said. “As though having dinner at the same table wasn’t enough.”

“It was enough for me.” He took my hand. “Ask me to go somewhere with you because you want me there. Let my no be my own when I can’t.”

“And if I do want you there?”

“Ask.”

“Would you come to the market with me on Sunday? Not to carry anything or repair a stall. I want to walk with you and buy something neither of us needs.”

“Yes. I have the morning.”

“You don’t know what I’ll buy.”

“That’s the risk.”

I kissed him beside the herb pots. A stranger passed, and I did not move away as though the kiss belonged only to a room with a closed door. When I did step back, I could see that Felix was smiling.

“For the record,” I said, “I might still help lift the sign.”

“Tell her yourself.”

“I will.”

We started walking again. It was a small distinction, each of us speaking for our own time. It had cost me one easy answer at a supper table and given me something I wanted more: the sight of Felix choosing a Sunday morning with me in front of nobody at all.