It was the second week of October. Until now, the weather had been unseasonably warm—like summer all through September, and like early September at the beginning of October. Then the weather changed, literally, overnight.
Shelly went to bed with the windows wide open because the house was stuffy from having been shut up all day (the morning weather report had predicted rain, so she’d closed everything, although rain never came), and had woken up in the fetal position in one corner of the bed with a sheet and a thin comforter twisted around her. Jeremy was purring, pushed up against her hip as if huddling there for protection from the elements, and the curtains were whipping around in the window frame. The temperature in the room could not have been above fifty degrees.
“Shit,” she said, jumping out of bed, sending Jeremy tearing out of the room as she hurried to the windows to close them. How had she slept through this complete scene change? The clock on her nightstand said 7:02, but it was pitch black outside—huge rolling dark clouds in the sky seemed to be preparing for a battle of epic proportions. Shelly grabbed her robe and wrapped it around her, and followed Jeremy out to the kitchen. Passing the thermostat on the way, she twisted the dial to seventy degrees—five degrees higher than she usually kept it even in the dead of winter, and eight degrees higher than her ex-husband had ever allowed her to turn it.
The weather change was going to be a problem. She’d need to find her down jacket and waterproof boots before she walked to work, and she was already running late, and the cat needed feeding, and she needed a shower—and the disconcerting darkness, accompanied as it was by inky rain, and the unappealing prospect of trekking across town, gave her the idea that she might, this being Tuesday and Josie’s early-morning day, call in sick.
What could it hurt? She was caught up with all the work she had to do for the next four concerts, and she had no new projects that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. She could just call the cell phone Josie kept permanently attached to her ear, say she wasn’t feeling well, and then call Security to unlock the doors so Josie could get in and answer the phones. Surely Josie could handle the one or two phone calls she might get while filing her nails in the office and playing around online.
The plan coursed through Shelly like fresh blood.
She’d had no idea, she realized, until this moment, how badly she wanted a weekday away from that place. Had she become one of those people who hated their jobs? Only once before in nineteen years had she consciously, brazenly, called in sick when she was certifiably in the pink of health, and that was the morning she woke up for the first time beside Paula and realized that it would take a lot more than the Chamber Music Society to pull her out of that bed if Paula was going to be in it.
Even given all that had happened, that snatched day had been a good decision: a stolen, sensuous morning, the details of which (coffee spilled on the pillows, eggs grown cold, the sheets twisted around their legs) were seared onto Shelly’s memory forever. The memory of that day still filled her with pleasure and contentment, even knowing now, as she did, that Paula would, a few months later, go back to her husband when he was diagnosed with clinical depression and when her grown children told her their father might die if she didn’t go back to him and that they would never speak to her again if he did.
True, it had broken Shelly’s heart. But even that seemed somehow beautiful, being proof as it was that she’d been capable of that kind of love at least once in her life. She’d walked through the world like a zombie for an entire season—like the beast in the Stephen Crane poem, eating of her heart and enjoying it, because it was so bitter, and because it was her heart. But she carried within her the deep satisfaction that she had thrown everything she had into that love, had done everything humanly possible to persuade Paula to stay with her.
That, Shelly had learned, was the difference between heartbreak and regret:
Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren’t accompanied by regret.
She watched the storm from the kitchen window and sipped her coffee calmly, even when Jeremy, unnerved by the storm, abandoned his cat food prematurely (usually he licked the bowl until it was shining) and ran back into the bedroom, where, she knew, he would hide under the bed.
It was 8:45, and Shelly decided it was time to call Josie on her cell phone, so she wouldn’t arrive at the Chamber Music Society to locked doors—although, with this weather, it seemed unlikely to Shelly that the girl was dutifully making her way to the office.
“Shelly?”
Josie answered on the first ring—or at the first note of some pop star’s latest single, whatever Josie’s personalized ring tone might be—and Shelly was surprised to think that Josie either knew her phone number by heart, or had her number programmed into her phone. She didn’t remember Josie ever calling her at home.
“Josie? Hello?”
“Yeah! I’m at Fourth and South U. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Oh,” Shelly said, “that’s not why I called. You’re not late—” (for a change, she thought). “I’m calling because—because I’m not feeling very well, and I—”
“Are you okay?”
The alarm in the girl’s voice was, frankly, touching. Shelly could imagine Josie holding the phone to her ear inside the hood of one of her black or gray cashmere hoodies, bent over, wind in her face, black ballet flats exposing the pale tops of her feet to the elements, stopping to hear Shelly more clearly.
“Oh, sure, I’m okay,” Shelly said. “I’m perfectly fine. Just under the weather, I guess. I was going to see if you could take calls in the office this morning without—”
“Oh, no problem,” Josie said. “I can stay all day if you need me to. I only have one class, and it’s—”
“That’s not necessary. You can leave when you were supposed to, at noon, but if, when you do, you could leave a note on the door and . . . ?”
Shelly went on with the instructions, including Security, who would need to come and let Josie in and lock up when she left, and Josie enthusiastically agreed to everything Shelly said, and by the end of the phone call Shelly felt both relieved and confident about choosing that day to call in. Maybe Josie was starting to settle into the semester, and into the routine of the job, and her attitude was changing accordingly. Maybe Shelly wouldn’t need to fire her after all.
She put the phone back in its cradle and looked around the dark kitchenette for a minute, and then turned and peered into the living room (coffee table, overstuffed couch, braided mat for Jeremy next to Shelly’s reading lamp), feeling a little confused about what she was supposed to do next (shower? get dressed? check email?) until she realized it was okay, it was perfectly fine, to go back to bed, and she did.
The pillowcases smelled fresh, and like lavender. The sheets had cooled pleasantly, and the staticky pummeling of the rain on the roof was both calming and deafening, and Jeremy came out from under the bed and found his place at her hip, and Shelly was asleep within seconds.
It must have been about two hours later, in Shelly’s dreams, that the doorbell rang—a pale blue bird opening and closing its mouth in a cage at a mall she used to shop at with her mother as a child. That dream bird was making the muffled chiming noise of a doorbell instead of a whistle. It sounded maybe three or four times before Shelly realized that she was sleeping, and that the doorbell actually was ringing outside of her dream as well as in it, and she swung her legs off the side of the bed. Jeremy, sensing her alarm, jumped off and raced under it, his claws making a desperate scratching noise on the wooden floorboards as he did.
Shelly wasn’t yet sure what time it was, or when the rain had stopped, or even what she was wearing, or why she was in bed instead of at work—and was only slightly less confused by the time she got to the door, got on her tiptoes, pressed her eye to the peephole, and looked out to see Josie Reilly standing there, outside her door.
Josie was wearing one of her skimpy tank tops with a pink hoodie halfway zipped up over it, holding two large Starbucks cups with white lids, and she was looking up at the peephole with a faint little smile on her lip-glossed lips, as if she could see Shelly’s eye peering out at her through it.