Mechislav
It’s less than a week after Daisy came to the freight yard and Bohdan's crew are taking the wall out.
Daisy's standing at the front of the shop in a hard hat that's too big for her with her camera up.
She's been there since eight. When the last section comes down and the dust rolls up the length of the floor, the whole thing opens out exactly the way she said it would.
Door to back window in one line. She lowers the camera and doesn't say anything at all for about fifteen seconds. I watch her from the mezzanine steps but don’t go down there, because if I go down there I'll do something about the look on her face.
She’s already gone part time at the paper, so now she's at the shop Friday through Monday, and most evenings. Bohdan's men have started calling her boss, which I like and dislike in equal measure.
Here is what I've learned about Daisy Bishop in three weeks of renovation.
She can’t leave a job to somebody else. If there's a broom she'll take the broom.
She turns up with coffee for six men in a cardboard tray and knows every one of their names, including that Yusuf's daughter is doing her exams and Petro's back is bad in the cold.
She argues with Bohdan about the shelving depth for twenty minutes, loses, is proved right four days later when the trial run of hardbacks won't sit flush, and does not say one word about being right, which I find harder to take than gloating.
She works in the cold with her hands going red and cracked because she won't wear gloves. Her mother sends them, I overheard her telling Delilah, and she loses them or leaves them in the car or forgets.
So I left her a pair on the workbench. Lined leather, women's small, the kind that will actually take a paint scraper without falling apart.
Nobody says where they came from. She looks at them for a while, and then she looks around the shop at six men who are all extremely busy, and then she puts them on and gets back to work.
I don't look up from the flue survey until she's crossed to the other end of the floor.
The thing she doesn't know yet is how much of what she said that first morning is being built.
She thinks she's getting a strip-out and a fair fit. She thinks the shelving is a standard commercial spec that happened to come in on budget. She hasn’t asked why a building being fitted plain for resale in the spring has the original flue being relined at a cost of four thousand one hundred dollars.
I've had invoices for that work rerouted through the yard so that when she does ask, the number she's shown is the number I want her to see.
It’s the window seat that seems to make it real for her.
I'm up on the mezzanine going through Bohdan's variations when the door goes at half past six. She comes in straight from the paper with her bag still on her shoulder, and she stops three steps inside.
The front window has been framed out during the day. It's deep, deeper than the standard, because the original sill runs back further than anybody realized once the paneling came off, and Bohdan's carpenter has boxed it with a hinged lid on it for storage.
Daisy puts her bag on the floor. She walks over to it and strokes the bare wood in wonder. When sits down on it in the dim light with the streetlight coming through the dirty glass behind her, she runs her fingers over the carving I had put there. A small cat and the shop name.
Then she says, without turning around, “Mechislav.”
“Yes.”
“Come here, please.”
I make my way down the stairs. She's still sitting in the window with her coat on, looking down at where her fingers are tracing the small carved words.
“Say the ladder isn't happening,” she says.
“The rail's on order, but I can cancel it.”
She shakes her head, still not looking at me. “Say the children's section under the stairs isn't happening.”
“The frame went in on Friday. It's low. Nothing above three feet, like you said.”
“Right.” Her voice has gone strange. “Because those things weren't in the drawings I signed.
I have read that fit-out schedule eleven times.
It says wall removal and the party wall door and shelving…
it says built in counter and flooring made good.
It doesn't say one word about a custom window seat with a hinged lid, and I know exactly how much this costs, because I have priced it myself and allocated for it in the budget.”
“Bohdan had the timber left over.” I shrug as casually as possible and she finally lifts her eyes to me.
The light from the street is behind her so I can't read her face properly, only the shine of her eyes, and she's quiet long enough that I hear the café's extractor humming through the party wall.
“You didn’t write any of it down,” she says. “But it’s all here.”
“I remembered,” I say, sliding my hands into my pockets.
She stands up. It puts her very close, and she has to tip her head back a long way to keep looking at me.
There's plaster dust on her cheekbone. She's still got the gloves on, and she pulls one off, slowly, and then the other, and drops them on the seat behind her, and neither of us says anything for about four seconds.
Her hand comes up and stops just short of my chest.
I know what's happening. Her breathing has changed, her chin has come up, and she's looking at my mouth. Every part of my body is telling me to put my hands on her waist and pull her into me.
She stood in my kitchen and told me clearly, in full possession of the facts, that she couldn't be involved with a man like me.
“There's a survey on Monday for the door,” I say. “You'll need to be here to sign it.”
Daisy stands in the window with her hands at her sides.
“Right,” she says. “Monday.”
“I'll lock up. Go home, it's late.”