have something snarky to add. Could it be possible that she misses his presence around the house? The news cuts to a shot of the shore at Cocoa Beach. Tourists in clamdiggers wander through the frame. A despondent would-be surfer paddles out into the placid water. A typical day in paradise. “It’s calm now,” the meteorologist on the scene reports, calibrating the cadence of his delivery to trace the fuzzy boundary between intimating a need for panic while dispelling the same. “But later this evening we expect seas of—”
Laila switches the television off and tosses the remote onto the couch. Another moment and they’d be cutting to stock footage of a swell cresting over the breakwater while some idiot fisherman in a slicker casts a line into the surf.
“I’ll deal with you in a minute,” she says, shutting the pantry.
She rinses the coffeepot and washes her mug, then dries her hands and heads upstairs.
Pulling back the blackout curtains in her room allows the late-morning sun to fill the space like a vessel, illuminating, in the process, her secret shame. Alex embraces his messiness, but with her it’s a furtive endeavor. Clothes drape over an antique armchair in the corner. Dirty coffee mugs colonize the nightstand. Grooves in the carpet delineate a collection of favorite paths around the room, an atlas of forgotten vacuuming and too few shampoos. Her simple dresser is a layered moraine of accumulated living. Purchased (for a lot more than she cares to admit) specifically because its clean lines evoked an aspiration toward orderliness; instead, the dresser’s plain surface has become an archaeological wealth of jewelry, bills, magazines, and makeup. This is the real reason Alex is banned from her bedroom. She doesn’t want to confront the hypocrisy.
She grabs a pair of clean panties from the pile on the chair, depositing in their place the yoga pants she slept in, and slips them on. Her jeans, freshly laundered and neatly folded two days earlier, peek out from beneath a sweater she optimistically considered wearing on a recent chilly morning. Her favorite tops lie somewhere in the pile, too, though no doubt impossibly wrinkled. Rather than sort it out she pulls a fresh blouse from the closet, not a favorite but serviceable in a pinch.
A quick pass with the hairbrush and a splash of facial toner, then she’s back in the kitchen to survey the pantry again—this time with a pencil in hand.
Determining what provisions to buy is surprisingly tricky.
Ideally, hurricane supplies consist of food one typically eats, staples that won’t collect dust on the shelf between now and the next storm. But how much tuna will they realistically consume? How many lentils before she’s sick to death of soup? And who’s to say how long she needs to plan for? The power could be out for a few hours or several weeks, or not at all.
She drops the pad in her purse, then heads for the truck.
Lines at the store are long and the shelves picked over, but an encyclopedic knowledge of the aisles and aggressive shopping cart skills give her an edge. She scrounges together just about everything on her list and is back in the parking lot in record time. She rewards herself with a tall Americano and a trip downtown. After fighting the masses for canned foods, bottled water, batteries, and butane, she’s in need of some frivolous sophistication in the form of a visit to an art gallery. It’s the kind of thing a cosmopolitan single gal might do with a girlfriend if she didn’t have to work twelve-hour shifts six days a week, all while babysitting a teenager. She should text the girls, her locas. When was the last time they all met up for lunch or a drink? Ha pasado—way too much time.
She parks the truck in a garage and filters into the pedestrian wave fattening the sidewalks. Office workers return from late lunches and delivery vans idle on curbs. Birdsong competes with the Doppler howl of a passing motorcycle. Somewhere cars honk and fungal fingernails panhandle. Grease and discarded vegetables ripen to a cloying bouquet in alleyways behind restaurants. A tension lifts from her shoulders and a slink slips into her step. She opens the door to the gallery and is greeted by a chime.
A small sculpture, no larger than a paperback, sits on a simple podium in the center of the space.
It intrigues her.
From a distance the sculpture’s convex surface appears smooth, but closer inspection reveals a landscape of intricately carved glyphs. Written and rewritten in an unfamiliar language, the carvings are a kind of palimpsest, impossible to decipher. What’s more, the distinction between sculpture and podium is illusory. Both are part of the same stone.
She catches the attention of a gallerist poised behind a desk. “Are these real words?”
The gallerist walks over and assesses the sculpture with her for a moment before responding. “Some are, like this bit in Sanskrit. Some are gibberish”—he indicates a series of symbols on the far slope of a bulge—“others are borrowed from invented languages found in literature—Elvish and Klingon. That kind of thing.” He slips her a smile. “Let me get you a catalog.”
While he’s away, she circles the sculpture, examining it from various angles. “It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. Are those paintings by the same artist?”
“Mm-hmm. The whole gallery. Everything you see. She’s local, but I’m sure we’ll lose her to New York soon.”
He presses something the size of a European fashion magazine into her hand. Presumably, this is the catalog. She gives it a cursory glance, then tucks it under her arm and takes a phantom sip from her long gone Americano.
“It’s really stunning.”
“Take a look around.” He holds out a hand for the empty cup. “I’ll bring you a fresh one. Regular or decaf?”
She smiles. “Regular. Cream. No sugar. Thank you.”
He disappears into a back room, returning a moment later with a mug of steaming coffee. It smells delicious and she hazards a sip, burning her tongue.
“Careful, it’s still hot. I’m Peter, by the way, the owner.”
They shake hands. “Laila.”
“Nice to meet you, Laila. Do you live in the area?” As they chitchat, they drift toward a triptych on the far wall.
“I do, yeah. I’m never home, though. I work too much.”
“What line of work?”
The triptych hangs together haphazardly, but each individual canvas is subdivided into orderly diamond grids. The same glyphs that skin the sculpture appear here scaled down. The work is exquisitely detailed. “I’m a pharmacist. Is this painted?”
“Partially. A randomizing algorithm generated it. All the symbols are fed into a database, then the algorithm flows everything into a template. The results are then printed onto canvases prepared with different washes.” He indicates the variations in each of the paintings. “These three are my favorite in the whole show.”
“They’re the same markings from the sculpture.”
“That’s right.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“I think so, too. There’s something so current about it, but also classic.”
She compares the texture of the canvas to the flatness of the ink, trying to recall some trivia from her art history class in college, but nothing comes to mind. She shakes her head. “I could never be an artist. I’m not that creative.”
“Then tell me about being a pharmacist,” Peter says. “Was it something you always knew you wanted to be?”
She laughs. “God, no! My father was in fashion and everybody figured I’d go that route, but it didn’t appeal to me. When I got to college I realized I had a knack for chemistry, so I went into pharmacology. People think pharmacists are just glorified retail clerks, but there’s more to it than that. There’s a whole side of it that’s about compassion and pain management. That’s what I like about it most. I like working with people.”
“That’s very interesting.” He