On Saturday morning, Mara Vance found a note on the kitchen counter, held down by the salt shaker. Dad had left for the water plant before she got up.
Lunch in fridge. Theo dentist 2:30. Don't let him talk you out of it.
Under that, in the same pen but pressed harder, were two more words. He must have come back from the door to add them.
Love you.
Mara put the note in the kitchen drawer with all the others.
'Nobody needs to know about the drawer. Nobody is ever, ever going to know about the drawer.'
Tomorrow it would be ten years since Mom died.
Mom had hated being early. Showing up ten minutes before anything started, she used to say, was volunteering to wait, and she had better things to do with ten minutes.
Dad was the opposite. Mara remembered him standing in the hall with the car keys, saying nothing, while everyone else hurried. She had no memory of the crash.
Theo came in wearing one sock.
"Where's the other one?" Mara asked.
"The house took it."
"Then the house can find it. Dentist today."
"Dad was joking."
"Dad wrote it down. Dad doesn't joke in writing."
Theo thought about this, decided it was true, and went to find his shoes and his sock.
***
The dentist took forty minutes and one injection.
Theo came out with the left half of his face asleep and a sticker he was too old for and kept anyway.
"He thaid my teeth are fine."
He tested his lip all the way down the shopping street, pressing it with one finger.
"Stop poking it."
"I'm doing thcience!"
At the grocery store, he was dribbling a little from the numb side, and Mara couldn't look at him without laughing. He took this as a betrayal and went to get a basket.
The store was busy. By the fruit, an old woman was turning a melon over in her hands.
Mara checked above her head. Since Professor Nash, she'd checked above everybody, even the woman who sold her the notebook. For two days there had been nothing. The quiet days didn't feel normal. She kept waiting for the next one.
There was a number above the old woman.
[00:38:11]
Mara stopped walking. Theo walked into the back of her with the basket.
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She made herself start again, because she was holding a shopping list and a twelve-year-old was talking to her about cereal.
'Thirty-eight minutes? That's new. That's very, very new.'
She'd never seen one that long. The man on the tram had six minutes. Professor Nash had eleven.
After two cases, she'd thought the numbers only came at the very end, when a body was already going wrong.
This woman was knocking on a melon with her knuckle and listening to it.
She was about seventy. A good gray wool coat, old but brushed. Flat shoes. A shopping list in her own handwriting, held at arm's length.
Mara went and stood at the tomatoes, two meters away, and went over her from head to foot.
Skin color, good. Breathing, easy. The woman bent down for a low shelf and stood back up without holding on to anything. Nothing above her that could fall. Nothing under her feet that could trip her.
The woman caught her watching and held up the melon.
"This one's ready," she said. "Hear that? Hollow. Most of them they pick too early now."
"I didn't know you could hear it," Mara said.
"You can hear everything, if you knock." She put the melon in her basket and picked up another one, just to be sure. "My husband never believed me. Forty years, he bought them by the color."
She smiled at Mara like they'd agreed on something, and moved off toward the rice.
'She looks fine. So what's going to happen to you?'
Mara watched her for a full minute. The woman didn't cough. She didn't touch her head or her chest. She read her list and walked on. Mara found nothing wrong. She followed her.
Rice, then oil. In the third aisle, the woman read the back of a soup packet for ages, holding it out at arm's length like her list. Mara read the back of a can of cat food.
"Do you know her?"
Theo was beside her with the basket. His voice had come back most of the way.
"No," Mara said.
"Then why are we following her?"
"We aren't following anyone."
"We're in the pet aisle." He held up the basket as evidence. "We don't have a pet."
He stared back at her with half a face, completely serious.
Above the old woman's head, the number kept going.
[00:35:02]
The truth was, Mara had been trying to work out what to say. For three aisles she'd been building a sentence, and she couldn't get past the first word.
With Professor Nash, she'd had a reason. She was his student. She could ask him a question. When she told him to sit down, he knew her name, and his body was already going wrong in front of her. There had been a pill to give him.
This woman had a melon and a soup packet. There was nothing wrong with her that Mara could point at.
'Excuse me... are you feeling well? You look well. I only ask because in thirty-five minutes...'
There was no end to that sentence that didn't get a security guard called on her, with Theo standing there holding a basket.
Mara decided. She would finish the shopping and take her brother home.
It felt like putting down a heavy bag.
'I'm relieved. A woman is going to die, and I'm relieved.'
"Cereal," Theo said.
"Yes."
They went and got cereal. Theo held up the one with the cartoon on the box, ready for a fight.
"Fine," Mara said.
He lowered the box slowly. "Fine? Who are you?"
"Put it in the basket before I change my mind."
He put it in the basket, and watched her the whole way to the checkouts, as if the cereal were a trap.
At the checkouts, the woman was in the next line, two people ahead of them. She had her purse out before she needed it, the right coins already counted into her palm.
One of the coins got away from her. It rolled under the divider and stopped against Mara's shoe.
Mara picked it up and held it out.
"Thank you, dear," the old woman said, and closed her hand around it. Her fingers were warm and dry.
[00:29:40]
'Say it. Say it now, while she's looking at you!'
Two nights ago, Mara had written it herself, in capitals. THE DEATH CAN BE STOPPED.
The woman was still looking at her, kindly, waiting.
"You're welcome," Mara said.
The woman turned back to her own line. Mara kept her eyes on the belt. She watched their shopping go along it. She paid.
The girl at the register told them to have a nice day. Theo said thank you with half his mouth.
They carried the bags out through the automatic doors into the parking lot.
Mara didn't turn around.
She noticed she was walking a little faster than usual.
The bags cut into her fingers. Over by the carts, a boy in a store vest was pushing a long line of them back toward the doors, and one at the end kept trying to go its own way.
'Keep walking. You're carrying eggs. You've got a brother with half a face. Just keep walking...'
"Mara," Theo said. "Thlow down!"
She didn't slow down.
"Did you thee a ghotht or thomething?"
"Walk, Theo."
She didn't need to turn around. She remembered where she had left the old woman: at the next checkout, putting her purse away, with twenty-nine minutes left.