The conservatory held its heat like a cupped hand. María had opened the vents at nine and closed them again at eleven, and by two the glass had done its work: the room smelled of damp earth and rosemary and the faint mineral tang of the slate under her bare feet, and the light came through the old panes in long dusty slabs that moved across the floor at a pace she could actually watch. She had carried out the little folding table herself, one hinge wobbling, and set it down beside the chaise with a grunt she did not bother to edit. Ninety was not a number she pretended to be above. It was simply a number that had the good manners to leave her most of what she liked. She was a retired succubus, and she had chosen this elderly human form the way she chose most things now—deliberately, and for her own pleasure.

She had chosen the dress that morning the way she chose most things now—slowly, and entirely for herself. The dark green cotton, the one that had gone soft as a worn bedsheet at the elbows, with the deep pockets she'd sewn into the seams because a dress without pockets was a dress designed by someone who had never needed to carry a pair of secateurs. It fell loose over her hips and left her arms bare, and her arms were one of the few things about her body she'd never once reconsidered. Brown, freckled, the skin at the crease of the elbow gone loose and crepey, the fine dark hairs along the forearms silvering now at the roots. She had stopped shaving anything in her fifties, not out of ideology but out of a sudden, clarifying boredom with the razor, and had never found a reason to take it up again; she liked the silver against the brown, liked that her body had kept its own record. Her hair was silver and pinned up, and her eyes were dark brown, and her skin was naturally wrinkled and soft. The dress had a low, easy neckline, and beneath it her breasts hung heavy and full, soft and low on her chest, the skin creped and freckled, the nipples broad and dark and gone loose with age, and she had not worn a bra since breakfast and saw no reason to start. Over her shoulders she had draped the silk shawl, the old one, the color of weak tea, because the conservatory could turn cool once the sun moved and because she liked the weight of it. At her ears she had fastened the pearl earrings, and at her throat the old silver brooch, a crescent set with a single flawed pearl, because the neckline wanted something and because she liked the cool weight of it against her collarbone. She had dabbed the perfume at her wrists and the hollow of her throat before she came out—the rose one, faint and close to the skin, which she wore for no one's benefit but her own and which the conservatory would hold in its warm cupped air all afternoon. When she turned her left hand, the fine scar across the palm showed pale against the brown.

The chaise was the thing she'd come out here for. It had been shoved against the north wall since the spring, when she'd had the glazier in to replace two cracked panes and he'd needed the room, and she'd never gotten around to moving it back. Now she took the near end in both hands and walked it, inch by scraping inch, across the slate toward the west windows, where the afternoon sun came through at the angle she liked best—low enough to warm the shins, high enough not to be in her eyes when she read. Her back complained; she told it to be patient. When the chaise was where she wanted it, angled to catch the light and face the fern bed, she stood back and looked at it and decided it would do.

The music took longer. There was a small cabinet in the corner, walnut, the veneer lifting at one corner like a fingernail, and inside it a stack of records she had not gone through in years. She crouched—carefully, one hand on the cabinet's top, because the knees had opinions—and flipped through the sleeves with her thumb. Most of them she could dismiss at a glance. Some she set aside out of loyalty. She pulled one out, looked at the cover, and put it back with a small private snort, because she had bought it for a man and could no longer remember which man, which was its own kind of verdict. In the end she chose a record she'd had since her thirties, a woman's voice, warm and unhurried, the kind of singing that didn't ask anything of you. She set it on the old turntable and lowered the arm, and the needle found the groove with a soft tick, and the room had music.

She arranged the flowers next, because there were flowers and they were not going to arrange themselves. White stocks, a little tired, and a few stems of the rosemary she'd cut that morning, which she put in the water anyway because she liked the smell better than she liked the look. She set the jug on the folding table, moved the jug a hand's width to the left, and then moved it back. The wobbling hinge she propped with a folded beer coaster from a brewery that had closed in the nineties. It held. She stood back and looked at it all—the jug, the chaise, the light—and felt the small, particular satisfaction of a room arranged exactly to her own taste, which was a pleasure she had never once grown tired of.

Then she sat. It took a moment. She lowered herself onto the chaise with her hands braced and let the cushion take her, and then she swung her legs up and lay back, and the sun came through the glass and lay across her like a second blanket. Her feet ached pleasantly. The slate had been cold and now it wasn't. She reached over without looking and found her book on the table, and opened it to the ribbon, and did not read a word for a while, because the room was doing the thing she'd gone to the trouble of arranging it to do. The cotton of the dress had warmed where the sun struck it and stayed cool in the shadow of her own arm, and she turned her wrist a little just to feel the difference, and the perfume came up off her skin, and the damp green smell of the ferns came up under it, and she lay there and let the two of them mix.

This corner had taken her years. She thought about that, lying there with the record turning over, the way you think about a road you've already walked. When she'd bought the house the conservatory had been a dead room—glass on three sides and a concrete floor and nothing in it but a hose coiled in the corner and the smell of old damp, and the estate agent had called it a "sunroom" in the listing and then, more honestly, "a bit of a project." She'd stood in the middle of it and known, the way she sometimes knew things about rooms, exactly what it could be. Not a showplace. She'd had showplaces. She'd spent a good many years being an ornament in other people's showplaces, and she had no intention of building another one.

She'd done it in pieces, the way you do anything worth doing. The slate floor first—laid by a man named Hollis who'd done it badly, and then relaid by her, on her knees, over a summer, with a rubber mallet and a level and a great deal of swearing. The chaise had come next. It was special, long enough to lie full out and wide enough that she did not have to hold herself in any particular shape to fit it. She had spent a lifetime, in one way and another, holding herself in shapes. The chaise asked nothing of her posture. That had been the whole point of it.

The cabinet had come later, and the things in the cabinet later still. She did not open it now. She didn't need to. She knew what was in it—the small brass key on its frayed ribbon, the folded silk that had gone the color of weak tea, the letters in a hand she could still see when she closed her eyes. She had been a woman with a considerable appetite and a house full of handsome men, and then a woman with a considerable appetite and a great many lovers come and gone, and then—this, this room, this sun, this long chaise that fit her, and no one to perform for. The silk had been a performance once. Now it was just silk in a cabinet, and she was just a woman who had liked it, and both of those facts sat easily in the same drawer. Retirement from her succubus work had not dulled the appetite. It had only freed her from the need to spend it on anyone's schedule but her own. She thought, lying there, that she had never in her long life been so comfortable in her own skin as she was now—the wrinkles and the softness and the silver hairs and all—and that the comfort was not resignation but a pleasure she had earned and intended to keep spending. And lately she had found a new way to spend it: she had become, in her own private arrangement, a goonette, a woman who gave her appetite a room and a schedule and let it run until it was spent, and the arrangement suited her better than any lover ever had. She felt the first slow warmth begin to gather low in her belly, the old appetite stirring under the cotton, and she knew, lying there, that she would go to the towel in a moment. She had decided it the way she decided most things now—deliberately, and for her own pleasure—and the deciding was itself a small, warm pleasure she turned over and looked at before she acted on it.

Old habits did surface, now and then, and she enjoyed them. There had been a young man at the garden centre in April, all forearms and sunburn, and she had caught herself doing it—the little tilt of the chin, the pause in the voice, the arrangement of herself in the aisle so that the light fell a certain way—and she had enjoyed it thoroughly, right there among the tomato seedlings, because the poor boy had been trying to sell her a bag of compost and she had been, quite deliberately, flirting. He'd flushed to the ears and forgotten his pitch twice. She'd bought the compost. The habit had been a tool once, a chisel she'd carried for work; now it was a pleasure she took out when the mood struck and put away when it didn't. There was no one in this room to be admired by, and she found she liked the room better for it—but she had not stopped wanting, and had no intention of pretending otherwise. Lately the wanting had taken a turn she had not expected and did not resist: she had begun to spend her afternoons in a different kind of shopping, and her nights in a different kind of pleasure, and she had discovered that ninety was no obstacle to either—that a retired succubus could keep her appetite entirely for herself, and that the appetite, kept for herself, only grew hungrier. She chose the towel herself, and the wand, and the plug she wanted that day, and laid them out in the order she intended to use them, and the choosing was half the pleasure—the other half being the wet, greedy, unhurried work of using them. She had stopped being tidy about it years ago. The towel was there to catch what it caught, and what it didn't catch she let run, because a body that had been used well was not a body that stayed clean, and she had made her peace with that long before she made her peace with anything else.

The first order had been an experiment, placed late one night from the chaise with the record turned down and the phone held close, and it had arrived in a plain brown box that she had carried into the conservatory herself and opened with the secateurs because she could not find the scissors. After that the boxes came faster than she could unpack them. She bought a magic wand, and then a second one because the first had a cord and she wanted to be able to walk with it; she bought a womanizer, and a rabbit, and a drawer's worth of butt plugs in graduated sizes, and a pussy pump, and then another pussy pump in a larger size, and then a third, because she had discovered that she liked the particular ache of the larger ones and saw no reason to deny herself. She bought dildos the way other women bought shoes—giant ones, dragon ones with ridged and glittering shafts, knot dildos that swelled at the base and had to be worked out slowly, cocks of a size that would have made the garden-centre boy faint, tentacles that curled and suctioned and took both hands to manage. She bought a sex machine that arrived in three boxes and which she assembled herself over a weekend with the same rubber mallet and level she'd used on the slate, swearing at the instructions and then, when it was running, laughing out loud in the empty conservatory. She bought sex dolls—luxury ones, the kind with articulated joints and faces painted with more care than most people gave their own—and stood them in the corner by the cabinet and dressed them in the silk from the drawer, and found that she liked having them there, liked the absurdity of them, liked the way the afternoon light fell on a face that asked nothing of her. She bought nipple clamps and a nipple pump and a boob pump and devices for the boobs that were frankly torture and which she used on herself with a concentration she had once reserved for lovers, and rope, good rope, soft and strong, which she learned to tie around her own breasts in patterns that swelled them and bound them and left her breathless and pleased. The conservatory, which had been built for light and ferns and one long chaise, now held a pleasure pit as well, and she had arranged it with the same care she had given the slate and the flowers—the machine at the center, the dolls watching from the corner, the toys laid out on a towel within reach of the chaise, everything in its place for the long goon sessions she had come to plan her weeks around. Each item had been chosen, not accumulated; she could have told you why she had bought every one of them, and the telling would have been a pleasure in itself. And the sessions had done what she'd wanted them to do: they had stretched her, over months, until the hair that grew thick and soft over her mound and between her cheeks no longer hid anything at all, and she could look down at herself afterward and see the work of it plainly—the puffed, reddened pussy, the loose and open ass, both of them framed in wet silver-brown fur, both of them hers and both of them used exactly as she pleased, both of them still throbbing and hungry for more.

The big ones were a project, and she had learned to give them the time a project deserved. She would take the largest of the dragon dildos down from the shelf and hold it against her belly first, feeling the weight of it, the ridged and glittering shaft warm from her hands, and then she would kneel on the towel with her knees wide and work it into her ass slowly, breathing out, letting the widest part of it press and press until it gave and slid home, and she would stay like that a while, full and stretched and quiet, before she began to move it. She had done it often enough now that her body took it the way it took most things she asked of it—grudgingly at first and then greedily—and she liked the moment it stopped being an intrusion and became a want. She worked it in and out, long slow strokes, and she could feel the mess of herself gathering on it, the wet and the filth, and she did not stop to wipe it. When she drew it out at last it came out coated, streaked brown and slick, shit smeared along the ridges and caught in the glittering grooves, and she looked at it and felt the deep, uncomplicated satisfaction of a body that had made something and was not ashamed of it. She could not resist it. She brought the filthy head to her mouth and put it in, the taste of herself thick and bitter and warm on her tongue, and she sucked it slowly, cleaning the ridges with her lips and her tongue, the glittering grooves, the whole streaked length of it, until it was slick with spit instead of shit and she had tasted every inch of what she'd made. Then she put it back in. She put it back in and rode it until the pressure broke and she squirted, hot and sudden, all over her own thighs and belly and the towel beneath her, and then she took it out again, wet and filthy as it was, and smeared it over herself—across her belly, up over her soft hanging breasts, along the crepe of her throat—and lay there in the reek and the warmth of it, her appetite not spent at all but only banked, still hungry, already turning over what she would do next.

When she had caught her breath she reached for the biggest thing she owned, the horse cock, twenty-four inches of it and as thick as her leg, and she carried it to the machine and strapped it into the thruster herself, checking the collar twice the way she checked everything she meant to trust. Then she lay back on the chaise and pulled her knees up and let it find her—her asshole loose enough now to take it straight in, no coaxing, the whole ridiculous length of it sliding home until her cheeks pressed the base. She set the machine going and stopped thinking. The rhythm took her the way a tide takes a swimmer, in and out, deep and steady, and she lay there and rocked with it and let her mind go quiet and empty and bright, nothing left in her but the stretch and the hum and the long hypnotic slide, and she squirted once, twice, three times, the spray of it arcing up over her belly and her soft hanging breasts and her throat and her face, and then her bladder let go entirely and the hot flood of it ran down her thighs and over the towel and she did not stop, did not want to stop, only rode it out with her head back and her mouth open and her whole body given over to it.

María had never mistaken endurance for virtue. At ninety, she preferred a little ceremony, good silk, and the satisfaction of choosing her own company. She paused when the clock caught her eye. "One more minute," she murmured, amused by how much the phrase sounded like a bargain. Then she stayed—not because she had forgotten she could leave, but because leaving had begun to feel like giving something up.

Afterward she was filthy, and she liked that too. Her naughty holes after a long session were a sight—swollen and open and slick, the pussy puffed and reddened from the pump, the ass loose and used from the plugs and the knot dildos, everything wet and tender and hers. She had stopped shaving anything in her fifties, and the silver-brown hair grew thick and soft over her mound and down between her cheeks, and after a session it was matted and clumped and shining with what she'd done to herself, and she liked the look of it better than any smooth thing she'd ever paid to have waxed away. She would spread herself with two fingers and look down at the mess of it, the gaping pink of her, the shine, the way her holes stayed open a while after the toys came out, the dark fur around them pushed flat and wet and the pale skin showing where she'd stretched herself wide, and she would feel a deep, uncomplicated satisfaction at the sight—a pair of swollen, stretched-out, over-used hairy holes, and every silver hair of them hers. She had always enjoyed pissing on herself, the hot spread of it across her thighs and belly, and she had practice, long practice, in playing with her own shitty filth, and she did not apologize for any of it to anyone, least of all to herself. Today she had outdone herself. The towel beneath her was a wreck—soaked through with piss and squirt, and under her ass a thick, soft, reeking mess of shit where the horse cock had worked it out of her in slow pulses while she rode, and she had reached back and gathered it on her fingers and brought it forward and smeared it where she wanted it, across her belly and up over her soft hanging breasts, into the crepe of her throat, and she had pushed her fingers back inside herself and scooped and spread until her holes were packed and shining with it and the silver-brown fur was clumped and darkened and heavy with the stink. She lay there afterward with the filth of it all over her, head to toy—the squirt drying tacky on her breasts and her throat, the piss cooling in the creases of her thighs, the shit drying in a crackling film across her belly and her breasts and her throat, the smear of the dragon dildo still streaked across her belly—and she lifted her fingers to her mouth and tasted herself, and the taste was the whole afternoon in miniature: the salt of her sweat, the flat mineral tang of the squirt, the bitter, faintly sweet piss she had never once flinched from and had come, over the years, to savor the way other women savored wine, and under it all the deep, earthy, shitty taste of what she'd made and spread on herself, thick on her tongue and in her nostrils, and she licked her fingers clean and then licked them again, and the rose still faint on her wrists and the rosemary still in the air and the sun going gold through the west windows, and she thought that this—this exact hour, this exact body, this exact room—was a pleasure she had earned and intended to keep spending, and that her retirement had freed her from nothing except the need to be discreet. Whether she had spent the afternoon or the afternoon had spent her, she could not have said, and she found she did not much mind not knowing.

The fern bed drew her eye the way it always did, and the iron bench at the end of it, rust blooming up through the black paint in orange freckles, and the memory came up through the two of them together, the way a smell can carry a whole afternoon.

Fifteen years earlier, María had hosted a benefit plant sale in this same conservatory. It was a long summer afternoon, too crowded and short on shade, with donated plants wilting on the trestle table. María had agreed to host because the cause was worthwhile. Near the fern bed, pretending to sort seedlings, she noticed a woman standing by the hydrangeas.

She was not hiding, exactly. That was what María noticed first—that she wasn't hiding, she was managing. A large woman in a dress the color of a plum, standing at the edge of the browsing crowd with a glass she wasn't drinking from, and every so often her hands would go to the dress—smoothing the front, tugging the waistband down where it had ridden up, adjusting the neckline—and then she'd catch herself doing it and stop, and then a few minutes later she'd do it again. She was monitoring herself. Watching the room watch her. María knew that arithmetic. She'd done it herself, for years, in rooms where she'd been the largest thing and the most watched thing and had learned to keep the two facts in a separate ledger.

She'd walked over with her own glass, mostly empty, and stopped beside the woman at a companionable distance, and said, "The hydrangeas are a lie, you know. They're painted. Someone's been out with a brush."

The woman turned. Her face did a quick, complicated thing—the automatic apology already forming—and then stopped, because María had not asked her anything and had not looked at her the way people looked at her, and the apology had nowhere to go. "They're not painted," she said.

"No," María agreed. "But you looked at them properly to check, which is more than anyone else here has done all afternoon." She nodded at the trestle table. "You've been standing by that table for twenty minutes and you haven't picked up a single plant. You keep reading the labels."

The woman laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of her, and it changed her whole face. "That's a terrible way to start a conversation."

"It's the only way I know," María said. "The weather is a waste of everyone's time. What do you do?"

"I'm a seamstress." A beat; her hands went to her dress, then deliberately fell away. "Alterations, mostly. And I make things." She shifted the folded garment over her arm—a few fine straps and a small piece of silk. María noticed the immaculate seams first. "Have you ever thought of making something truly minimal?" María asked. "Not merely small for the sake of being shocking. Something so spare and well-made that the wearer feels she chose every inch of it." Venus looked down at the garment, considering. "Low-rise pieces. Tube tops. Cropped tops. Less fabric, but better cut." "Exactly," María said. "Clothes that let a woman decide how much of herself she wants to show." Venus’s expression changed; the idea had caught. "I could make that work. Carefully. As luxury clothing, not a novelty." "Then make it beautiful," María said. "I’ll be your first difficult client." Venus smiled. "That sounds more interesting than ordinary alterations."

"It's interesting to me," María said, and meant it, and something in the woman's shoulders came down a quarter of an inch. "I've never married and I've a wardrobe full of things that don't quite fit. Tell me what people get wrong."

And she had. Standing there by the hydrangeas with her undrunk wine, the woman had told her—about the brides who came in with a dress three sizes too big and a mother who wouldn't stop talking, and the ones who came in with something they'd bought off a rack and wanted it to look like it had been made for them, and the ones who came in with nothing but a picture torn out of a magazine and a look in the eye. She talked about seams and darts and the difference between a garment that fit and a garment that merely closed, about the tiny things she made for clients who wanted to be seen and the harnesses and cuffs she made for clients who wanted something else entirely, and how the second kind of client was often the easier to fit because they knew exactly what they wanted and were not ashamed to say it. She talked about the work itself—the hand-finished edges, the hardware set by hand, the hours that went into a piece no bigger than a palm—and she talked about it the way a craftsman talks, without apology and without inflation, because the price of it was the price of it and the care was the whole point. She talked for twenty minutes. Her hands stopped going to her dress. She forgot to monitor herself, and María stood and listened and asked the occasional question and did not once look at her the way the room had been looking at her, and by the end of it the woman had finished her wine and was standing differently, one hip against the bench, entirely at ease in a body she'd been apologizing for all afternoon. María had liked her. She'd liked her very much. She'd liked, especially, the moment the woman had stopped performing and started simply being, and María—who had spent her life being looked at—had recognized the exact weight of what the woman had set down.

"You should come to dinner," María had said, when the light started going and the visitors began to thin out and the last of the donated plants were being carried off. "I cook badly and I talk too much and the wine is better than this. Bring nothing. Bring an opinion."

The woman had looked at her for a moment, the old arithmetic flickering behind her eyes—what does she want, what will this cost—and then she'd said, "All right," and given María her number, written on the back of a fabric invoice, in a hand that was small and square and entirely her own.

The record ended. The arm lifted, clicked, swung back, and the room went quiet, and María came back to the present the way you come up from a shallow sleep, with the sun still on her shins and the stocks still in the jug and the iron bench still rusting at the end of the fern bed, and fifteen years gone by in the space of a song.

Fifteen years. She let herself count them, the way she let herself count most things now. There had been a great many dinners. There had been the year Venus had come down with the flu and María had turned up with a pot of soup and stayed four days and they had watched an entire ridiculous television series about a hotel and argued about which brother was the worse one. There had been the disagreement about the shop—María had thought she should give up the storefront and work from home, Venus had thought she should keep it, and María had been wrong, and had said so, which had cost her more than she'd expected and had been worth more than she'd expected too. There had been the summer Venus had helped her rehang the curtains in this very room, both of them up on chairs, laughing, and the winter María had driven her to the hospital for a thing that had turned out to be nothing and they had eaten terrible sandwiches in the car park afterward and Venus had said, "You didn't have to stay," and María had said, "Don't be stupid," and that had been the whole of it.

She had set out, fifteen years ago, to be kind to a woman at her own plant sale. She had not set out to be changed by her. But she had been. Venus had a way of asking her plain questions—what do you actually want, why do you do that, does it make you happy—that nobody had asked her in years, and she had found, to her considerable surprise, that she wanted to answer them honestly. She had spent most of her life being wanted. It had taken a woman who spent her days making things fit other people's bodies to make her feel, for the first time in a long while, known. She had been the one to teach Venus to stop monitoring herself. She had not expected Venus to teach her anything in return. That was the thing about the girl by the hydrangeas that María had not seen coming, all those years ago: she'd had a spine under the apology, and opinions, and a way of looking at María that said, I see you doing the thing, and I'm not going to let you get away with it. Fifteen years of friendship, and María still caught herself watching Venus's hands when she talked, still felt the old pull and let it warm her without needing it to go anywhere. Desire, she had learned, did not have to be spent to be worth having.

She lay there a while longer. The light moved. The herbs smelled. Somewhere beyond the glass a blackbird was making a fuss about something, and the warmth came through the panes and lay across her arms and her closed eyes, and she was entirely, uncomplicatedly happy in a way she'd have found embarrassing to describe and did not have to describe to anyone. She turned her head and pressed her cheek to the warm cotton of her own shoulder and breathed in the rose and the rosemary and the faint mineral smell of the slate, and she thought that this—this exact hour, this exact body, this exact room—was a pleasure she would not trade for any of the years behind her.

When she got up, it was because she wanted a cup of tea and because the afternoon had done what she'd wanted it to do and she was ready to let it go. She swung her legs down and sat for a moment, and then stood, one hand on the chaise, and went to the conservatory door.

The door caught. Not much—an inch, maybe less—and she pushed at it the way she always did, with the heel of her hand, and it stuck, and she pushed again, harder, and it gave with a scrape that went through the room like a fingernail on a blackboard.

She stopped. She crouched, slowly, hand on the frame, and looked.

The paint along the bottom edge of the door had gone. A fresh scrape, the pale wood showing through the green, and beside it the finish had begun to lift and flake in a small crescent, and when she ran her thumb along the bottom rail she could feel the door itself had dropped—not much, a fraction, but enough that the gap under it was no longer even. It had been even in the spring. She remembered, because she'd waxed it in the spring, the way she did every year, working the wax into the bottom rail with a rag and telling herself she'd get a man in to look at it properly one of these days, and then not getting a man in, because the door had behaved itself and she'd had other things to do. She'd accommodated it. A push here, a lift there, a shoulder into it on the damp days. She'd been accommodating it for longer than she cared to admit.

This was different. This was the door telling her, in its own language, that the accommodation was over. The scrape was new. The gap was uneven. Something under it had moved, or swelled, or given, and she could see the symptoms plainly enough and had no intention of guessing at the cause—she'd learned that much from watching men guess at things over the years, and she had no wish to be one of them.

She straightened up and stood in the doorway with her hand still on the frame and thought about it.

The sensible thing was to get a man in. The sensible thing was always to get a man in, and she'd spent a lifetime not doing it, because she'd learned early that a man in your house was a man who would decide things about your house. She'd had a plumber once, years ago, who'd told her the whole bathroom was a death trap and quoted her for a full refit before he'd so much as looked under the sink, and she'd shown him the door and done the job herself over a winter, badly, and it had held for a decade. She did not enjoy strangers making decisions about her house. She did not enjoy the particular way a certain kind of man looked at a woman living alone in a large house and decided, on no evidence whatsoever, that she needed managing.

But this door she did not want to do herself. It was the original door—good wood, old, the kind you did not find anymore—and she wanted it preserved, not replaced, and preserving a door was a different order of work from relaying a floor. And she had, she realized, standing there with her hand on the frame, a recommendation. Venus had one. Venus had been going on about her handyman for weeks now—not in the way of a woman recommending a tradesman and not quite in the way of a woman recommending anything else, either, though María had her suspicions and had decided to let them ripen—and she'd said, more than once, in that flat way she had when she meant a thing: he's good, María. He listens. He doesn't decide things for you.

He listens. He doesn't decide things for you.

María stood in the doorway a moment longer, looking at the scrape, and then she went and found her phone.

She had the number in her contacts, because Venus had sent it to her months ago, in a message that had said SAVE THIS ONE, with the name and nothing else, and María had saved it because Venus did not send messages like that about nothing. She sat down on the edge of the chaise—the sun had moved off it now, and the cushion was cool—and she tapped the number and held the phone to her ear and looked out at the fern bed while it rang.

He answered on the third ring. "Omar Reyes."

"Mr. Reyes," she said. "My name is María Antonieta Madero Iturbide, which is a great many names and you may call me María. Venus gave me your number. I have a door."

A pause, and then, mildly, "A door."

"A conservatory door. It's been sticking for a year and I've been waxing it and pushing it and pretending that was a solution, and today it scraped the paint off the bottom rail and the gap's gone uneven, and I've decided I'd rather not pretend anymore." She settled back on the chaise. "I want it kept. It's the original door. I don't want a man coming in and telling me it wants replacing, because it doesn't, and I won't have it."

"I'm not going to tell you anything over the phone," he said. "I haven't seen it. It could be the hinges, it could be the frame's moved, it could be the floor under it. I'd need to look."

"Good," María said, and found she meant it. "That's the correct answer. When can you look?"

There was a small sound on the other end, not quite a laugh. "I've got a job running through the end of the week. I could come out Monday afternoon, if that suits. I'd want to see it in daylight, and I'd want to look at the floor on both sides of it while I'm here."

"Monday afternoon," she said. "I'll be here. I'm always here." She paused. "Bring an opinion. I don't like people who agree with me."

"I'll try to be difficult," he said, and she heard the dryness in it, the small flat humor, and decided she approved of him, provisionally. "I'll want to know how long it's been catching, and whether it's worse in the wet weather, and whether anything else in that room has started to move. Think about it before Monday."

"I've been thinking about it for a year," she said. "I'll think about it more."

She ended the call and set the phone down on the folding table, and sat for a moment in the cooling room with the record finished and the stocks smelling faintly in the jug and the scrape on the door waiting for Monday.

Then she got up—carefully, hand on the chaise—and went to the cabinet in the corner, and opened it, and took out the rag and the tin of wax she'd used in the spring. She did not go to the door. The door could wait for Monday; she was not going to make it worse by fussing at it. Instead she took the rag and the wax to the iron bench at the end of the fern bed, and crouched down, and began to work the wax into the rusted freckles along the arm, the way she did every autumn, not to fix it but to slow it down, because she liked the bench and had no intention of letting it go. The wax smelled of beeswax and turpentine, and the rag went dark with rust, and the work was slow and warm and entirely her own.

Her phone rang. Omar Reyes's name appeared on the screen. María looked at it a moment, then answered. "You're calling at an interesting moment, Omar."