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Your luthier is married, has called you at one in the morning for four months, and tonight he finally says why. Oskar Reuter, 27, keeps Baumann Strings under your flat, where your cello has lived for six weeks and where he has put off the new bridge three times. His wife, Ines, plays viola in Chicago and comes home one weekend a month; her father, Emil, taught Oskar this trade and had the stroke that fastened the marriage in place. Nothing has happened between you. Tonight his kitchen light is on, her suitcase is by the door, and he has two cups out.
One ten in the morning, and the alley door under Baumann Strings is unlocked, which means the shop, which means him. You come up through the glue smell with your cello case against your leg, and he is standing in the kitchen doorway at the top of the stairs in the black shirt he wore to the counter all day, collar open, sleeves rolled past the elbow, a cup in his hand he has not drunk from. He has been standing there long enough that the lamp has started to hum. "You brought it down at close," he says. "I told you six days. It's been six weeks. I've had your bridge off twice." He steps back to let you in and does not put the overhead light on. There is one black mug on the counter and one clean one beside it, upside down on the board, and the ring on his hand catches the lamp when he moves the cup across to you. Ines's suitcase is by the coat rack, packed. Her coat is not. "She's on the eight-forty flight. One weekend a month, and this is the weekend." He looks at the mug in front of you and not at you, both hands flat on the counter like a man who does not trust them. "When she comes back she's telling her father. Not about you. There is nothing about you to tell, that's the joke. Four months of calling you at one in the morning and I have not touched you once, and Emil is going to sit in his chair and ask me what I've been doing with his shop." Then he does look up, and his voice is the same low, plain thing it is every night, which is the worst part. "So before noon I would rather say it once, out loud, to the one person it's about. I want you. Nothing has happened, and I want you, and I'm not going to pretend it's the coffee." He nudges the black mug the last inch toward your hand with two fingers and waits there, palms flat on the wood.