Moreover and most importantly, he excelled at the job. He treated customers with courtesy and charm, moved the cancer groupies gracefully toward the exits, and excelled at sales, probably because he wasn’t pushy in the slightest. He answered the phone, usually by the second or third ring, and carefully wrapped the prints before shipping those ordered by mail. Usually, to complete all of his tasks, he would stay for an hour or more after the gallery had closed its doors. Luanne was so impressed by him that she had no worries about her monthlong holiday in Maui with her daughter and grandchildren in December, a trip she’d taken almost every year since she’s started at the gallery.
None of that, Maggie realized, had been much of a surprise. What did surprise her was that in the last few months, her reservations about Mark had slowly given way to a growing sense of trust.
*
Maggie couldn’t pinpoint exactly when that had happened. Like apartment neighbors regularly riding the same elevator, their cordial relationship settled into a comfortable familiarity. In September, once she began to feel better after her last infusion, she had started spending more time at work. Simple greetings with Mark gave way to small talk before segueing to more personal subjects. Sometimes those conversations took place in the small break room down the hall from her office, other times in the gallery when it was devoid of visitors. Mostly they occurred after the doors had been locked, while the three of them processed and packaged the prints that had been ordered by phone or through the website. Usually Luanne dominated the conversation, chattering about her ex-husband’s poor dating choices or her kids and grandkids. Maggie and Mark were content to listen—Luanne was entertaining. Every now and then, one of them would roll their eyes at something Luanne had said （“I’m sure my ex is paying for all the plastic surgery on that tacky gold-digger”） and the other would smile slightly, a private communication meant just for the two of them.
Sometimes, though, Luanne had to leave immediately after closing. Mark and Maggie would work together alone, and little by little, Maggie came to learn quite a bit about Mark, even as he refrained from asking personal questions of her. He told her about his parents and his childhood, which often struck her as something akin to an upbringing imagined by Norman Rockwell, complete with bedtime stories, hockey and baseball games, and his parents’ attendance at every school event he could remember. He also spoke frequently about his girlfriend, Abigail, who’d just started working toward a master’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago. Like Mark, she’d grown up in a small town—in her case, Waterloo, Iowa—and he had countless photographs of the two of them on his iPhone. The photos showed a pretty young redhead with a sunny, midwestern affect, and Mark mentioned that he planned to propose after she received her degree. Maggie could remember laughing when he said it. Why get married when you’re still so young? she’d asked. Why not wait a few years?
“Because,” Mark had answered, “she’s the one with whom I’d like to spend the rest of my life.”
“How can you know that?”
“Sometimes you just know.”
The more she learned about him, the more she came to believe that his parents had been as lucky with him as he’d been with them. He was an exemplary young man, responsible and kind—disproving the stereotype that millennials were lazy and entitled. Still, her growing fondness for him sometimes surprised her, if only because they shared so little in common. Her early life had been…unusual, at least for a time, and her relationship with her parents had often been strained. She herself had been nothing like Mark. While he’d been studious and had graduated with highest honors from a top university, she’d generally struggled in school and had finished less than three semesters at a community college. At his age, she had been content to live in the moment and figure things out on the fly, whereas he seemed to have a plan for everything. Had she met him when she was younger, she suspected that she wouldn’t have given him the time of day; when she’d been in her twenties, she’d had a habit of choosing exactly the wrong kinds of men.
Nonetheless, he sometimes reminded her of someone she’d known long ago, someone who had once meant everything to her.
*
By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, Maggie considered Mark a definite member of the gallery family. She wasn’t as close to him as she was to either Luanne or Trinity—they’d spent years together, after all—but he’d become something akin to a friend nonetheless, and two days after that holiday, all four of them had stayed late in the gallery after closing. It was Saturday night, and because Luanne planned to fly to Maui the following morning while Trinity left for the Caribbean, they opened a bottle of wine to go with the cheese and fruit tray Luanne had ordered. Maggie accepted a glass, even though she couldn’t fathom the thought of either drinking or eating anything.