Original fiction. Nina, her friends and the events in this story are imagined.
The window
The dress had pockets. Nina knew this because the woman arranging the shop window had put both hands into them before taking it off and handing it to the mannequin.
That had been on Tuesday. By Friday, Nina had checked the dress twice more, purely because the shop stood between her office and the bus stop. There were other routes. She did not take them.
At fifty-six, she owned clothes for client meetings, clothes for the garden and a selection of dresses waiting for occasions that kept happening to other people. This one was dark green, with sleeves and a hem that would not require an argument with the wind. The price was more than she usually spent on a Friday afternoon. It was less than the replacement office printer everybody had been discussing for a month.
She went inside before she could begin comparing it with other household appliances.
“Would you like to try it?” the assistant asked.
“I was looking at the pockets.”
“They come with the dress.”
Nina laughed, which made trying it on seem like the natural next step.
In the changing room she put her phone in one pocket and her keys in the other. Then she took them out again because it seemed unwise to test the stitching quite so thoroughly before paying.
The dress fitted. She stood sideways, straightened the shoulder seam and looked at herself without deciding what anybody else would think first.
“I’ll take it,” she called.
“For something nice?”
“Yes,” Nina said. Then, because she could hear herself doing it, she added, “Dinner. Possibly.”
An invitation with a detail missing
The invitation was on her phone, between a request to approve a drawing and a photograph of her daughter’s half-finished kitchen.
Sarah: Friday. Seven. The little place by the station. Come if you can. It would be lovely to see you.
Nina and Sarah had worked together at an architectural practice years earlier. Sarah had been the person who could tell a client that a load-bearing wall was load-bearing without making the client feel personally blamed. They still exchanged birthday messages and occasional photographs of improbable buildings.
Nina had replied, Sounds lovely. Let me check the week.
She had not checked the week. She knew what was in it. She was waiting for the sort of empty evening that arrived already dressed and carrying its own enthusiasm.
There was also the matter of who else would be there. Sarah had written “come,” which might mean a dinner for two, or a gathering of former colleagues who remembered what Nina had said about the old director at a Christmas party in 2009.
Outside the shop, carrying the dress in a paper bag, Nina opened the message again.
Nina: I can come. Is it a group thing?
The little typing dots appeared, disappeared, and returned.
Sarah: Just us! Unless you’ve invited the whole office.
Nina felt the small, ridiculous relief of discovering she had been nervous about six imaginary people.
Nina: I have not even invited myself properly yet. Seven is good.
The office chair
Back at the office, her colleague Martin looked at the bag.
“Good weekend planned?”
“Dinner.”
“Excellent. I’ve sent the revised elevations.”
There was a time when Nina would have remained in the office to look at them. They were drawings for a library extension, and the glazing mattered, and Monday morning was never as far away as it pretended. She opened the file, checked the issue Martin had flagged and made a note for the team.
Then she closed it.
“I’ll review the rest Monday,” she said.
“Fine by me.”
He did not sound disappointed. He did not lower a flag outside the building. He put on his coat and asked if she wanted the desk lamp left on.
“No, thanks.”
The office went gently dim around her. Nina changed in the small bathroom, balancing the paper bag on the hand dryer. She folded her work trousers badly and put them in the bag. The dress required no special shoes, which she considered a point in its favor.
Her daughter called while she was searching for an umbrella.
“Do you think the tiles should go all the way up?”
“I think I need to see the picture again.”
“I sent three.”
“I’m going out. Can we do tiles tomorrow?”
“Oh! Where?”
“Dinner with Sarah.”
“That’ll be nice. Tell her I said hello.”
Her daughter remembered Sarah as the woman who had once built a cardboard castle at an office family day. Nina had forgotten the castle. It had taken two hours to make and eleven minutes for the children to reduce to a defensible ruin.
“I will,” she said.
The bus
The bus was late enough for Nina to consider walking home. Her flat was in the opposite direction, but the possibility stood beside her in the rain with its own convincing little argument: she could wear the dress another day. Sarah would understand. The library drawings were still on the server.
She put her phone in the pocket. There was room for it without making the dress hang oddly.
When the bus arrived, the driver waited while a man with a folded shopping trolley negotiated the step. Nina climbed on behind him and found a seat beside a woman eating chips from a paper bag.
“Sorry about the smell,” the woman said.
“It’s a good smell.”
“Dangerous to start them. I bought them for my husband.”
The woman folded the top of the bag with an expression suggesting the husband would receive a carefully edited portion.
Nina watched the street move past. A florist was bringing buckets inside. Two teenagers tried to share one inadequate umbrella. At the next stop, somebody shook water from a coat sleeve directly onto her shoe and apologized with such alarm that Nina apologized back.
Her phone vibrated.
Sarah: Running ten minutes behind. Train has decided to be a hotel. Get a table if you’re first?
Nina: I’ll ask for one away from the door.
She liked having a small job. It made the dinner feel less like an occasion she had to qualify for and more like somewhere she was expected.
The table
The restaurant had changed its name since Nina last passed it. It had also added a large arrangement of dried flowers that reached out over the entrance like an ambitious hat.
“Table for two?” the waiter asked.
“Yes. Somewhere quiet, if possible.”
He glanced around the nearly full room, then moved a small reserved sign from a table near the window.
“This one is yours until nine.”
“Perfect.”
Nina took off her coat. The dress was a little creased from the bus, which was what happened when a dress met a bus. She put her bag under the chair and ordered sparkling water.
There was a mirror on the far wall. In it, she could see the back of her own head and a man carefully photographing an olive. She looked out of the window instead.
Sarah arrived carrying a canvas bag with the name of a bookshop on it. Her hair was shorter than Nina remembered. She looked exactly like herself and older in the ordinary way Nina supposed she must too.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You’re eleven minutes late. I’ve been late for this dinner for about four years.”
Sarah sat down and put the bag under her chair.
“Lovely dress.”
“Pockets.”
“Then congratulations on your new property.”
The thing they had both assumed
For the first few minutes they talked about the train, the library extension and a former colleague who had moved to the coast. Nina passed on her daughter’s hello. Sarah remembered the cardboard castle at once.
“Your daughter was the one who insisted it needed a toilet.”
“She’s still very particular about buildings.”
They ordered. Nina chose the fish because she wanted it, then spent an unnecessary moment explaining that she had nearly chosen the pasta.
“You can have some of mine,” Sarah said. “We are not submitting our decisions for review.”
It was said lightly, and Nina laughed. Then she looked down at the folded napkin.
“I thought there might be other people tonight.”
“Who?”
“The old office, perhaps.”
Sarah frowned. “Did I make it sound like that?”
“Not really. You said come if you can. I pictured a table of people already coming.”
“Oh. I wrote that because I didn’t want you to feel cornered.”
“I thought I was an extra.”
“You were the entire booking.”
The waiter brought bread before either of them could make the conversation more complicated. Sarah took a piece, then put it down again.
“I did think you might not want to,” she said.
Nina looked up.
“The last two times I asked, you were busy. Which is fine. I just couldn’t tell whether asking again would be annoying.”
“It wasn’t annoying.”
“I know that now.”
The space between those two sentences was uncomfortable, but smaller than the space they had managed to create by being considerate in opposite directions.
A dinner does not need a speech
“I was busy,” Nina said. “I also let the reply get away from me. Then it felt too late to say anything except sorry.”
Sarah nodded. She did not say it was nothing. Nina was grateful for that.
“I wasn’t waiting for a perfect apology,” Sarah said. “I just wanted dinner.”
“You’ve got it now. Until nine.”
“Time-limited reparations.”
Nina laughed, and this time the laugh stayed with her while the waiter described the specials to the next table.
There was no need to excavate every unanswered message. Nina asked about Sarah’s job. Sarah told her the useful version first, then the version that involved a meeting in which somebody had suggested “more exciting parking.” Nina told her about the library, including the child who had asked whether the new building would have somewhere to sit that was not a chair.
“Fair question,” Sarah said.
“I thought so too.”
They ate. Sarah’s pasta was very good, and Nina accepted the offered forkful without explaining her decision further.
When the waiter asked whether everything was all right, both women answered at once. Then they went back to a conversation about the cardboard castle that neither could remember in the same order.
Something Sarah had not mentioned
After the plates were cleared, Sarah pulled a slim paperback from her bag.
“I brought you this. You don’t have to read it.”
“That’s a promising recommendation.”
“It’s a collection of essays about public spaces. There’s one about a bus shelter I thought you’d like.”
Inside the cover was a bookmark from the bookshop on her bag.
“You’re there a lot?” Nina asked.
“Wednesday evenings. I help with the readings.”
“Since when?”
“March.”
It was October.
Nina turned the bookmark over. “I didn’t know.”
“I don’t think I told you.”
For a moment, Nina felt the peculiar embarrassment of having mistaken the gaps in her knowledge for gaps in Sarah’s life. She had imagined the usual outline: work, home, occasional trips. Meanwhile, Sarah had been arranging chairs between shelves and knowing who wanted a microphone.
“Do you like it?”
“Mostly. One man reads the same poem every time. He says he’s revised it, but the seagull always dies on page two.”
“Could I come?”
“To hear about the seagull?”
“To the reading.”
“Of course. I’ll send the date. You don’t need to buy a book.”
“I might want a book.”
“You can buy a book, Nina.”
The bill
They shared a dessert because neither wanted a whole one and both wanted to try it. It arrived with two spoons and a decorative mint leaf that Sarah moved carefully to the side.
“Do you want that?”
“No.”
“Good. I dislike negotiating garnish.”
At ten to nine, the waiter came over with the apologetic expression of a person about to mention a fact already agreed upon. Nina asked for the bill before he had to.
They paid separately. Sarah looked at the dress again while Nina found her card.
“Was that for tonight?”
“I bought it today.”
“I’m honored.”
“I didn’t know I was coming when I bought it.”
Sarah considered this. “Even better.”
Outside, the rain had stopped. The pavement reflected the restaurant windows, and the dried flowers above the door were now impossible to see clearly enough to disapprove of.
“Same again sometime?” Sarah asked.
Nina reached for her phone, then stopped.
“Can we choose the date now?”
They stood beneath the enormous arrangement and compared calendars. The first Friday did not work. The second did. Sarah made the booking while Nina held both their bags, which seemed a sensible division of the evening’s remaining responsibilities.
On the way home
At the bus stop, Nina sent her daughter a photograph of the restaurant window.
Nina: Lovely dinner. Tiles tomorrow after eleven?
Her daughter: Yes. How was Sarah?
Nina began typing a summary, then deleted it.
Nina: Good. She helps at a bookshop now. I’m going to a reading next week.
Her daughter: Look at you. Send me the details if it’s open to anyone.
The bus arrived before Nina could reply. She climbed on, found a seat and put the book on her lap. Her work trousers were still in the paper bag, folded into an unconvincing square.
There would be drawings on Monday. There would be tiles tomorrow. The dress would need hanging up, and the shoes would need drying. Nothing about the evening had rearranged those facts.
She opened the book at the essay about the bus shelter. A receipt slipped out from behind the bookmark: Sarah had bought it three weeks earlier.
Nina held the receipt for a moment. Then she put it back where it had been, took out her phone and wrote, Thank you for asking again.
Sarah’s answer arrived at the next stop.
Sarah: Thank you for coming. Second Friday. It’s in the diary.
Nina put the phone in her pocket. It fitted beside the keys.
Want to make an invitation of your own? The free Friendship Field Guide includes suggested wording and practical planning pages. This story is fiction, not evidence that a guide or product changes someone’s life.
