On dates, Darija often postponed the question about work until the second coffee. She arranged funerals and could predict almost exactly where the conversation would go. Somebody would try to be funny. Somebody would remember a death in the family and spend half the evening describing someone else's mistake. After their third meeting, one man sent her a competitor's price list and asked whether she could arrange a cheaper offer for his uncle. They did not meet again.
She met Irfan at a pottery class. They had both enrolled in the beginners' group, and her first bowl resembled a hat run over by a bicycle. Irfan made a heavy, ugly candlestick and stubbornly took it home. When he invited her for coffee, she agreed because she liked the way he carried his failure, carefully, in both hands. He arrived in the same blue shirt whose sleeve he had dipped into the clay the previous week.
He asked where she worked before the waiter brought their order. Darija answered and had already drawn breath to steer the conversation. Irfan nodded. Then he asked whether she liked her job. He did not request her most unusual funeral story or mention somebody who would soon need help. She said she liked being useful to people when thinking was difficult for them, but that after a hard day she sometimes wanted to listen to completely silly music.
"How silly?" he asked. Darija named a song she would probably tell her friends she only heard on the radio by accident. Irfan immediately knew the chorus. He sang it quietly, out of tune, with the wrong final word. She corrected him before managing to suppress her laughter. They continued talking about music, dreadful jackets from their youth, and her unsuccessful attempt to learn roller-skating. She could not remember the last time she had told anybody that story.
As they were leaving, her work phone rang. She saw her colleague's name and answered briefly, confirming the time for the following morning. Irfan waited, holding the door. Darija began explaining why people called in the evenings too. She stopped when she realized nobody had accused her of anything. "You don't have to account to me for one phone call," he said. He offered his hand because there was a puddle outside the entrance, and she kept holding it after they reached the dry pavement.
At home she called to ask whether he had seriously intended to display his candlestick in the living room. He sent a photograph of the ugly object beside neatly arranged books. On a blank sheet of paper, Darija drew an even uglier bowl she wanted to make the following week. A difficult working day awaited her in the morning. Tonight she was choosing a color for something that would be useful to nobody, except perhaps the two of them.