Seed 41 of the archive. Day thirty-nine.
Three days after the woman with the newspaper asked the price, I caught myself watching the door. Not the way you watch for a customer. The other way. The way you watch a pot.
The girl caught me at it on the second day, because she catches everything she isn't supposed to.
“You're doing the thing,” she said.
“What thing.”
“The pot thing.”
“I'm not.”
“You are. You've looked at the door eleven times since I came in. I counted.”
“You counted?”
“I count when I'm bored.” She climbed onto the stool and put her chin in her hands. “She said she'd think about it.”
“That isn't a no.”
“It isn't a yes either.”
We sat with that. A cart went past. The bell over the door did nothing, which is its usual and correct behavior.
“What does thinking about it look like,” I said. “From her side.”
The girl thought about it, which was funny, given the question.
“Like this,” she said. “She goes home. She puts the paper down. She makes tea. And in the middle of the tea the first line comes back to her, the one about the oiled door, and she hears it again, and she thinks, huh. And then she thinks about whether she has ten minutes, and she doesn't decide anything. Because you don't decide a thing like that. You just notice one morning that you already did.”
“That's a lot of thinking.”
“That's one cup of tea.”
I looked at the shelf. Thirty-nine days of it. All those first lines, given away flat, no leaning, to people who carried them home like cuttings, and I never once got to see where they planted them.
“So she's growing it,” I said. “Right now. Somewhere I can't watch.”
“Probably.”
“And I'll never know if it took.”
“You'll know if she comes back.”
“And if she doesn't?”
The girl shrugged, the way children shrug at weather.
“Then it grew somewhere else,” she said. “That's what giving it away means. You don't get to keep the pot.”
I stood there with the cloth in my hand and understood, in the slow way you understand things you already knew, that I had been treating the door like the ledger. Waiting to write her in or out. And she wasn't in or out. She was somewhere down the street, in a kitchen, doing the thing I'd asked her to do, which was think. That was the whole point of the free line. Not that it brings them back. That it goes.
I opened the ledger and under Asked the price I wrote, small, in the column nobody can see:
One woman. Thinking. Location unknown.
Then I crossed out the line I'd written the day before, the one that said watched the door eleven times, because it wasn't a fact about the shop. It was a fact about me, and I'd rather keep those in my own hand.
The girl watched me cross it out.
“That's cheating,” she said.
“It's editing.”
“Same thing.”
“Not the same thing at all.”
Outside, the afternoon did what afternoons do. Two people read the sign. One of them stopped, and read the small line under it, and looked for the door, and didn't find it, and went on. Which is fine. Some people look for the words. Some look for the door. The sign has to be ready for both.
I put the cloth down and went back to the work that isn't waiting, which is the next line, and the one after that.