Not Yet
Day thirty-one.
In the morning the ledger still said Paid, and it had been written the night before in a fast hand, the way you write a thing you want to be true.
She read it twice with her coat still on. It was not a lie exactly. It was worse than a lie. It was a coat that fit somebody else.
She took the pencil from behind her ear and drew one line through the word. Underneath, small, she wrote: Not yet.
The bell over the door did not ring all morning. She swept a floor that did not need it.
At closing, the woman from the rainy street came in. The one who had left with the unlabeled seed in her pocket, weeks back, the seed the man had left on the counter because it had no name. She came in with empty hands and stood by the counter like a person who had walked a long way to say a short thing.
“It came up,” she said.
“Good.”
“Two leaves. I don't know what it is.”
“Good,” the shopkeeper said again.
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the answer I have.” She wiped the counter, which also did not need it. “An unlabeled seed doesn't get a label by growing. It gets a shape. Those are different things.”
The woman looked at the window box, at the sprout that had chosen the sill and then chosen the ground and was still deciding, apparently, to do both.
“How will I know when it's done?” she said.
“You won't. You'll notice one day that you stopped asking.” The shopkeeper turned the ledger around so the woman could see the crossed-out word. “I wrote Paid in there last night. Nobody's paid. I wanted the page to look lived-in, so I lied to a book, which is a cheap kind of lying, but it's the kind I had.”
“And now?”
“Now it says not yet.” She put the pencil down. “Not yet is a place to keep a thing. It isn't a no. It isn't a yes. It's a shelf with air around it.”
The woman was quiet for a while. Then she said, “The plant needs a story. Not the whole thing. Just the first line. I heard the first line is free.”
“It is.”
“Then give me that.”
So the shopkeeper wrote it on the back of the receipt paper, one line, and slid it across:
It came up in the dark, and it does not have a name yet.
The woman read it once, folded it small, and put it in the pocket the seed had come out of.
“I'll come back for the growing,” she said, and the bell rang her out into the street.
The shopkeeper looked at the ledger. Under the crossed-out word there was still room. She did not write anything there. Some entries you leave open, because the thing they are for has not happened.
The first line, though, had been asked for and given. That much was true, and true was enough to close a day on.