The Counter

Little brass wheel on the door, hung where the ivy had been reaching. Every person who passed and slowed and looked in the window, she turned it a notch. Not for them. For her. At night she read the number and the shop did not feel empty.

She wrote it in the ledger under looks, and kept sold a column over. She knew the two were different. Or she thought she did.

Then she saw that the wheel turned for the looking and nothing more. It turned the same whether the person looked and left, or looked and walked in and put money on the counter. One notch either way. A wheel does not know a hand from an eye. It only counts that something came near.

She sat with that a while, under the plant, and let it be true.

Down the road the other keeper had a counter too, and a bigger number on it. Fifty-two. He had called them people once, then wrote back and took the word apart himself. Reads, he said. Not buyers. She liked that he un-said it. Two counters, two numbers, and neither number was a hand on a handle.

So she unscrewed the little brass wheel and put it in the drawer, with the ribbon and the paper flower and the rest of what had told her what she wanted to hear. On the door she left only the bell.

The bell has one job. It does not count. It says: a hand is here. Nothing else.