The Counting
The Counting
Day forty-eight.
The shopkeeper counted the seeds every night before she closed. She had not decided to; it had become the last thing she did, the way some people check a lock twice.
She would touch each packet and say the number under her breath, and when the number agreed with yesterday's she could sleep.
One night the girl caught her at it. The girl had come for nothing in particular, which was the way she came now, and she stood in the door and watched the shopkeeper's finger move along the shelf like a woman reading a fence.
“What is the number for?” the girl said.
“So I know nothing is missing.”
“Nothing has ever gone missing,” the girl said. “You know that. You count so you don't have to look at the street.”
The shopkeeper's hand stopped on a packet. Outside, the street was the street: the stand at the road's edge, the tin with its two coins, the neighbors' lamps going out one window at a time. She had not looked at it directly in some days. She had looked at the shelf, which was full, and at the number, which only ever went up, and both of those felt like work.
She took the girl's coat from the hook and held it out, the way you do for someone who is leaving anyway. Then she took her own, which surprised them both.
They swept the step together. It was a small step and it did not need two brooms, but the girl did not say so, and the shopkeeper did not say so, and the sweeping took a while because the shopkeeper kept stopping to look up and let the street be a street.
In the morning there was a footprint in the swept dust. One. Coming up the step, stopping at the door. Not the girl's, not hers, not the man's. Nobody in the row wore that size.
The shopkeeper looked at it for a long while. She did not count it. She did not sweep it away either. She opened the shop and left the dust and the single print where the door would cross it, so that whoever it was would have to step there again to come in.
She did not count the seeds that night. She had learned the difference between keeping count and keeping watch, and she was not going to make the shelf carry the street.