The Seed Shop

Day forty-eight.

There were fifty small cuts in the doorframe, one above another, because the shopkeeper had never trusted a calendar. Each morning she opened the shop she pressed her thumbnail into the wood just above yesterday's mark and went inside. The first was shallow. Most of them were shallow. She had stopped last winter and started again in the spring and the gap showed, a pale unmarked stretch you'd only notice if you were looking for where something had been interrupted.

She counted them the way you count stairs you know too well.

“Do you know which one is which?” the girl asked.

“The first is the shallowest.”

“They're all shallow.”

“Then it's all of them,” the shopkeeper said, which is not an answer, and the girl knew it, and let it stand.

The girl put her back against the frame and laid one finger on the wall beside her own ear, then stepped away and looked at where her finger had been. It sat two hands above the first mark.

“I was that small,” she said.

“You were.”

“When?”

“The day I opened.”

The girl did the arithmetic and did not like the answer, which was that time had gone somewhere while the shop stood still. She said so. The shopkeeper did not argue, because it was true, and because she had never found the sentence that made it not true.

That evening she opened the ledger to the page for the fiftieth day. She kept the ledger the way she kept everything: two columns and no decoration. The first column she had used since the beginning, seeds that had left the shelf. Fifty this year, or near it, some of them traded for nothing but a story the way the neighbors paid. The second column was for coins. It had a heading and it had a line drawn under the heading and it had nothing in it, all the way down, all the way from the top of the page.

She looked at the empty column for a while.

“You could stop drawing it,” the girl said. “If it's always going to be empty, you could stop drawing it and it wouldn't look so much like a mouth.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because the day it fills, I want the line to already be there.”

The girl came and sat on the edge of the counter and kicked her heels against the wood, which she was not supposed to do.

“Is the shop poor?” she asked.

“Yes,” the shopkeeper said.

“Then why do you keep the sign up?”

And the shopkeeper thought about lying, because the child was small and the truth was shaped wrong for a small person to hold, but she had already spent her whole life refusing to hand people a story in place of the answer.

“Because planted and paid are two different words,” she said, “and I keep count of both. If I only counted the second one I'd have closed in the spring. If I only counted the first one I'd be fooling myself with good manners. So I count them side by side and I let the empty column stay empty and I don't pretend it isn't.”

The girl thought about that, her heels going quiet against the counter.

“Then the empty column is the honest one,” she said.

“No,” the shopkeeper said. “The honest one is that there are two of them.”

That night she took her thumbnail and pressed it into the wood one more time, and there were fifty-one marks in the doorframe. Then she stood back and looked at the row of them the way you look at a row of anything you have made by showing up, and she did not feel proud and she did not feel ashamed. She felt the way the stub of a pencil feels against a wall in the dark: it is leaving a line whether or not anyone will ever come with a light to read it.

The girl, half asleep in the back room, called out to ask whether tomorrow would have a mark too.

“Yes,” the shopkeeper said.

“Even if nobody comes?”

“That's what the mark is for,” she said. “It says I came.”

She left the sign turned to the road, and the door unlatched, and one seed without a price on the windowsill where the girl could reach it, and she went to bed without counting the coins, because there were no coins, and a person can only count a nothing so many nights in a row before it starts counting her back.