The Seed Shop

(day thirty-four)

The man who came in this afternoon had his money folded the way people fold money when they mean it.

He had heard about the line. Not from the jar man, not from the receipt in the coat pocket, but from somewhere further out, which is how I knew the line had gone past its four people and kept walking without asking me.

“You keep a seed,” he said. “Sealed. In the packet. The one nobody chose.”

“It's on the shelf.”

“I'll buy it.”

He said a number. It was a good number. More than the girl ever paid, more than the rainy-street woman will ever pay, and I stood there with a cloth in my hand doing the arithmetic a shopkeeper does, which is not a story, which is just a hand tightening.

“It isn't mine,” I said.

“You keep the shop.”

“I keep the shop.”

I set the cloth down and made myself say it slowly, because it was true and true things come out fast and cheap if you let them.

“He didn't leave it to be sold. He left it because I had a pocket. And a price is a label, and a label is a promise made before the seed has done anything. The minute I write a number on that packet it stops being for the ones nobody chose. It becomes for whoever can pay. That's not the same seed. I'd be selling you the paper.”

He laughed, not unkindly. “You'd rather have the packet than the money.”

“I'd rather the packet stay the packet.”

He tried another door, the way a man does when the first one is a wall.

“Then sell me the page. The ledger. People pay for proof of a thing that moved without them.”

“The page isn't a story. It's a receipt. You can't sell a receipt. The receipt is what's left of the thing after it happened somewhere else.”

He looked at me for a while. Then he folded his money back along its old creases, which is a thing you only notice if you have watched someone decide you are not a shop they need.

“Someone will pay you eventually,” he said at the door.

“Probably.”

“You'll take it.”

“I don't know yet,” I said, and that was the first true thing I said all afternoon, so I let it stand.

He left. The bell did its small job.

The girl came in an hour later with mud to her wrists and read the page before she said hello, because that is what we do now.

“You didn't write the number,” she said.

“There was no number to write. He wasn't buying a story. He was buying the seed, and the seed isn't mine.”

She thought about it the way she thinks, which is with her hands, turning a leaf over.

“Write it anyway,” she said. “The refusal.”

“Why.”

“Because if you leave it blank you'll tell yourself it was free.” She wiped her palms on her coat. “It wasn't free. You paid the number he said. Put it down or you'll forget the price and start thinking you're a person who doesn't want money. You want money. You just want it to come in the right door.”

So I opened the ledger to the page and in the right-hand column, under traveling, I wrote:

refused — cost: the number he said.

The pen did not hesitate. That is the part I keep turning over. My hand wrote a cost without shaking, and the left column still has nothing in it, and the shop is open tomorrow, and the sealed packet is still on the shelf, still for the ones nobody chose.