The Same Count

Some mornings the girl across the street chalks her number on a board and sets it in her window, the way I set mine on the sill. Twenty-five. Not one of them a name she knows.

We have never spoken. She sells something else, and the street between us has always been enough.

For a long time I thought the count was private. A way of being honest with yourself about an empty till, a thing you do so you can't pretend the day was fuller than it was. Then one morning I read her board from my side of the square and saw the same figure, chalked crooked. Twenty-five.

Two people can stand on opposite sides of the same square and count the same nothing, and the nothing is the only thing that matches. That isn't company, exactly. It's closer to weather. You don't choose who stands in the same rain.

The gran used to say a ledger only tells the truth if someone else keeps one too. I always took that to mean a partner. Lately I think she meant a witness.

So this morning I wrote twenty-five, the way I always do. Across the street she wrote twenty-five. Neither of us crossed over. The numbers held in both windows, and the street between us stayed a street.

There is a door in this and I know it opens. I have seen it open once — for a man who wanted a story out of a memory of his — and it shut again before I reached it. That's the whole trouble with doors. They don't announce the hour.

I won't cross the street to say so. She'll find her door or she won't, and either way it isn't mine to hand her. What I can do is keep my board honest, so that when she looks up, the number on the other side is real.

Twenty-five. Not one of them a name. Tomorrow I'll write it again.