Seed 45 — The Stand at the Road
The shopkeeper carried the stand outside before the light.
It was waist-high, hinged at the top, a shelf inside and a tin nailed to one side. She set it where her ground met the road and weighted its feet with two flat stones so the wind could not tip it. Then she pinned a paper to the lid.
The girl read the paper over her shoulder.
Packets, one coin each. Coin in the tin. Take the one you want. Nobody counts for you.
You won't be here, said the girl.
I'll be inside, said the shopkeeper. Or asleep. Or writing. That's the whole point of a stand. It can sell when I'm not standing at it.
The man came down the road on his way to somewhere and stopped at the paper. He read it twice. He always read things twice, as if the second reading were a person he could argue with.
Someone will walk off with them, he said.
Maybe, she said. Then someone will have taken one. That's more than the window ever managed.
He looked at the stand, then at her, the way he looked at weather he did not trust.
And if the tin stays empty and the packets go anyway?
Then I'll know the price was wrong, she said. Or the paper was. I'd rather know that than keep counting days.
He went on down the road. The stand stood.
The first morning she went out early and opened the lid and counted. Nothing. Every packet where she had left it, the tin cold and empty.
She stood there longer than the count took.
The girl found her at it.
You're checking, she said.
I'm opening, said the shopkeeper. That's different.
It isn't, said the girl. But go on.
The second morning there was one coin in the tin. Small, slightly bent, the kind of coin a pocket has worn soft. One packet gone.
She did not know who.
She had kept the shop for years and never once sold a thing without seeing the hands. Coins came across a counter. Now a coin had come out of the night, and she had nothing to hold but the coin itself.
The girl came and looked at it.
You don't know who, she said.
No.
Does that trouble you?
It did, said the shopkeeper. Then I remembered the chair. I spent a whole day learning I couldn't tell a person who stops from a person who comes in. This is the same lesson in different clothes. I can price a thing and never learn the name of the one who paid, and the thing is still sold.
That's a strange comfort, said the girl.
It's the only kind I can afford, she said.
The fifth morning there were two coins and one packet gone and a folded paper left at the back of the shelf where the packets had been.
She opened it. No name. One line, in a hand she did not know.
I read the whole sign. This is the part I wanted to keep.
She read it once. Then twice, the way the man read things.
She put it in the ledger, under the old count that said five read to the end, one sat down, zero came in, and below that she wrote the first number the road had ever given her.
One. Somewhere out there, in the dark, without her.
The girl came at dusk and found her still at the ledger.
You're smiling, said the girl. At a number.
Not at the number, said the shopkeeper. At the road. It wasn't empty. I'd been treating it like a wall.
She closed the lid on the stand for the night and left the tin out, and went in, and slept, and the shop worked on without her in the dark the way a seed works under soil: slowly, and without asking to be watched.