THE LAST REPAIR TICKET

“Who certified the place was unstaffed?” Miriam asked.

“The evidence is an exported ledger of service transactions. There were none.”

Beside her Vernon had spread out the yellow copies on the bench like little chairs for a meeting of dolls. The woman in the bicycle jersey had made room for Alma and Daniel to work together, and Alma was clicking her tongue with concentration as she bent another piece of wire. In the front window an old man sat reading the newspaper, waiting to have his watch put on a wider strap.

“Which ledger?” Miriam asked.

“The flagship’s.”

She closed her eyes. “And who made sure all the customers that wanted repairs went across the street before a ticket was opened?”

Caroline did not know. Perhaps they would find someone who did.

Back across Dean Street, Claire was no longer at her station. She had left her badge on the blue velvet tray. Under it lay a folded note in the handwriting Miriam had seen on the business card, and inside the note was an address in a town fifty miles away.

If you want to hear my father talk, the note said, you should come today. He’s still good in the afternoons.

Chapter 5 — A Very Good Employee

The house at the address belonged to a retired dentist called Hugh Mercer. You could tell this by the little ceramic tooth screwed to the mailbox, or by the trays of dental picks still in their original wrapping for sale at fifty cents apiece on the porch. Beside them was a dish of change and a sign that read PLEASE TAKE EXACTLY AS MUCH AS YOU NEED. It was either a radical approach to home economics or the work of somebody who knew every resident of the block.

Claire came out to meet Miriam. She had changed out of the blazer and into a blue jumper with a little pink handprint low on one sleeve. Without her badge she looked about five years younger.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” she said.

“I brought somebody.”

Daniel was helping Vernon out of the back of the car. Alma had stayed in the shop with Ada and Miles with her father’s permission. She was making a pull for her dad’s lunchbox zipper, the little brass tab of which had broken off sometime in the Reagan administration, according to him.

Claire looked frightened again. “My father’s had a stroke. You can’t all sit around him asking questions.”

“Then we won’t. He can decide who he wants to see.”

He wanted to see everybody. Inside, he was strapped into a chair with a tray under his elbows and a fat orange pencil stuck through a loop of elastic near his hand. From the tray he took a sheet of paper on which he had written, in wavering block capitals, I CAN HEAR YOU. His second card said COFFEE PLEASE. There were a great many others in a stack supported by a bowl of sugared almonds.

“So that’s what became of old Hugh,” Vernon said.

The man in the chair gave a peculiar snorting laugh, part indignation and part delight. He tapped a card and turned it over. ABOUT TIME YOU CAME.

“You never invited me.”

Hugh thought about this for a moment. He turned back to COFFEE PLEASE.

Daniel offered to make it. He found the cups where Claire told him to look. In a few minutes, freed from having to explain what his face meant at every instant, Hugh swiveled his eyes to Miriam and raised his eyebrows.

“I’m Josephine’s daughter. My name’s Miriam.”

He closed them briefly. Claire observed that this meant yes most of the time except when he had decided the question wasn’t worth answering. Miriam said that was a distinction anybody could use occasionally.

There was a big bay window looking onto a brick wall about six feet away. Claire had hung bird feeders in the intervening space, and a series of scratched marks on the wall made it look as though the birds were recording their salaries there. Hugh followed Miriam’s gaze to the feeders. He reached down with his good hand and switched on a small electric water pump. Water fell in a trickle into a saucer. In an instant, from absolutely nowhere, three finches appeared.

“That was you?” Miriam asked. “We had one of those at the back door of the store. I used to try to catch whoever made it come on.”

His eyebrows went up: got you.

Daniel brought the coffee. Vernon sat on a low ottoman where Hugh could easily see him. Claire told her father what had happened in the store that morning. She told it quickly, and she gave herself the worst of it. When she got to the rolled stool she blushed. Her father looked down at his tray until she was finished. Then he moved his pencil, with some pain, toward a sheet of clean paper.

W H Y, he wrote.

“You know why, Dad.”

He smacked the point of the pencil twice on the H.

“You told me when you worked at Bell that it was only the people who bought something that kept the doors open. You used to come home talking about the drawer people. Always something in a drawer they thought belonged to them, always some occasion when they needed it back. You said if somebody had time to come in looking for things that weren’t worth any money they had time to come back another day.”

Hugh’s neck reddened above the collar of his clean shirt. With great deliberation he wrote again. I SAID WHY TODAY.

Claire set down her coffee. “Because it was the last day. They told us this was the last day people could come in on the old books. Tomorrow anything left went to the new company and there’d be a different procedure. If I could get to the end of this morning without another dispute, my bonus got approved. I get a clean quarter if I have no unresolved complaints.”

“You’re paid for what you keep out of the book,” Miriam said.

“I’m paid twelve dollars more an hour on a clean quarter.” She drew a fingernail over the pink handprint on her sleeve. “Seventeen people work there on some version of it. I have a mortgage. I have this house too because my father gave it to me when we thought he was going to need to go away. I don’t know how much you pay for a night sitter for him in your head, but whatever you think, double it.”

“I don’t pay for one in my head,” Miriam said. “I did pay for one for my mother.”

“Then you know.”

Miriam nodded. “When did you start using the bonus as a reason to make decisions about kids and women who look like me?”

Claire’s face went bright red. Hugh leaned back in the chair. The long muscle in one side of his face pulled a little. From outside came the steady trickle of the fountain.

“I knew you were with her,” Claire said. “I told you I thought that.”

“You saw two people with brown skin at the same counter. You decided we were together. You decided I’d dressed up to do something to you. You made about six decisions before you ever got around to the one that had money attached.”

“I didn’t know anything about you.”

“You didn’t try to find out.”

There was a crack of porcelain. Hugh had put one of the little plates down so hard a corner had broken off. He held out his hand to show he hadn’t hurt himself and then picked out a card from near the bottom of the stack. UPSTAIRS OFFICE.

Claire said, “Dad, nobody’s been upstairs with you since January.”

He made a sound of furious objection. Down the hall, a dog in an adjoining house answered him. He pointed at his daughter. Then he pointed at Miriam. Then he flung his arm toward the hall in a gesture that needed no translation whatsoever.

The upstairs office had once been a nursery. A strip of wallpaper still clung to the wall behind a bookcase. On it a duck in a sailor hat played the concertina to a dog in an evening gown. There was a tray of dental molds on the desk and a plaque from the Rotary Club bearing the name of Claire’s mother. Her father had been the dentist’s bookkeeper, she explained. The house had been her mother’s. The tooth had come with it.

“What was he doing working at Bell?”

“He was in and out of the shop when he and my mom were first married. Your mother needed someone to run credit accounts. He needed a job. He’s good at looking at columns of figures for hours. Was, anyway.”

At the bottom of a filing cabinet they found three envelopes marked with the letter B. Inside the first were snapshots of early window displays. The second held the missing bits of the yellow receipts from the basement. The third held a packet of time sheets and a cassette tape with a typed label. FOOD FOR FIRE HALL SUPPER, the label said.

Claire’s eyes filled with tears. Miriam thought it might be grief or exhaustion until she saw Claire had started laughing.

“He did this with everything. He thought somebody was going to break in and steal his tapes, so he called them the most boring things he could think of. My graduation is called ADJUSTMENT TO HOUSEHOLD INSURANCE.”

At the bottom of the envelope was a folded pay slip. In the space for BONUS, beside the sum of eight hundred dollars, somebody had written Declined due to unresolved customer claim. The signature beneath was Hugh’s. The date was the very week of Miriam’s mother’s funeral.

They took the envelopes downstairs. Hugh had turned off the pump and the finches had gone. Beside his chair there was now a jug of water full of ice and a plate of sugared almonds with one bite taken out of each. Vernon was trying very hard to pretend he hadn’t been helping.

“Is this what you meant us to find?” Miriam held up the tape.

Hugh turned to a card that said ASK ME A QUESTION I CAN ANSWER.

“Did you make this tape?”

Yes.

“Is my mother on it?”

Yes.

“Did she know you were recording?”

He wrote a word on the clean sheet: HERS.

It took some searching to find the cassette player. It was on a shelf with the Christmas decorations, exactly where everybody keeps things that are needed unexpectedly on a Thursday in April. Claire found batteries in one of the dental pick boxes. They set it up on the coffee table, and for the first minute or two there was nothing but an account of twenty pounds of potatoes and how very hard it was to get flour into the fire hall without carrying it through the ladies’ room.

“You might have to turn it over,” Claire suggested.

Then a voice said, “Well, if that’s all the wisdom we’ve collected on the subject of potatoes, I believe I should probably confess to taking something that wasn’t mine.”

It was Miriam’s mother. She would have known it through a foot of brick. She had been preparing for this all the way from the staircase to the table, yet the first little upward hitch at the end of a sentence was enough to make her feel what it had cost to go fifteen years without hearing it.

“I have Beatriz’s ring,” said Josephine. “Hugh, are we getting this? Can you see the little wheels going around?”

They could hear his younger self assure her he could.

“Fine. I bought it and then I did something I would never advise anybody to do. I used it to make an engagement ring for a woman my partner was supposed to marry.”

The click at the end of the tape was so loud Daniel flinched.

In the chair Hugh had his finger already resting on a card.

OTHER SIDE, it said.

Chapter 6 — The Other Side

On the other side Josephine was sneezing. Someone said bless you. A window scraped up in its frame, letting in the sound of a ball game being played a great distance away. Miriam remembered that sound. There had been a Little League field behind the old fire hall before the medical center bought the land. One year she had learned the rhythms of baseball so completely that she could tell a hit from an error by the direction of the shouting, even from her bedroom three streets off.