THE LAST REPAIR TICKET

In the envelope was also a statement from an account in Margaret’s name. Her inheritance from the dentist, her mother, had been loaned to the workshop through Samuel because Margaret did not care at the age of thirty to be known as the woman with enough money to have her name on a building. The last balance shown on the statement was zero.

It took six weeks, several meetings in rooms with barely functioning window blinds, and the services of a county archivist who had very strong feelings about the preservation of staple holes to establish the complete story. Margaret had released the paid-off loan. The county recorded the release under the name of the private lender exactly as it appeared in the original instrument. When Pike’s estate looked for it under his name they found an index entry for the original option and nothing more. No one had searched the book for Margaret’s release because no one had been paid to look beyond the evidence of a transaction still to be done.

The option on inactivity was a different question, one the parties could have fought about for years. Instead, faced with a roomful of living association members and a business that had performed more than seven hundred repairs in the past year, the estate relinquished it in return for a final accounting. The loan-purchase option lapsed along with Miriam’s financing. The people with the hotel plans chose a piece of land down by the river where trucks had been turning quite comfortably for decades.

Samuel’s estate still owned forty-nine percent of the flagship, and Miriam, who owned the other fifty-one, was still its chair. Her board censured her for signing the consent and required another director to countersign property transactions. She put her own name at the top of the list of people who had approved the bonus arrangement. Peter gave evidence at the meetings. He had known how much people were paid to keep somebody like Beatriz away and was prepared now to say it in a room with people who had done it.

He resigned as manager effective at the end of the next payroll cycle. They could have let him go immediately. Instead, at his own request, he spent his last ten working days sitting at a table by the entrance, reading aloud to customers what had happened to their requests and how they could choose to proceed. The first woman, after he had finished his explanation, slapped the table with her open hand. He sat very still.

“That,” she told him, “was to stop me slapping you.”

“Fair enough,” Peter said.

The second customer brought back a broken little clock for which she had never been able to get a quote. The third wanted to know why they were doing all this talking about how they talked to people while the door still had a step his wheelchair wouldn’t go over. Peter brought out a temporary ramp that same afternoon and stayed late to help fit the permanent one.

Claire did not go back behind the counter. After an inquiry into the earlier incidents, the company ended her employment with her earned wages and paid leave intact. She asked if she might speak privately to Alma’s father. He agreed on the condition that his daughter shouldn’t have to hear it unless she wanted to. Alma chose to come. She carried her bent copper leaf in a little box that had previously held chewing gum.

“I saw you had a repair ticket,” Claire told her. “I took it out of your hand. I gave you a job to do, getting a grown-up, so you’d go away. Then I spoke badly to somebody I thought was with you. You had every right to sit at that counter and I made you think you needed a better reason. I’m sorry.”

Alma thought this over. “Are you just saying it to keep your job?”

“No. I’m done with that job.”

“Are you going to come back there when I come back?”

“Would you like me to?”

“Probably no.”

“Then I won’t.”

It was the end of the conversation. Daniel did not tell her to forgive the woman or make her accept a handshake. Once outside, Alma asked if they could stop for a pretzel. She had been thinking about one for apparently the whole of the apology.

Chapter 10 — For All the Tired Feet

In June, on the anniversary of what the family called the Great Disaster with the Lilies, Beatriz had lunch with Hugh. They met at Price & Daughter because it had a level entrance and a great deal of cake and very little tolerance for people telling them what was good for them. Hugh brought Beatriz the ring. She brought him the matching painting of an orange and a bread knife. He raised his eyebrows at the knife. She explained she intended to cut the cake and wish him many happy returns, since it was his birthday the following Monday and she didn’t know if either of them would be free to attend.

They spent an hour talking about the woman each had known half a lifetime and had only just discovered the other knew. It was quite possible to talk for an hour to someone with a stack of cards and a face that said everything else. By the end of it they were both tired, and Hugh’s sleeve was full of crumbs, and Beatriz had learned something about her husband she hadn’t known in fifty years. He and Hugh had fixed the teeth on the duck’s-head umbrella handle together, back when Mateo was still selling cigarettes. The teeth were a spare set of plaster dentures from the practice. This explained why until he was fully grown her son had been a little frightened to put a hand near it.

In the workshop Vernon pushed the green pen toward Miriam. “Yours,” he said.

She turned it in her hand. “What made you order green, anyway?”

“Your mother said the whole world signed their names in black and blue and look where it got us. She thought a little green might be an improvement.”

It was with that pen that Beatriz signed her instructions. Detach the diamond without damaging the old band and offer it to the family of its first owner. Preserve the half moon if possible. Make the old band round and safe for a young person to wear, though Beatriz would prefer to keep the shallow dent, because it seemed to her a good thing you could still feel the years of somebody else’s hand around your own.

Claire carried the diamond to Elizabeth Pike. It was Elizabeth who sent it back to the workshop along with a photograph of Samuel’s grandmother and a check sufficient to buy two more benches. She wanted somebody to have the use of the diamond as a tool for cutting glass if such a thing were possible. Vernon wrote her back that industrial diamond tools did not generally start life in a lady’s brooch, and asked whether she would object to him selling the stone and putting the proceeds to that use. Elizabeth gave her permission. The workshop bought tools for twenty people.

At the end of the summer a new service desk opened inside the flagship. A brass plaque gave the hours the representative from across the street would be available. Anyone could take a ticket, and the ticket always belonged to the customer. The person at the counter got paid by the hour. The little girl who came on the first morning to ask what it cost to make a copper zipper pull was told how much for materials and how much for time, and asked if she had a particular project in mind.

“I already made one,” Alma told the new associate. “I’m finding out how much to charge my dad.”

From the bench behind her Daniel made a small and theatrical groan. It was the first sound that Miriam heard when she came in, and it was a sound she would be happy to associate with the place whenever she remembered it.

She bought the remaining shares from Samuel’s estate three years later, with earnings from the store and a smaller loan secured only against things she actually owned. On the first anniversary of the purchase she took her son down to the basement to see what could be rescued from the last flood before the bakery made enough money to waterproof the old wall. He was taller than she was by then and inclined to think his mother could profit from instruction on the lifting of heavy boxes. Mostly she let him tell her.

They came up with two albums, a clock case and a bad photograph of a very little boy playing a tree. The photograph had been mailed to Vernon by a shamelessly proud mother and pinned over his bench until it fell down a crack. The boy looked at it for a long time.

“You really did see the play,” he said.

“Four camera angles. Longest performance of any tree I’ve ever seen.”

He slipped the picture into his pocket, an act that became part of the complicated business of pretending never to have cared about a thing while making absolutely sure it wasn’t thrown away.

At the bottom of the last box was the picture with the missing shoe. He recognized the baby immediately. The man who carried her had become the music teacher at his school. The woman still wore her hair the same way, piled up on the back of her head with exactly one piece always coming loose. On a sudden impulse they carried the picture down to the school and asked the custodian if the teacher still had the same room.

He did. There was a piano against one wall, and a cupboard full of instruments that children had sworn never to abandon. The teacher looked at the picture, put on his glasses, took them off again and pressed his thumb gently against the baby's shoe.

“She lives in Oregon,” he said. “She grows pears. I could never get a tune out of her if I gave her a bucket to carry it in. Do you suppose I could send this to her?”

It was a funny thing to be asked by the person actually in the picture. Miriam handed it over. He sat at the piano and played four measures of a tune that he said his wife used to hum on the bus to get the baby off to sleep. Halfway through he lost the notes. Theo hummed the rest. It was one of the songs his grandmother used to sing to him, and in the ordinary way of knowing a thing by heart he had never wondered how she had come to know it too.

Walking back to Dean Street, he asked if there were more pictures with names they could trace. Miriam said there must be a hundred. He thought a hundred sounded manageable if they took the time to get people to help. She agreed, and he made her promise to leave him the work of asking. He wanted to find out what people remembered when nobody important was in the room to give them a hint.

On their first Saturday they found the woman who had borrowed a neighbor’s veil and the man who had proposed by dropping a ring into a bowl of cherries. He admitted that he had forgotten about the pits. They found the bakery apprentice who had never married the person in her photograph and wanted the picture anyway. It was the only one she had of the coat her older sister made her for that winter.

In the shop across the road her mother’s clock kept time on a face which still had no numbers. Miriam had once asked Vernon why on earth anybody would have gone to all that trouble with the porcelain and never put the numbers on. He had said he supposed you might get to a point in your life where you knew what time it was.

She was putting on her white hat to go when a young man came through the front door holding a paper bag to his chest. There was something expensive inside by the way he was carrying it, though it might only have been expensive to him. He looked at the rows of bright cases and the clean aprons of the people standing behind them.

“Am I in the right place?” he asked her.

Miriam pulled out the stool. She turned the brass plate toward him and waited while he sat down. Then she sat down beside him and helped him open the bag.THE LAST REPAIR TICKET