The camera stays on the desk. Jasper sets it there at seven, lens down, and lays the recorder beside it with the switch pushed to off. Then he covers both with a folded sock, which is a stupid thing to do, and he does it anyway. The sock is gray wool, and it makes the pair of them look like something he has buried.
He hasn't slept. Four hours on his back, with the eighth sheet pale on the wall and Alan's voice running its small circuit through his head. *Find me the crack.* Around three he got up and turned the wall to face the plaster by taking the tape off one corner of each sheet and letting them hang from the other. They still hang that way. Seven names and an eighth list, nodding in the draft from the window.
The phone lies in the drawer under the bed. Marlow's two hundred and eleven messages sit inside it, unread, patient as dogs.
Outside, the morning has put a skin of ice on every puddle in the lane. Jasper's breath goes ahead of him. Smoke stands straight up from three chimneys, and from the corner of the green comes the smell of Bart's first loaves, a warm brown smell with a sour edge, and under it the cold iron smell of the pump.
"Jasper Cole goes to ask a favor," he says, low, to the frost.
The sentence hangs in the cold, and he stops. Then he goes on, because the sentence ended on its own and the next one has to come from somewhere. He tries one in his head. *I want to learn something.* It sounds like a line from a mission statement. He tries another. *I want to stand in a room where nobody needs me to produce anything.* That one sounds true and also like a quote, and he drops it in the ditch with the first.
Biscuit meets him at the corner of the green. The dog comes out from under a porch with a dead leaf stuck to his ear, falls in at Jasper's left knee, and keeps pace with the air of an escort who has been paid in advance.
"You were out late," Jasper says.
Biscuit sneezes.
"Delphine says you came home at midnight smelling of the road. She says it like a diagnosis."
They pass the grange. A man on a ladder is scraping the lettering off the sign above the door, and a younger man holds the ladder and gives advice. Neither looks down. Outside the seed library a row of wooden flats stands in the frost with nothing in them, waiting for a season, and past them the road bends toward the low brick building at the bottom of the green, where the window is full of paper.
Wren's door is already open.
She stands in the doorway with a rag in one hand and her sleeves shoved to the elbow. Her forearms are black to the wrist, and a streak of the same black crosses her cheekbone, where she pushed back a curl. The rest of her hair has come out of its knot at the left side and hangs in a coil against her neck. She watches him cross the last twenty yards with her head tilted and her weight on one hip, the way a person watches weather come up a valley.
"He heard you before I did," she says, and nods at the dog.
"He's the one who knows the way."
"He knows the way to everything." Her eyes go to Jasper's hands. They stay there a moment. "No camera."
"It's under a sock."
The corner of her mouth moves. "Why a sock?"
"I didn't have a better idea."
"Is the other thing under the sock too?"
"The recorder. Yes." He holds out both palms, front and back, like a man at a border crossing. "I have hands. That's what I brought."
"They look soft."
"They are soft."
"Good." She wipes her own on the rag, which makes them no cleaner. "Soft hands learn quick and quit early. What do you want, Jasper?"
It is the first time she has used his first name. He lets it go by and then catches it late, the way he catches a step in the dark.
"I want to watch you work," he says. "Not for the piece. If I think of the piece, I'll send it away. I'll leave the notebook outside if you want. I wouldn't mind being told to stand in a corner."
"You'd mind."
"I'd mind, and I'd stand there."
She considers him. Behind her the shop breathes out a smell of oil and warm metal, and under it a sharper note like a struck match held under a lemon. A motor hums inside the building, low and level, and a belt slaps the air in a slow count.
"Corners are for people who watch," Wren says. "I don't have the room for people who watch." She steps back from the door and holds it wide with her hip. "I have work. If you stand still long enough, I'll give you some."
***
The shop is longer than it looks from the road. It runs back from the window in one room, brick on the left wall and plaster on the right, and the ceiling is high enough to hold a loft stacked with paper in brown wrappers. Light comes in from tall north windows set above the benches. It is gray light, even and without shadows, and every object in it looks drawn rather than lit.
The press stands in the center like a piece of furniture a church would own. It is black iron with a gilt line along the flywheel, a clamshell machine with two great jaws, one holding a flat bed and the other a flat plate. A belt runs from the flywheel up to a motor bolted to the wall. At the moment the belt turns and the jaws stand open and the whole thing idles, a patient animal with its mouth propped. Jasper has measured it against a truck in his head and lost count of the units.
Along the left wall, wide, shallow cabinets climb to the ceiling, each drawer labeled in a square hand. *10 pt Caslon Roman. 12 pt Caslon italic. 18 pt Bell. Ornaments. Rules.* One drawer says only *mistakes.* Under the windows runs a bench of scarred pine, and on the bench stand cans of ink with their lids tied down with twine, a tin of kerosene, a jar of brushes, and a heap of rags the color of a thundercloud. Everything has a place. The place for the broom has a nail, and the nail has a pencil outline of the broom.
*Like Hollis,* he thinks, and then, more quietly, *no, like her.*
"Boots," Wren says.
"Boots?"
"There's a mat. Wipe them. Floor's oak, and the oil never leaves it." She is already across the room, bending over a long, flat table covered in paper. "Biscuit, not on the stock."
Biscuit has one front paw on a ream of cream-colored sheets. He considers the instruction, withdraws the paw, and turns two circles on a patch of rag rug beside the stove. The stove is a small iron barrel with its door cracked, and it ticks the way Hollis's does. In a corner by its flue, a wooden box labeled *Kindling* holds bent sheets and offcuts, and Jasper looks at it for a second longer than he means to, because every sheet in it has a line of ink across the top.
He wipes his boots.
"Apron," Wren says, and tosses one without looking.
It is canvas, stiff as a board, and it smells of linseed and old coffee. A long brown stain runs down the bib, and the strap has been mended twice in two kinds of thread. Jasper loops it over his head and ties it behind, and the strings come out unequal.
"My mother's," Wren says. She has turned and watches him fail at the knot. "She wore it thirty years. She'd have told you the stain is a map of Tuesdays." She crosses the floor, takes the strings from his fingers, and ties them with two quick pulls. Her hands are rough and smell of kerosene. "Don't ruin it."
"I'll try not to."
"Trying isn't the instruction. Don't ruin it."
"I won't ruin it."
"You will. Do it small." She steps away. "Come here."
She leads him to a standing cabinet near the window, waist high, shallow, with a single wooden tray the size of a card table and sectioned into a hundred compartments. Each compartment holds a heap of small gray bars, and the bars shine.
"This is the case," she says. "Upper case is the top, where the capitals live. Lowercase is at the bottom. That's the reason for the words." She reaches into a compartment and lifts out one bar between finger and thumb. "Sort."
Jasper bends. It is a slug of metal no longer than the first joint of his finger, and at one end it carries a letter, raised and backward, a tiny mirror of an *e* made of lead and tin. The edges are clean. She turns it once in the gray light, and it leaves a thin line of dark on her fingertip.
"That's the face. The letter's on the end of the body. Hold it like this." She turns it so the face points up and a small notch on the side points toward him. "That's the nick. It faces you when you set. If the nick's down, the letter's upside down in the stick, and you'll never find out until the paper tells you."
"Why a nick?"
"So you can feel it in the dark." She sets the *e* on his palm. "Close your hand."
He does. The metal is cooler than he expected and heavier. It weighs about as much as a good coin.
"My mother cut her thumb open on a sort when she was nine," Wren says. "Her father set the nick that day with a file, so the next child wouldn't have to look." She takes the *e* back and drops it into its box, where it lands with a faint click. "It's a small kindness. They're all small kindnesses. Most of printing is that."
"Who files them now?"
"I do. Every time I find one that's smooth." Her thumb passes over a grooved side, and Jasper sees a row of tiny nicks along the metal's flank, scored in different decades by different hands. "Come. I'll show you the stick."
The composing stick sits on the bench beside the case. It is a steel tray with one open end and one fixed and a sliding knee at the other side that can be locked at any width. Wren sets the knee to the width of her palm and tightens a thumbscrew. She picks up the stick in her left hand with her thumb along the inside.
"Left hand holds. Right hand sets." She reaches without looking and plucks sorts from the case, three, four, five, and drops each into the stick in a rapid, tidy click. "Left to right, upside down, nick toward you. You read it backward and upside down. It takes a month before it stops hurting."
"A month."
"To stop hurting. Not to learn."
She hands him a sheet with a printed line across the top. Four words, plain type. *harvest dance.* Beneath it, in pencil, in her square hand: *Saturday at the Grange. Bring a dish and a chair.*
"Hettie Pruitt's cousin wants forty handbills by noon," Wren says. "I had them half composed before you knocked. I'll show you how I set a line. Then you set one."
"Why would you let me touch the handbills?"
"Because they're forty sheets of paper, and I have a great deal of paper." She says it as if it settles the matter. She hands him the stick.
The stick is heavier than it looks. He holds it the way she held hers, thumb along the inside, and the steel is colder than the lead. In front of him the case opens like a map he can't yet read. The boxes aren't in alphabetical order. The *e* sits in the largest compartment at the center, and the *a* sits near it, and the *z* hides in a corner at the top, because Wren's mother put them where she'd reach.
"Find an *h*," Wren says.
It takes him a long time. He scans the lower case twice, left to right, and then top to bottom. His eyes look for a letter, and everything in the case is a letter. All the boxes hold the same small gray ranks, packed together like a crowd of mirrors.
"Don't look at the letter," Wren says. "Look at the shape of the box. You'll learn the boxes by where they sit."
"Where does the *h* sit?"
"Where the *h* sits."
He gives her a look. She does not give it back. He tries again, and this time he lets his eyes slide to the compartment third from the left of the second row, and he pulls out a sort and turns it over. A *b*.
"*b*," Wren says, in the tone of a woman reading from a register. "Try the next box."
"I thought the first one was where you pointed."
"I didn't point."
"It's the sort of thing a person says when she's pointing."
"I'm not pointing." Her eyes crinkle once, and the crinkle goes. "The *h* is two over."
He finds the *h*. He sets it in the stick with the nick up and sees it lie there in the steel, backward and small, a single letter at the end of an empty line. He turns it over once to check the nick. It is up. A flush of competence warms his neck.
"There," she says. "You've set an *h*."
"I've set one."
"Go on. You have seven letters to go."
***
By the time he finishes *harvest*, the light has moved a hand's width along the bench. The stick has a line of type in it, seven letters and a space, and his left thumb aches from holding the knee tight. He has dropped an *a* twice. It rolled off the bench and bounced across the oak, and Wren, without looking up from the ink she mixed, said "Left of the stove" and was right.
"Read it," she says.
He holds the stick up to the window and tilts it. The letters stand in a row like soldiers in a mirror. He reads backward from the right edge. *t-s-e-v-r-a-h.* It makes a word if he reads it right to left and flips every letter in his head, and nobody ever in his life has asked him to do that on purpose.
"It says harvest."
"Does it?"
"It does."
"Read me the second letter."
He looks. "*a.*"
"Upside down or right side up?"
He checks the *a*, then the next letter, then the one after. All the nicks face him. All the faces are right. He glances at her, and she watches him with her chin on her fist.
"They're right," he says.
"I know." She lets the fist fall. "I wanted to see how long you'd check."
"That's cruel."
"It's accuracy." She nods at the stick. "Go on. Space, then the next word."
"What size space?"
"What size does it want?"
"I don't know."
"Then look at the line."
He looks at the line. He sets a space, a slim sliver of metal no thicker than a coin, and the gap between *harvest* and where *dance* will begin looks too wide to him. He takes the sliver out and puts in a thinner one. Now the gap is too narrow. He puts the first one back.
"Try the third," Wren says, and sets a hair of brass into his palm. He drops it between the first spacer and the *t*. The gap looks right at once. It looks like a person standing in the right place in a room.
"How do you know?" he asks.
"I don't." She shrugs, a short one. "I ask the line. It tells me when I get close."
"The line tells you."
"The way a loaf tells Bart when it's done. If you press and it springs back, it's done." She makes a small gesture with two fingers. "Don't write that down."
"I'm not writing."
"You were going to."
"I was going to remember it."
"That's different." She reaches over his shoulder and straightens a sort with the tip of her smallest finger. "Remembering is slow. You'll like it."
He sets *dance*.
The *d* takes a long minute. It is one of those letters that looks like four other letters, a *b* to anyone who isn't paying attention and a *p* to anyone who is paying the wrong kind. He picks one from the box, turns it, finds the nick, and sets it with a tiny, satisfied click. The *a*, the *n*, the *c*, the *e* go in without a fuss.
"Jasper Cole sets a word," he says under his breath.
Wren's hands stop on the ink knife.
"He does not," she says, without turning. "Not yet."
It startles a laugh out of him, short and surprised. She still doesn't turn. The ink knife resumes its slow sweep across the glass slab, and a long black ribbon peels off and folds over itself.
"What was that?" she asks.
"A habit."
"The voice?"
"I used to dictate. Every day. A voice in my ear took it down and kept a record. Where I went, what I saw. What I was about to say next." He turns the stick in his hand. "When I'm nervous I do it out loud. It doesn't have an ear now. I should stop."
"Why?"
"It sounds like I'm talking to nobody."
"You are." She scrapes the knife against the slab's edge. "That isn't the worst thing a person can do. Hollis talks to the radios."
"The radios have a good listener."
"They're better than most." Now she looks up. The black streak on her cheekbone has dried to a dusty gray. "Say it again. The sentence. Not the whole thing. Just the end."
"*Sets a word.*"
"Say it as though you've done it."
He thinks about that. In the stick the five letters of *dance* stand in their little rank beside *harvest*. His left thumb has gone numb along the edge.
"Jasper Cole sets a word," he says.
"That's a statement."
"It was a statement."
"No. The first time was a report. Now it's a statement." She lowers her eyes to her work. "Different thing."
He has no answer to that. He sets the line.
***
Wren shows him how to fill the stick to the edge, so every line in a block sits tight against the others. She hands him strips of lead that she calls leading and wooden blocks that she calls furniture. The furniture goes around the type like the border of a field. The whole thing sits in a steel frame called a chase, and Wren tightens it with a key, turning small wedges, four of them, until the form closes and holds. She runs her thumb across the top of the type and nods.
"Lift it," she says.
"By the frame?"
"By the frame."
He lifts the chase. It rises and the type stays where it is, a solid square of backward words, and a small cold thrill goes through his wrists. He sets it on the stone. The stone is a flat slab of marble, and the chase meets it with a click he can feel in his teeth.
"If you hadn't locked it, the line would have fallen out," Wren says. "It's called pi. The whole form comes apart, every letter in a pile, and I'd have you sort it back into the case, one piece at a time. That's the old punishment. Apprentices wept."
"Did you?"
"Once. I was eight." She slides the form onto a long tray. "It took me three days."
"Three days to sort one form?"
"I was a thorough child." She says it with no expression at all, and he has begun to learn that this is when she is funniest. She leans over the stone and studies the form with her hands behind her back, the way a doctor studies a patient. "It's good."
"Is it?"
"It's good for a first one." Her hand comes up, and one finger touches the nick of a sort on the end of a line. "Tight. Level. Nothing sprung. You did it right."
Heat spreads through his chest. A voice that scored every compliment for sincerity has called him brilliant in four languages. Standing beside a table covered in ink, he blushes over the word *tight.*
"Now we ink," she says.
The ink is stiff as putty and the color of nothing, a black so dense it takes the light and gives none back. She works it onto a round steel disk with a palette knife. The disk is attached to the press, and she turns the flywheel by hand once, then twice, until the rollers climb over the disk and pick up a film of black. The film is thin and perfect. It makes a wet sound like a tongue.
"Watch the rollers," she says. "They go over the type once on the way down and once on the way back. Too little ink and you get ghosts. Too much, and the face fills in and the letters blur."
"How do you know what's right?"
"You look at the paper."
"I can't look at the paper until the paper has ink on it."
"Correct." Her eyes don't leave the rollers. "That's the whole trade."
She locks the form into the bed of the press with a clank he feels in his shins. Then she slides the sheet guides into place against a paper stop and lays one cream-colored sheet against them, edges square.
"You feed," she says. "I'll run the treadle. The platen comes up, you pull your hand out of the way, the platen closes. Pull your hand out before the jaws meet."
"That's the whole safety instruction?"
"That's the whole safety instruction." Her eyes flick up, level and dark. "I've never lost a finger. I have, once or twice, pulled out a student's. It's a rhythm. Count it. One, place. Two, pull. Three, the jaws."
"Can I see you do it first?"
"No."
"I thought not."
"It teaches you nothing." She puts her foot on the treadle. "Place the sheet."
He lays the sheet against the guides, left edge and bottom edge, and the paper lies flat as a held breath. The jaws are open and
the form shines black in the lower half of the press. His hand hangs over it.
"Place," Wren says. "Pull. Close."
He places. He pulls his hand away with the paper under his palm for one terrible half second, then lets go. The jaws come together with a deep, flat clap that rattles the glass in the north windows. The platen holds for a heartbeat against the type. It opens.
The best thing he has heard in years is the half second after the clap, when the iron stops and the glass in the north windows quits humming.
"Pull it," Wren says.
He peels the sheet from the bed. It comes away with a tug, as if the metal has taken a liking to it. The ink on the paper shines wet, a crisp black line of words with a bite at each edge where the type pressed the page. The letters stand in the paper like they've been there longer than the paper.
He holds the sheet by its corners. For a moment he doesn't read it. He looks at the black and the white and the little rim of pressed fiber that surrounds each letter, and his mind holds only that, the black and the white, with no voice offering a verdict.
"Jasper," Wren says.
"Yes?"
"You're going to want to read it."
He reads it. He reads it at normal speed, left to right, the way anyone reads a handbill. The words go through him and come out the other side as meaning: a dance, a Saturday. A dish and a chair. His eyes take in every line and approve of each, and he nods at the sheet.
"It's good," he says.
Wren says nothing. She watches him with her hands in her apron pockets and her head bowed.
"It's good," he says again. "It's clear. The spacing is good. I like the italic on the bottom line."
"Read it again."
"I just read it."
"You looked at it. Read it. Aloud. Slowly."
He lifts the sheet and tries again, starting at the top.
"*Harvest...*"
He stops.
"Go on," says Wren.
"Pance."
"Say it again."
"*Harvest pance.*" He lowers the paper and looks at her, and she has lifted a rag to her mouth. Her shoulders shake once. "Oh, God. It says pance."
"It says pance."
"I set a *d* upside down."
"You did."
"I checked the nick. I checked it twice. I checked every one."
"You checked the others." She takes the rag from her mouth, and the laugh is already out, a low rolling sound that starts in her ribs and gets away from her. She has to put her hand on the press to stay upright. "You checked *harvest*. You were so proud of *harvest*. You looked at *dance* and your hand went to the *d* the way it goes to a door handle. You didn't look."
"I didn't look."
"The whole town will arrive on Saturday for a pance."
"A pance with a dish and a chair."
"Bring a dish." She wipes her eye with the back of a wrist and leaves a smear of black across her temple. "Bring a chair, and nothing else. It's a strict dance."
He starts to laugh. It comes up from his stomach, a bad cough at first, and then it unlocks and runs, a big shapeless noise he has not made since he was a boy, and he has to set the sheet down on the bench and brace his hands on his knees. Wren laughs with him. For a minute they cannot look at each other. Biscuit lifts his head from the rag rug, assesses the room, and sets it down again with a long-suffering sigh.
"In the city," Jasper says, when he can speak, "it would have fixed itself."
"The page?"
"Everything. I'd have typed *pance* and the word would have healed before I got to the end of the line. I never saw a mistake. Not once, in six years." He wipes his eyes on his wrist and finds ink there too. "It was always corrected before it reached me. I didn't know I'd stopped seeing them."
"Now you've seen one."
"I've seen one." He picks up the sheet again, holding it by the corner. The ink gleams across the top. *harvest pance.* The *p* sits there, upside down and sure of itself, a small proud letter in the wrong place. "It's the best thing I've ever made."
"It's the worst thing anyone's ever printed in this shop," Wren says. "Except for my brother's wedding invitation."
"What did that say?"
"I'll tell you when I trust you."
"That isn't fair."
"It's printing."
She takes the sheet from him, and as she lifts it from his hand, the wet face brushes the cuff of his sleeve. He feels it before he sees it, a cold slick patch on the cloth. When he looks, a black print of the word *pance* has transferred itself backward onto his wrist, perfect in every serif.
"Well," says Wren. She looks at the sleeve. "That doesn't come out."
"The sleeve was expensive."
"It's a good sleeve." She studies the mirror-word on his cuff, and her mouth does something complicated. "It reads right in a mirror."
"Does it?"
"Hold it up."
He holds up his wrist to the north window. In the glass of the pane, faint against the sky, the reversed print reads *dance*, the *d* exactly where it should sit.
Neither of them speaks. Jasper keeps his arm in the air a second longer than he needs to.
"Spoilage goes in the box," Wren says finally. She carries the sheet to the stove, opens the box labeled *Kindling*, and lays it face up on the heap. It sits there, wet, among bent offcuts and last season's misprints, and the ink on it shines. "It lights the stove. Nothing's wasted. It only changes."
"Doesn't it hurt?"
"What?"
"Burning your mistakes."
"My mistakes keep the shop warm." She closes the lid. "If I kept them, I'd have no room for the real ones."
***
They set the line over, correctly. This time Wren stands at his shoulder while he checks every nick, and she doesn't say a word. His hands, when he reaches into the case, find the *d* by the shape of its box. He holds it up to the light and turns it three times. It's right. He sets it, and he reads the line backward off the stick with his finger moving under each letter. The proof comes out clean.
They run forty sheets. It takes an hour. He feeds them one at a time and counts in his head, *place, pull, close,* and Wren's foot goes down on the treadle at the end of every count. The iron claps. The platen rests. He lifts the printed sheet from the bed and hands it to her, and she hangs it on a line strung across the shop, pinned at both corners with wooden pegs. By the thirtieth sheet the shop looks like a rigging yard, a row of white sails hung out to dry, each one different where the pressure of the platen or the thickness of the ink has changed the bite of the letters.
"They're all different," Jasper says.
"They are."
"I'd have said they were identical."
"People do. Then they hang them side by side." She runs a finger under the edge of a sheet, flipping it a quarter inch to catch the light. "Look at the *s* here. The ink's thick. This one's thin. Here the sheet slid a hair. It's the same page forty times, and it's forty pages."
He does look. He walks the length of the line with his hands behind his back, as she did at the stone, and reads the whole row. The *r* in sheet seven has a smudge at its foot. Sheet nineteen carries a tiny chip in its *e* where the sort has a flaw. The one in the middle has a pale square near the corner where a gnat landed on the paper, died, and left its print in the fiber.
"There's a bug on this one," he says.
"There's always a bug on one."
"You leave it?"
"It's part of the page."
He thinks of the data wall in the city, of forty thousand variations of a headline tested against a mood-matched audience and the winner printed on every screen in the same identical pixels. He keeps the thought where it is and lets the shop's warmth close over it.
Wren fills a kettle from the pump at the back and sets it on the stove. It takes the heat in an instant, a hiss and then a low murmur. She takes down two cups, one thick white mug with a chipped handle and one blue enamel tin, and sets the tin in front of him.
"Sit."
"Where?"
"Not on the stock."
There is an overturned crate by the bench, and a low stool beside the stove. He takes the stool. Wren perches on the corner of the long table, one leg swinging, a mug cupped in both hands, and her eyes go over his face as if checking his work. The tea is black and smells of smoke. He drinks it. It tastes of tin.
"You're better at it than you think," she says.
"I set a *pance.*"
"You set a *pance* and then you set a *dance.* That's all anyone does." She blows across her cup. "Most people who sit at my case give up at the *p* and *q.* You found out on your own, an hour in, and laughed."
"I haven't laughed like that in a long time."
"I could tell."
"Could you?"
"You didn't know how." She says it as a note about the weather. "You started like a man testing a stair."
He looks down at the tea. Steam fogs a patch of the enamel and clears. A flicker moves near the north window, a dark shape against the lower pane, and his eyes go to it before he decides to look.
On the sill, behind a jar of brushes and half hidden by a gray rag, sits a small sculpture. At first it reads as a clutter of metal, bits of brass wheel and a bent spring and the black hand of a clock. Then the parts resolve. A heron. It stands on one wire leg with its neck tipped in a long S, made of the minute hands of a dozen clocks overlapped into plumage. The beak is a watch pin. The eye is a jeweled bearing, a speck of red, and it catches the gray light and holds it.
He looks away. The look takes less than a second. When his eyes return to Wren, she has already turned her head and met them.
She says nothing. Neither does he.
The kettle ticks. In the corner, Biscuit sighs. Wren reaches out without looking, picks up the gray rag from the sill, and lays it over the heron the way a person covers a sleeping child. Then she folds her hands around her mug again.
"The tea's strong," Jasper says.
"It's Delphine's. She buys it by the sack and swears it's a blend." Her voice stays level. "Where did you grow up?"
The question comes sideways, and he needs a moment to see that the subject has changed. Heat climbs his neck,
and his shoulders drop. "A city. A tall building. Twelve floors up, in a hallway of identical doors."
"What did you do there?"
"Grew up."
"That isn't a thing a person does. Not by itself." She tilts her head. "What did you do on a Sunday?"
"I..." He stops. His first answer is *worked*, which is true and which he can hear her not believing. The second is *went to brunch*, which is a lie of the sort that has a polished surface. "I checked in with my companion at nine. It gave me a schedule. Usually a run, then a cultural event, then a social. A gallery. A reading. It picked something each week that matched my profile."
"Did you like them?"
"They were good."
"That isn't what I asked."
"They were well chosen."
"Jasper."
He makes himself say it. "I don't know whether I liked them. They were always the right ones."
Wren lets that lie between them for a while. A drop of water falls off the line of drying sheets and lands on the floor. The press ticks as it cools.
"What do you like?" she asks. "Food. Say a food."
"Bread."
"Which bread?"
"Bart's."
"You've been here three days."
"It's good bread."
"Delphine pushed it into your hand last night. Mr. Pell told me." She says it without any edge, and her eyes crinkle. "That's being handed. I asked what you want."
His mouth opens. In the city a list would surface now, a green line ranked by predicted satisfaction, and his mouth would say the first item and be right. Here, a blank. He pictures a table, a plate, a window, a street. All the plates belong to someone else's idea of dinner.
"I used to like peaches," he says.
"Used to."
"When I was six. A woman on the stair had a tree in a pot. She gave me one. It was warm from the sun and it dripped down my arm, and I stood in the hall and ate it over my shoe." He hears the sentence come out of his mouth and doesn't recognize the voice. "I haven't thought about that in twenty years. I couldn't tell you whether I still like them. Marlow stopped ordering them. I never noticed."
"Who stopped?"
"My companion. It adjusted my diet. Peaches had too much sugar for my morning numbers."
"So you were six, and a woman gave you a peach, and you remember her stair."
"The railing was green."
"What else?"
"The peach had a bruise on one side. The size of a thumbprint. I ate around it, and then I ate the bruise." He laughs, and it comes out wrong. "I've been telling people I don't have a favorite anything. I have one. I just keep it where I can't reach it."
Wren has not moved. She has stopped swinging her foot, and the mug sits still between her palms. She looks at him the way she looked at the form on the stone, with her hands behind her back, checking for spring.
"That's something," she says.
"It's a peach."
"It's yours." She finishes her tea and sets the mug on the table with a small click. "What do you like that's here?"
"Here."
"In Fair Hollow. In this room. Say a thing."
He looks around. The shop stands in its gray north light with its sails of paper drying overhead. The stove ticks. The rollers on the press have a wet shine. He hunts for an answer that might please her, the way he hunts for the line in an interview that will make a subject lean in, and finds the hunt empty. There's nothing to please. Only the room.
"The sound the press makes when it closes," he says.
"The clap."
"After the clap. When the platen holds and nothing moves." He frowns at his own hands. "It's a half second. Everything stops. I want to stand in it."
"That's a lull."
"Is it?"
"It's called the dwell." She says it low. "Every printer has one. Mine's the way the paper comes off the bed. That little tearing sound." She puts two fingers to her lip, a quick, private gesture, and takes them away. "I didn't know I'd tell you that."
"I won't print it."
"You'll remember it."
"Yes."
"Good." She looks at him for a long moment. "That's different."
Outside, a cart rattles past on the lane, wooden wheels over frozen ruts. Somebody calls a name, and somebody answers. The stove ticks.
"Wren."
"Yes?"
"Can I ask you something that isn't for the notebook?"
"You can ask."
"What does the heron do?"
Her face goes still. For a moment he thinks he has broken something, and the old reflex climbs in his chest, the urge to repair it with a smile and a quick joke, a voice at the temple suggesting the apology. He holds it down and lets the silence run.
"It doesn't do anything," Wren says.
"It stands there."
"It stands there." She stares at the gray rag on the sill. "I take the broken ones, the clocks nobody can fix. I take them apart and the pieces sit in a jar, and some nights I put them together a different way. It doesn't tell time. It doesn't hold paper down. It isn't for anything."
"Does anyone know?"
"You." She breathes out through her nose. "And Biscuit."
"I'll leave it under the rag."
"I'd rather you did." She wipes her palm on her apron. Then she looks at him straight, and the dark in her eyes is warm and level. "That's the only one I've ever shown anybody. And I didn't show you. You looked."
"I looked."
"You looked at it for less than a second and then looked away. I've watched a lot of people look at it." She picks up his empty tin and turns it in her hands. "Most of them keep looking."
"It looked like the kind of thing that belonged to somebody."
"It does."
He holds out his hand for the cup, and she gives it to him, and their fingers touch around the rim. Neither of them draws back for the length of a breath. Her skin smells of kerosene and tea, and the ink on her thumb leaves a gray crescent on his knuckle.
"Who are you," Wren asks, "when nobody's watching?"
It comes quietly, in the same voice she used to ask about Sunday. He holds the cup. His first answer is a name and a job. His second is a list of things Marlow said about him, with a satisfaction score. His third is a peach.
None of them fits in his mouth.
"I don't know," he says.
"That's an honest answer."
"It isn't a good one."
"It's the first one that wasn't built for me." She takes the cup from his fingers and sets it on the bench. "Go and wash. There's a pump. The soap is gray and it will take half your skin. Then come back, and I'll teach you how to clean the rollers."
"Is that a lesson?"
"It's a chore." Her mouth lifts at one corner. "It's also the best part."
He stands. His knees ache from the low stool, and the ink on his wrist has gone dry. At the pump he works the handle three times, and cold water spills over his hands and runs black into the basin. He scrubs. Under the grime his skin comes up pink, and in the creases of his knuckles a gray line stays, as stubborn as a vein.
Behind him the lid of the kindling box thumps. When he turns, Wren has it open. She holds a single sheet by its corner, the first sheet, the one he printed, and for a second he thinks she means to burn it.
She looks at it. Her thumb passes once across the upside-down *p*.
Then she lays it flat on the bench, face up, under the window, and weights it at the corners with four leads. She doesn't speak. She opens the stove door with the poker and feeds in a bent offcut instead.
"The stove's low," she says.
Jasper dries his hands on the towel. The water in the basin settles from black to gray. Beyond the line of white sails, the tall windows go from slate to silver as the sun finds the lane. Biscuit lifts his head. Down the road, the sound of a fiddle starts, six notes climbing and tipping over at the top, and a woman's voice calls out a boy's name.
He crosses the oak floor in his stained apron. The press waits with its mouth open. Wren holds out a rag, and he takes it.