Episode 178 · Until Tomorrow

By late afternoon, Varren was still beside the river in Vatra, with his folded chair against his knee and no room to take it to.

He had walked through the town after Zora went inside the hut. The bakery named in her notebook, a shoe repair shop, the bait shop near the bus depot. Doors, faces, the small absences that offered him somewhere to begin. A woman carrying groceries had needed another hand; he had carried a bag to her gate. She had thanked him, taken it, and gone inside.

That was all. He had been useful for the length of a street.

The night bus left after six. He could be on it with the chair folded between his knees, watching this river disappear behind the window. There were other towns, other reports too small for the front page. He had come to find people who heard what nobody else heard. So far he had found ducks and a woman who measured water.

His thumb moved over the knuckles of his other hand.

Across the bridge, the bakery’s window was glowing. The bank below it had gone dark already. He could still see the thermometer cord hanging from the pontoon railing on this side, waiting for the morning.

The hut door opened. Zora came out with a cardboard box held against her coat and tried to lock the door without putting it down. Varren stood.

— I’ll take that.

— It’s empty.

He had his hands out already. She put the box in them, turned the key, and caught her sleeve on the handle as she withdrew it. She freed it herself.

— That’s one way of making sure nobody steals it, he said.

— The door?

— You.

She considered the handle.

— I’d be very poor equipment. Difficult to calibrate.

Then the little laugh through her nose, a moment after the joke. She tucked the keys away and took the box back.

— Mr. Halloran lent it to me for the old reports. He wants it back. Apparently empty boxes are how a bakery stays in business.

— You sent them?

— This morning. Like every morning.

He knew she had. He had stayed by the railing until she was inside. It had been an excuse to ask something, and she had answered the question without helping him find a better one.

They crossed the bridge together. Varren carried his chair; she carried the empty box. The river below made the wrong sound for the season, water running freely where frost had closed every puddle in the street.

At the bakery a broad man in an apron was trying to pull a loaded handcart through the side entrance. The cart carried split logs. One wheel had fallen into the worn groove beneath the door, and the other was pressed against the jamb. He could draw it back or pull it forward, but neither movement changed where the wheels were.

— Mr. Halloran, Zora said, I’ve brought back your capital.

He turned, saw the box, and laughed with his head tipped back.

— Put it inside before somebody buys the business.

She went through the front door. The bell rang flat. Varren leaned the chair against the wall and took the front edge of the cart.

He knew where it was caught. A lift would free the wheel. He bent his knees and began to take the weight, careful of what his body would give him now.

— Wait, Halloran said.

Varren stopped with his hands under the rim.

The baker drew a loose log from the stack and put it under the trapped wheel, its cut face sloping out of the groove. Then he pushed the handles toward Varren.

— Back a little.

The wheel climbed the wood. Varren moved sideways to give it room, and Halloran turned the cart through the doorway. Its load followed without either of them having to lift it.

— Thank you, Varren said.

Halloran planted the handles on the floor.

— For letting you move my firewood?

— For the warning.

— I’ve smashed enough fingers on that door. No reason to start on yours.

He picked up the loose log and put it on the stack. Varren had reached to help before the man asked, and had nearly put his hands where the cart would crush them. The knowing had offered him a job. It had not told him how to do it.

Zora returned through the side passage. She had put the box away and unfastened her coat. Behind her was a curtain, and beyond it the warm smell of the ovens.

— This is Varren. He believes my thermometer.

— The thermometer doesn’t need believing, Varren said.

— Neither does the river, she said. We’re both doing rather badly without it.

Halloran brushed flour from his wrist and offered the hand.

— Halloran. I bake bread. It rises. Nobody’s sent a man to tell me it doesn’t yet.

— Give them time, Zora said.

The baker laughed again. Varren shook his hand, then searched the man without intending to. Warm room, working hands, a woman whose jokes he liked, wood enough for the ovens. Nothing presented itself to be supplied.

Varren let the hand go.

— I read your name in her book.

— She wrote down the bun?

— She wrote down what you saw.

— Same as she did. Steam off the water before the sun was up. Didn’t take a certificate to see it.

He stepped back through the curtain with the first armful of logs. Zora moved out of his way, familiar with the passage. Varren remained beside the cart. It would have been easy to carry the rest in after him, to turn an offered hand into a place behind the ovens, something to do tomorrow and the next day.

He had not been asked.

He picked up his chair instead.

— Are you going somewhere? Zora asked.

— I haven’t decided.

— There was a bus in. There’ll be one out.

He had thought the chair told her everything. Perhaps it did. Perhaps she was only leaving him the same room she had left around his answer that morning.

— Where do you stay? he asked Halloran when the baker came back.

— Here. Above the ovens. You’d boil.

— I meant where could I stay.

— Ah. That’s cheaper than a new bakery.

He wiped his hands on the apron.

— Shoe repair shop, up the street. There’s a room above it. Ask him, not his wife. She’ll tell you everything wrong with it before she names a price.

— And he won’t?

— He’ll tell you after. You’re buying the same room either way.