November 10, 2007
The shop was empty before the display was full.
On Friday morning, Sam's crew had taken the equipment in the order Peter arranged. The cabinet went last. I had expected to feel it leave like a tooth being pulled, but the men wrapped it in moving blankets and carried it so competently that I mostly worried about the narrow turn at the door.
Then the cabinet was on the truck, and the space where it had stood was simply space.
Peter handed over the keys to the lockable drawers and equipment we had sold. Sam counted them, thanked us, and drove away. Nobody said that an era had ended. Peter and I swept the floor because there was dust beneath everything that had been moved.
At Elena's that afternoon, we discovered that the photographs were too large for the arrangement I had drawn. We took one out. The sky did not fall. The remaining pictures had room around them, and people would be able to see the objects without stepping sideways into a shelf of books.
Now, on Saturday, I stood beside Leah's drawing and tried not to straighten the label every time someone entered.
Work We Made Here.
Elena had set out coffee in cups that did not match. Peter wore a clean shirt without Dad's apron. Ruth arrived with a friend and went directly to the supper-card border, leaning close enough to see the imperfect curl she had insisted we keep.
Leah came a few minutes later. She read the label beneath her drawing before she looked at me.
“Reading Together,” she said.
“Yes.”
She nodded and moved aside so someone else could see it.
The first person to repeat the old story was a customer who had ordered invitations from us for years. He studied the winter poster, then smiled at Peter.
“Your father had a wonderful imagination. I remember him showing me that one.”
My body prepared the familiar response before I had decided what to say. A smile. A grateful nod. A small silence in which an error could pass as courtesy.
“Leah drew that picture,” I said.
The man looked at the label.
“Did she? I always thought Arthur—”
“I wrote a leaflet that gave him too much of the credit for the shop's work. We used that description for years. This display is more specific.”
I pointed to Ruth's name and explained, briefly, what she had done to prepare the colors for printing. I said I had set the type. I did not give the customer the story of our kitchen argument or the note in the production book. Those belonged to the people who had lived them.
“Well,” he said, looking at Leah, “it's a lovely piece.”
“Thank you,” she answered.
Nothing dramatic followed. He asked about the paper. Leah told him what she remembered choosing. Their conversation moved into the work itself, where it should have been allowed to go nine years earlier.
I stepped away before I could make their exchange about my correction.
Later a visitor lifted a small camera toward the original. I asked him to leave that piece unphotographed; it was borrowed for this display only, and we had not arranged permission for copies. He lowered the camera without argument. After asking Elena, he turned toward the bookcases for a different photograph, with the borrowed drawing out of the frame.
At the uncertain birds, two people proposed different artists. I told them we had found no reliable identification. One offered to look at an old card collection at home. I thanked her without changing the label.
By noon, Peter was talking to Ruth about a photograph of the workroom. They were laughing at a shelf we had never managed to hang straight. Dad's picture remained beside it, his hands resting on the press. Nobody had needed to take him out for other people to fit.
Leah found me rinsing cups in the back.
“You didn't make a speech,” she said.
“Elena didn't ask for one.”
“That doesn't usually stop us.”
We laughed. It was not the relieved laugh after a crisis, but the smaller one that allowed two people to recognize a habit without having to defend it.
“The drawing comes home next Saturday,” she said.
“I've written it down.”
“I know. I'm reminding myself too.”
She took a towel and dried the cups I handed her. Out front, someone asked Peter about the old shop sign. For a moment I listened to his answer, ready to correct anything he overstated. Then I turned back to the cup in my hands and let him tell what he knew.