Chapter 1
The Bunting Out of the Box
The bunting lived on the third shelf in the stores, in a hat box that had never held a hat.
It came down once a year. Like a held breath, let out on a schedule.
Brenda used the steps this time.
She had not needed them at fifty. She needed them now. She noted the fact the way she noted everything, and set it aside.
The box was pasteboard, soft-cornered from thirty years of lifting. SUPPER, someone had written on the end, in marker gone the color of weak tea.
Below that, in pencil, a different hand: do not wash.
She carried it to the mending room.
She set it on the long table, under the north window.
The morning had the brittleness of a day that would burn off by ten. The hall still held October in its bones, the way old buildings do before the first real fire of the season.
Flat gray light came through the glass: light that told the truth about a color instead of flattering it. A south window will call a dishwater cream a white and mean no harm by the lie.
She trusted the north window the way she trusted very little else in Renfrow. Two commissions in her working life had turned on a room's exposure, and she had been right about both.
She lifted the lid.
The bunting unfolded in one long accordion, panel into panel. The whole spine of it smelled of pasteboard, and the tissue laid between the folds, and, underneath that, faintly, of the building itself.
No damp. She checked for damp first, every year: the back of her hand pressed into the creases, patient as a diagnosis.
The third shelf had earned its reputation. She had moved the box there her first autumn back, and never mentioned it to a soul.
Forty-one panels. Cotton, plain weave, each one a shallow triangle the length of her own forearm, strung the length of a cotton tape rebound at least twice.
Cream, rust, cream, rust, down and down. The rust had gone thin on the window side. It kept its color on the side that faced the room, the way curtains fade on the sun's side and nowhere else.
Four women, she guessed. Or one patient one, sitting down in a year when a thing like this got sewn rather than ordered from a catalog. Hand stitching at the tape. Machine hems on the panels: the practical calculus of one sewing machine and forty-one triangles to get through it.
The tape end held the proof, chain-stitched by a hand that had done this before: Renfrow Grange 1953.
She laid the first ten feet flat and started down it.
This was the part of the job she liked. Knew she liked, which is a different animal from enjoying a thing without watching yourself do it.
Her hands moved along the folds and stopped only where a fold wanted stopping at. A hem coming loose at one corner. A tape ring worked half free. Two panels gone thin enough to show their own weave against the window, not damage, exactly. More a slow forgiveness the cloth extended to itself, one it would go on extending long after she had stopped checking.
She catalogued each fault and moved past it.
Go the whole length first. Let an object finish saying what it has to say. Mend the first flaw you meet and you are not restoring the thing. You are arguing with it.
Forty-one panels take a while to argue with.
Arnie arrived around the second ten feet. He folded himself against the table leg in the three stages he always used, the way a dog settles when he has decided the day is going to be long.
"Forty-one," she told him.
He lifted his head. He considered her, then considered the box, in case the box might yet resolve into food.
He put his head back down with the resignation of an animal disappointed by boxes before.
Four folds past the middle, her hand stopped.
For a full second she did not know why.
She went back two panels. She came forward again with her eyes on the window glass rather than the cloth, the way she read a fabric when she did not yet trust her own hands to be honest with her.
It was a cream one.
She had already had her fingers on eleven of the twenty creams in the run, and this one did not answer the way the others had. Smoother. Not softer: smoother, the specific smoothness of a cloth that has never been washed forty times and pressed by eight different sets of hands.
Her thumb crossed it and came away with nothing to hold. On the panel beside it, her thumb caught, faint as a held breath, on cotton that had actually lived.
She turned it toward the light.
Under the gray of the north window the two panels sat shoulder to shoulder and refused to agree on a color.
She had walked past that disagreement every September for two years. Never once seen it.
The old cream leaned toward the inside of a walnut shell. This one leaned toward blue. A colder white, one that would read colder still under the big lights in the main room, where every color goes a little wrong anyway.
She turned the hem over.
Machine-stitched. That proved nothing on its own. The rest were machine-hemmed too. A different machine, though. A different thread.
The thread was the part that told on it: it sat up on the surface of the cloth instead of settling into the weave, the way thread behaves when it has been chosen to outlast the fabric rather than to match it.
The stitch ran shorter by a hair. The corner turned in a single pass instead of the two the old panels took. Fast. It held less well, and it was exactly the shortcut a person takes making one of a thing instead of forty-one.
She held it up by two corners and let it hang. It hung wrong.
None of the year in the box was left in it, none of the fold's memory. It came out of her hands flat and stayed flat, hanging there under the north light and announcing, with no particular shame, that it was new.
Brenda set it down.
She stepped back a foot farther than the looking required, and looked anyway.
A panel tears. A panel meets a candle, or a child, or forty patient years, and somebody replaces it out of whatever is nearest to hand. No rule anywhere says the whatever has to match.
The hall's whole history was a long line of people doing the practical thing with what they had in the cupboard. Thirty years of telling insurers which part of an object was original, and which part was somebody's grandmother being sensible in 1974, had taught her that nine times out of ten the answer disappointed nobody but the man who had already paid, believing otherwise.
So: a replaced panel. That, and only that.
She counted in from the tape end. Seventeen.
She wrote 17 on the back of the rental sheet and looked at the number a moment, unable to say what she meant to do with it.
"That one's not right," she said.
Arnie got up. He left, and came back with the rope toy clamped sideways in his jaw, like a fish he was pleased with. He dropped it at her foot. He stood over it, and turned his eyebrows up at her, one and then the other.
"Not now."
He gave her what he clearly judged a fair interval, then lay down on it, defeated by her indifference rather than persuaded by it.
There was nobody else in Renfrow she would have said that sentence to.
The other twenty-four panels took her to half past ten and yielded nothing worth the word discovery.
Two more worked-loose rings. One hem. A mark near the point of a panel that turned out, on inspection, to be honest rust off a nail somewhere, old, stubborn, the kind of stain that surrenders to patience and a good bright day or does not surrender at all.
She wrote the small faults under the seventeen.
She refolded the bunting along its own creases, panel to panel, the way a fold left a year in cotton stops being a fold and becomes the memory the cloth keeps of itself.
She made tea in the kitchen.
She carried it back through and let it go cold on the corner of the table, where the usage return had been waiting since Monday.
One page. Four numbers, due by month's end: rentals, hours, bodies through the door, and how many of those bodies the form called county residents, as if the Grange ran some kind of shuttle in from elsewhere.
The first three lived in her rental book. They cost her nothing.
The fourth was a guess she made fresh every year, and had not once been asked to defend.
Two hundred and forty. That was the figure she had entered for last year's supper, the largest single number the sheet carried by a wide margin.
Three weddings, the seniors' lunch, the polling station, and nine meetings of one committee or another did not come near it, stacked together. Take the supper off that page and the Grange became a building forty people used, occasionally, for reasons of their own.
Gil Pruitt kept the same page.
Four years of it, in a folder he had brought to a June meeting and set his hand flat on, twice, while he made his case. She had sat in that room.
The folder had done the arguing. His voice had only supplied the room tone around it.
She had understood him before he finished the sentence. So, she suspected, had everyone else at the table, and nobody had said so out loud, because saying so would have been rude to a man only doing arithmetic.
She filled in the three certainties.
The fourth she left blank, something she had not done in two years running, and set the pen down across the sheet, where she would have to see it before she left the room.
Out in the main hall, somebody had stacked the folding chairs eight high again.
She could hear Andy running the buffer over the floor, in the long straight passes he had worked out for himself back in the spring. A sound like a tide that never quite reached the room.
She considered going through to check his lines and did not. The floor belonged to him now. He was better at it than she was, and telling a person a thing they already knew was the surest way she knew to make them stop being good at it.
The bunting went back into the hat box, tape end up.
Seventeen sat four folds down. She could have found it with her eyes shut, now.
She put the lid on. She did not put the box back on the third shelf.
If anyone had asked, she would have said it would be wanted again inside the week, and there was no sense carrying a hat box twice for the sake of tidiness. It would even have been true.
She stood a while with her hand flat on the lid anyway.
She carried the steps back out to the corridor where they lived. She set them against the wall, in the pale patch thirty years of steps leaning there had worn into the paint.
Then she went to find out what Ingrid had done with the ticket money.
