The Unstuck Flap

Nell set the soap tin on the dryer lid and wiped her hands down her overall. She took the pencil from behind her ear, held her other palm out toward the back gate, and pointed Gordie at the back-room doorway with the point.

"Gordie, you wire nothing until I've signed that line in my own hand, and not before. Neil, bring that envelope inside and give it to me over the back-room sill, not across the gate. Winnie, the Maries go on the counter and I'll write them down."

Neil didn't come. He stood on the flags past the bolt with the envelope at the end of his arm and the pen uncapped in his other fist, on the one bit of yard he'd worked out was nobody's.

"I'll hand it over from here, Nell. The sill's inside the box and I don't cross it. Full arrears or a date you're out, and I'll put down whichever you say."

Gordie laid the screwdriver beside her soap tin and left the reel of grey cable alone. Above the back door the last unit sat on its bracket, dark, its loose wires bunched behind it.

"I'll wait on your pencil, love. Line's blank till you sign it, and I wire what's signed, that's all I've got to say on it. Then it's lit and I'm out of your way before the tea."

He was reading the docket. He wasn't looking at Winnie, and Winnie had noticed. She'd put the twist of Maries on the counter herself, before Nell could reach the book, and then planted herself in the doorway between Gordie and his docket with her hand flat on the frame. Coal dust on the paint. Nell would be wiping that later.

"Before Nell signs anything, Gordie, you tell me to my face why you put Dasu's name on this street, here where the box can hear you. Say it plain, then she sits in my front room this afternoon knowing what she's sitting as."

Nell went out to the gate. Neil let go of the envelope the second her fingers touched it. It was brown, her name and the shop's number typed across the front, and the flap wasn't stuck down. He hadn't even licked it. She carried it back unopened, put it on the sill under the soap tin, and held the pencil over the docket line.

"Neil, you've handed it over, and it sits on my sill now, so you'll have my answer from inside. Gordie, you answer Winnie first, because I sign nothing while the box is waiting on what you say."

Neil stepped back a pace, to the far side of the gate, and wrote something in his rent book without looking at the sill. "Whatever's said in there about the name, I'll put it down as said."

Gordie looked up at Winnie's hand on the frame. He kept his own hands still, took half a step toward the box on the wall, and stopped short of it.

"I said it was Dasu because she's the one the street's always gone to, love, and that's what the line asked me. I didn't put her there, I said what I saw. Sign it or don't, Nell, I'll wire what's signed."

Folk said the kiosk shelf held three coins and no more, so whatever you said in there, you said the true thing first. Gordie had paid for his three himself. Nell couldn't have said whether that made it truer or only his.

Winnie didn't budge. She tipped her head at the box.

"That's what the line asked, Gordie, not what you wanted when you fed it your own coins. Say what you meant by it, to me, with the box listening, or Dasu sits at my table as a guest and not as anybody's answer."

A box said it, in Nell's own voice.

*I want that last box lit so Neil goes and I've one less face to owe.*

Nobody turned to it. Gordie had his eyes back on the docket. Out past the gate Neil stood on his flagstone with the pen on the page. Nell's pencil was an inch off the line, and the soap tin sat on the envelope, holding the loose flap down.