Item 44. Oval wall mirror. Black wood frame, 52 by 71 centimeters. Marked on the back in pencil: I + D, first flat. Slight clouding at lower right. Price undecided.
Iris wrote the label at the counter and walked the mirror into the shop’s front room. Her husband had kept it under a sheet for eleven years. Since he died, she had sold his fishing rods, his second coat, and the chair he insisted was comfortable. The mirror was the last object she had avoided touching. It was heavy enough to require both hands, and lighter than she had expected.
She placed it opposite the window. In the glass, the old green chair stood by the stove. Daniel sat in it with a newspaper open on his knee.
Iris turned. The chair was gone; its buyer had collected it on Tuesday. Daniel’s coat hung on a hook by the stove, the hem brushing the wall. When she faced the mirror again, the chair was empty.
She moved it behind the till. In that position it showed a shelf of chipped bowls and part of the street. She could see no chair. She wrote possibly warped glass under the measurements, though the glass held the bowls straight.
At closing time she carried Daniel’s coat into the storeroom. From there the mirror showed only a dark corridor. She left the light on all night.
Item 44, revised. The glass reflects furniture not presently in the room. No customer should handle it until examined.
Mina came in the next morning to collect a blue lamp. She had bought it on Saturday and spoken for twenty minutes about the room it would light. Iris knew the lamp; she remembered wrapping the shade. She did not remember Mina’s face.
“You went to school with my sister,” Mina said.
“Did I?”
“We met at her wedding. You told me to buy a lamp tall enough to read by.”
Iris apologized. She had been poor at names all her life. Mina laughed and said the lamp was still tall enough. At the door she stopped. “You sold me Daniel’s hat last week,” she said. “I hope that was all right.”
“Of course.”
After Mina left, Iris found the receipt. It bore her own handwriting, the price, and a note: She’ll take the blue lamp Saturday. Iris could recall neither the hat nor the sale. She could recall, with painful clarity, the way Daniel had folded a newspaper to keep one page standing upright on his knee.
She closed the front room for the afternoon. In the mirror Daniel sat in the green chair again. His newspaper was folded at the racing results. She touched the frame. The image trembled, then settled. Iris asked him whether he could hear her. He turned a page. She could not read a word of it.
Her sister Jo arrived with coffee. Iris had called her but could not remember what she had said on the phone. Jo put the cups on the counter and saw the mirror.
“You took the sheet off.”
“I thought I should price it.”
Jo looked into the glass. “The chair’s gone.”
Iris gripped the counter. “You see it?”
“I see the place where it was. There’s a dent in the rug.”
Iris asked what else she saw. Jo described bowls, the street, her own face. No Daniel. Iris let her finish the coffee without explaining. Jo had brought a list of errands they had agreed to do together. Iris couldn’t remember agreeing, though every errand was one she would have accepted. She folded the list and put it in her apron.
That evening she tested the glass. She placed Daniel’s old pocketwatch beside it, waited, and looked. In the mirror he held the watch as if he had just wound it. When she put the watch in a drawer, his hand emptied. When she brought the coat back, he wore it. The objects called up pieces of him with a faithfulness her own mind could not match.
She thought of putting all of his things before the mirror. The little tin of screws, the book he had read twice, the dull scissors he used to trim the wick on the oil lamp. She thought of sitting there until she could see him whole.
The next day a customer brought in a cracked vase for repair. Iris did not repair ceramics, but she knew a woman who did. She reached for her address book. The repairer’s name was missing from it. It had not been scratched out; the page had never held it. Iris had written the name on the shop window in soap pencil a month ago. The letters there had washed away in the rain. She stood with the vase in her hands, unable to tell the customer where to go.
“You sent me to her last year,” the customer said. “On Chapel Street.”
Iris knew Chapel Street. She could picture its bakery and the horse painted above the pharmacy. She could not picture the repairer. The customer took back the vase and left.
Iris covered the mirror. At once she could remember the repairer’s laugh, high and sudden. The name did not return. She called Jo and asked her to come over. This time she wrote the request on the back of Mina’s receipt.
Jo brought dinner and sat on the floor because the green chair was gone. Iris told her what she had seen. Jo asked the questions one asks when a person might be ill: how long had she slept, had she eaten, who could stay with her tonight. Iris answered each one. Then she lifted the sheet an inch and asked Jo to look at the bowl shelf reflected there. Jo looked and said the blue bowl had disappeared.
It stood on the shelf in front of them.
They lowered the sheet together. Jo did not ask for another look.
Item 44, withdrawn. No sale. Jo to drive it to the glazier on Thursday. Coat and pocketwatch remain with Iris.
The glazier had repaired windows for Iris’s shop before. He listened to her request and did not ask why she wanted the silver backing removed from a usable mirror. He said the glass might break and the frame might not survive. Iris paid him to try. She and Jo waited at the bakery across the street. Iris tried to remember the repairer’s name while Jo ate a bun. It still would not come.
When they returned, the frame lay on the bench. The glass had broken along an old flaw. The glazier had saved a plain oval of wood and the small penciled mark on its back. Iris took the frame home. She hung it in the front room with nothing inside it. Through the oval she could see the street, the bowl shelf, and the place on the rug where the chair had been.
Mina came by on Friday for a second lamp. Iris recognized her at the door. She still could not remember selling the hat, so she asked whether it fit. Mina said it sat on a shelf above her kitchen sink. It was too big for anyone in her house. She had bought it because the brim held the shape of a man’s hand.