On the morning the market committee rejected Neri’s lettering, her blue paint refused to dry. She held the board up to the window, turned it, and watched a fat drop crawl uphill toward the word FERRY.
“That’s a bad sign,” said her brother.
“It’s a sign with wet paint.”
“And a bad one.”
Oren had come to collect the shop’s last ladder. He and Neri had been dividing their father’s things for six months, a slow operation made slower by the fact that their father was still alive and objected to nearly every division. He had sold the shop to them together. Oren wanted to make furniture. Neri wanted to keep painting the street signs that had paid for their childhood dinners. The market committee’s order would have bought her a season to prove that was possible.
She set the board flat. The paint, which had cost more than the committee’s deposit, flowed back into its proper place. Oren did not see it happen. He was finding a reason the ladder belonged to him.
The customer at the door was too tall for the bell to ring above his head. He wore a coat with pockets on the outside and carried a single brush wrapped in butcher paper.
“A trial,” he said. “For the festival work.”
Neri looked at the runny blue. “Who sent you?”
“No one ever sends me. That’s one of my troubles.”
He unwrapped the brush. Its bristles were black, except for one white hair that bent the wrong way. The ferrule was copper, green at the seam. Neri knew good brushes. This was not one.
“Try a letter,” he said.
She dipped it into her own paint and made an R on a scrap of pine. The brush dragged. The leg came out crooked. Then the leg drew itself straighter, taking a fleck of blue from her thumb. It became an R of such calm proportion that she could hear her father saying, with irritating pleasure, There. That’s what I meant.
Oren came back without the ladder. “What happened to the board?”
The rejected sign was dry. Its arrow pointed the right way. Its letters stood clear at twenty paces.
“Trial,” said the stranger.
He asked for three small favors in return for the brush. Neri would make a correction to one public sign on each of the next three evenings. He would choose the sign. She would choose the color. When she asked what sort of correction, he showed her the blank inside of his coat. A pocket hung there, buttoned shut, though there was no lining to hold it.
“A word, at most,” he said.
“Put it in writing.”
He looked delighted. Neri found an order slip and wrote the terms down herself. He signed with a mark that looked like a comma trying to escape the line. At the bottom she added: No person will be injured by the requested work. He read this twice.
“Cuts, burns, broken bones,” he said. “Agreed.”
She should have asked why he had made a list. Instead she watched him sign again.
By noon she had painted four market signs. By four she had painted eleven. When the committee chair returned, he said that he had never doubted her. He had rejected the first board because it lacked authority, he explained, a quality Neri had apparently found before lunch. She took the balance of the order and did not tell him where to put his authority.
Oren lent her the ladder until the festival was over. He wanted it back on Monday, whether she had earned enough to buy him out or not.
That evening the stranger waited at the bakery corner. He introduced himself as Pell, as if she had requested it. He pointed to the baker’s sign: FLOUR FOR SALE.
“Change sale to all,” he said.
Neri climbed the ladder and painted the new word over the old. She used yellow because the baker hated yellow. He had once sent her father back to the shop three times over a yellow stripe. She remembered the wasted afternoons and felt, for a moment, that this made the favor easier. The letters arranged themselves neatly. A woman stopped, read the sign aloud, and called her husband over. They helped themselves to two sacks the baker had set outside for a delivery. Others followed them into the yard.
“Those aren’t theirs,” Neri said.
“The sign says for all. They may think they are.”
The baker came out shouting. Two sacks were already gone. Neri offered to pay him; he told her the flour belonged to another baker across the river and that her money would not get it to its buyer in time. She took her ladder and left before he could ask who had painted his sign. At dawn she tried to put the word back. Her ordinary brush could cover the yellow A, but the stroke sank into the board and yellow showed through again. She put the ladder away before the baker saw her. Her order slip allowed two more.
On the second evening Pell chose the painted notice outside the hall. It listed the stallholders granted space for the festival. He asked her to change MIRA VALE, POTTERY to MIRA VALE, PORTERY.
“That’s not a word.”
“Then you’ll have to paint very well.”
Mira had been Neri’s closest friend at school and remained the only person who would tell her when a painted face looked like a boiled potato. She sold cups with thick handles that did not break when dropped. Neri asked Pell to choose another name.
“The correction is mine to choose.” He tapped the slip in her pocket. “The color is yours.”
Neri used a brown so close to the old paint that the changed letter was nearly invisible. The brush made it perfectly legible. Pell watched until a woman stopped at the notice and read the new word aloud. He buttoned the unsupported pocket inside his coat.
“The first reader,” he said, “is always the difficult one.”
Neri looked at the little flap of cloth. Something underneath it pushed outward, then subsided.
In the morning Mira’s stall was gone. The committee chair said there had been a confusion: porters had the covered bays this year, and a porter named Mira Vale had already claimed the spot. Neri knew no such porter. Mira came to the shop carrying a box of unfired cups, each wrapped in newspaper.
“They told me I entered under the wrong trade,” she said. “I showed them my receipt.”
“What did they say?”
“That the board has been there all week.”
Neri told her about Pell, the brush, and the letter. Mira set down the box carefully. She said nothing for so long that Neri wished she would accuse her of lying.
“Can you change it back?” Mira asked.
Neri had tried at dawn. Ordinary paint had peeled from the board like damp paper. The marvelous brush painted an O, then quietly made it a P again.
“I can take the board down,” Neri said.
“Then take it down.”
They did. By lunchtime a new notice had appeared on the hall door, in the committee chair’s handwriting. It said PORTERS: MIRA VALE. Neri had not put that one there. She found Pell beside the river, feeding white crumbs to black fish.
“You said a correction to one sign,” she said. “That was one sign. Why has another appeared?”
“People make copies of useful things.”
“She’s lost her place.”
“Cuts? Burns? Broken bones?” Pell held out his hands. “She has all her fingers. You wrote it.”
Neri wanted to hit him with the brush. Instead she put it in her pocket and walked to the market committee. She brought the original order slip, her receipt for the sign, and Mira, who insisted on coming. The chair listened. He agreed that the notice might contain an error. Then he pointed to the crowds gathering below the hall windows.
“I can sort it after the festival,” he said.
“The festival is when she sells the cups,” Mira said.
“Everyone sells something at the festival.”
Neri had heard him say nearly the same thing when he rejected her first board. This time there was no brush to make her work persuasive. She showed him the wet brown smear on her thumb and asked him to read the receipt. He read it. He read the altered notice. His mouth tightened.
“I will give her the bay if you find the other claimant,” he said.
They searched the porters’ ledger. The other Mira Vale had signed in a cramped hand under a date that had not yet happened. The final stroke of the name bent into a comma trying to escape the line. Neri laid her order slip beside it.
“The same customer,” she said. “Look at the signature.”
The chair saw it too. A forged application was something he could explain to the committee without mentioning a brush. He scratched out the entry and gave Mira her bay. Neri took the notice home and burned it in the stove. The new one on the hall door kept its strange word, but Mira’s cups went on the shelf beneath it. Customers asked what portery meant. Mira said, “Cups with somewhere to go.” She sold six before noon.
Pell came for the third correction at dusk. Neri had pinned the order slip above her bench. She had underlined the clause about injury so hard that the pencil had torn the paper. It still did not say what she had meant.
He pointed across the square to her best board, the ferry sign. Boats ran until midnight on festival nights, bringing people from the orchards on the far bank. The board showed the landing, the fare, and the last departure.
“Change midnight to nine.”
“There will be people across the river.”
“There are people across the river now.”
“They’ll miss the last boat.”
“Perhaps.” Pell’s pockets rustled though there was no wind. “They might find another way home. I have one.”
He opened his coat. Inside the pocket Neri saw a strip of black water, with a distant light moving across it. She could hear someone calling a name.
“What do you charge?” she asked.
“A small favor. Most people are glad to agree when it gets late.”
He closed the pocket before she could see where the light was going.
Neri understood then what a missing boat would cost him and what it would cost everyone else. She asked whether she could keep the brush if she refused. He said no. She asked whether her signs would go back to the way they had been. He said probably. It was the first word from him that sounded like an honest estimate.
She walked to the ferry board with him. Half the square could see her. Oren was carrying a chair to a customer. Mira had come out with a tray of cups. The committee chair stood under the hall awning, counting coins from a collection box.
Neri climbed the ladder. She held the brush against the painted word. For a moment she could feel the letters wanting to move, the way a horse leans into a hand on its neck. A woman on the square called up, “Is the last boat early tonight?” Pell turned to hear Neri’s answer. So did the boatman, halfway through tying his rope.
“No,” Neri said. “It sails at midnight. Pell asked me to paint nine. I changed the baker’s sign too. That was why the flour went missing.”
The baker was in the crowd. He said several things Neri could not answer. The boatman climbed onto a bollard and announced the last departure himself. Oren read the board aloud, including the midnight hour. So did Mira. A few others joined in, amused at first, then curious about the man Neri had named. Pell checked the pockets on the outside of his coat, one after another. Neri climbed down and passed the brush to him by its handle.
“I can’t complete the order,” she said.
“Then you owe me for the work already done.”
“Send an invoice.”
He stared at her. Neri had the sudden, dreadful sense that he might. But the crowd had begun to argue about the ferry fare, which the board listed a penny too high. The boatman pushed through them to complain. He had been complaining for years. Pell stepped back from the noise, put the brush inside his unlined pocket, and was gone before Neri could decide which direction he had taken.
The ferry sailed at midnight. Neri watched it leave with Oren, who had kept the ladder after all. By morning every sign she had made with Pell’s brush had run in the night damp. The committee chair demanded his money back. Neri returned half and promised to repaint the boards by hand within the week. He said half was an insult. She said it was all she had until somebody bought the shop’s last good ladder.
Oren put the ladder back against the wall. He wanted to know whether she needed him to hold it while she worked. Mira brought her a cup with a handle wide enough for a paint-stained hand. They started with the ferry sign; the boatman checked the fare before Neri laid a brush to it. The first E leaned. She wiped it off before it dried. Oren held the ladder while she marked the spacing again; this time she stepped down to look from the landing before she began the second line.
On Friday Neri took the first installment for the flour to the baker at the corner. He counted the coins and wrote the balance on the back of a torn sack. He had taken down the old sign; he wanted a new one before the next market.
“Yellow?” Neri asked.
“Brown,” he said. “And you will show me the words before you hang it.”
She took a pencil from behind her ear and waited while he told her exactly what he wished to sell.
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