Tavi found the oracle putting a price on a saucepan.
“Three pennies?” she said. “It has a hole.”
“In the handle. A useful hole.”
Orra threaded a length of string through it and hung the pan from a nail. Underneath, she wrote Four pennies, with string.
The shop had been a kitchen before it had been a place to ask about tomorrow. It would become a kitchen again when Orra’s niece took it over. Tavi had bought her lunch there on her first day as a glassmaker’s apprentice, before she understood that the woman stirring the soup also sold glimpses of the next day.
She understood the limits now. Orra could open the book on tomorrow, at a time and a place. The visitor had to solve the page’s riddle. Then the page showed one minute of that future, provided the arrangements that led to it stayed the same. It could not say what anyone felt. It would show a shut door, not why somebody shut it.
That had never kept the queue short.
“Last questions at noon,” Orra said. “Then I close.”
Tavi looked at the clock. Half past eleven.
She had brought two pennies, the usual fee, and a folded invitation. Her father had not yet seen it. She had written it on a clean scrap of wrapping paper, thrown it away, and written it again on the other side.
“Will he come?” she asked.
Orra put the saucepan down.
“You know that’s the wrong form of question.”
“Show my room at seven tomorrow evening.”
“And that is the right form with a bad hope inside it.”
“You sell bad hopes by the minute.”
“Among other things.”
Orra opened the book. Its cover was stained with fat. Nobody had succeeded in copying it; away from this kitchen the pages held nothing but soup recipes. Orra was leaving it for her niece, who had decided to keep those. The niece did not want a line of frightened people interrupting every meal she cooked.
Tomorrow’s page had three riddles, each beside a different pot. Orra put her finger on the first.
With a full belly I open my mouth. What leaves me has no feet, rises without climbing, and vanishes when it meets the window.
Tavi looked at the empty stove. “A kettle. Steam.”
“Which answer?”
“Steam leaves it.”
Orra nodded. She wrote Tavi’s address and seven o’clock in the margin, filled the little kettle, and set it on the fire. While it heated, Tavi tried to flatten the invitation on her knee.
Her father had attended every exhibition she’d had as an apprentice. He came early, looked at everything, and told her what each piece ought to have been. Thicker here. A straighter lip. A sensible colour. He was a potter and believed his attention was a gift. At the last exhibition she’d asked him to leave. He had gone before he reached her best piece.
It stood on the windowsill of her rented room now: a bowl so thin that evening light entered through the side. She had wanted him to admire it. She had also wanted not to wait for his admiration before enjoying anything she’d made.
“If he isn’t there,” she said, “I won’t cook all afternoon.”
“You haven’t invited him.”
“He might come anyway. We used to eat together on that day.”
The kettle began to breathe. Orra held the page above its mouth. The paper darkened where the steam touched it, and a patch of Tavi’s room appeared.
She saw the window, her bowl, the little table. At seven, tomorrow, she was sitting with a plate of bread. The other chair was empty. The minute passed with no movement but her own hand breaking a piece from the loaf.
Then the page was a soup recipe again.
Tavi turned it over. Plain paper. She knew it would be.
“There.”
“There,” Orra agreed.
“He won’t come.”
“You saw an empty chair. At seven. With things as they are now.”
Tavi put the invitation in her pocket. “Then there’s no point.”
Orra poured the kettle water into a basin. She had small hands, and Tavi had watched them all winter: serving strangers, opening pages, shifting a person’s future away from the sleeve that would otherwise brush a candle.
“If you leave without sending that, the minute may happen just as you saw it,” Orra said. “If you send it, you’ve changed an arrangement. He may refuse, or come, or still be deciding at seven. The picture won’t answer for the new arrangement.”
“Then show the new one.”
“After you’ve sent it. If you’re back by noon.”
Her father’s workshop was across the market. She could deliver the invitation and return. It would be a sensible use of another two pennies. She reached for her purse.
Orra took the book off the stove and put it on the counter. “You can do that. But do you mean to send him whatever invitation gets you a picture you like?”
Tavi’s father had always offered advice as a question. Orra had a similar talent. She disliked discovering it in someone she trusted.
“Perhaps I’d like one person to stop asking what I mean.”
“Then don’t pay me to look at it.”
Tavi stood. She put the original two pennies on the counter. Orra moved them into the till without apologising for her service.
At the workshop, her father was smoothing the rim of a jar. There was clay on his wrist where he’d pushed his sleeve back. He looked at Tavi, then at the paper she held.
“Is this for your next exhibition?”
“Dinner. Tomorrow. Seven.”
He read it. She had written that she’d cook, that she wanted him there, and that her room and the objects in it were not being submitted for inspection.
His face changed at the last line.
“I’ve never charged you for advice.”
“I haven’t asked you for all of it.”
“You asked me to look.”
“Yes.”
He put down the jar. “Those aren’t different things to me.”
The workshop clock struck twelve. She could hear Orra’s clock across the market answering it a little late.
Tavi had spent her walk imagining an invitation that would make her father smile. This one had not. She left it beside the jar anyway.
“They are to me,” she said. “You don’t have to come. I’d like you to.”
He didn’t answer. She went back to work, where her master made her redo a foot she’d attached badly. She accepted that criticism, which annoyed her more than if she hadn’t.
The next afternoon she bought onions, bread and cheese. She made enough for two, because she still hoped, and ate some standing at the stove, because she was hungry. At seven she sat down.
The chair opposite was empty. She watched the window. Her glass bowl glowed in the low light. This was almost the minute she’d seen, except for the onions and a plate on the other side of the table. She could not tell whether changing an arrangement had made the vision wrong. She could tell that waiting to find out was ruining good food.
She took the spare plate away and ate.
At eight a workshop boy came with a note. Her father’s handwriting sloped hard to the right.
I wasn’t ready to come tonight. I don’t know how to look at work without seeing work to do. I can try Tuesday. Don’t make a feast. Let me bring bread.
There was no apology in it. There was no instruction about onions either.
Tavi wrote Tuesday, seven underneath and gave it back to the boy. After he left she washed both plates. She put the cheese away, but she ate the last warm onion from the pan.
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