The second bargain was for a neighbor whose name Daniel didn’t know until he knew it, the curse-memory supplying the name “Mr.
Calloway” and the detail that Mr.
Calloway had arthritis in both hands and the arthritis was getting worse and the winter was going to be hard.
Mr.
Calloway did not ask for a deal.
He asked for help getting his groceries up the stairs, and Daniel carried the groceries up the stairs, and at the top of the stairs Mr.
Calloway mentioned that the pain was worst in the mornings, the particular worst of a man who couldn’t open his own hands before noon, and the hum under Daniel’s sternum had stirred, and Daniel had said “I’d like the pain to ease,” and the hum had answered, and the pain had eased.
The price did not come for two days.
Daniel walked around Storybrooke in the two-day gap and tried not to think about the price, and the not-thinking was a pressure at the base of his skull that was worse than the thinking would have been.
The kit had charged him a shoelace for held rain.
The kit was going to charge him something for eased arthritis.
The kit was going to charge something worse than a shoelace, because the second price was always worse than the first price, because the kit was a counterparty that knew how to escalate.
On the third day he walked into the diner and his coat tore.
The Brooklyn coat, the good coat, the coat with the memory-list inside, caught on the door handle and tore along the left lapel, a clean rip, a rip that was exactly the wrong shape for a door handle to make, the particular shape of a thing that had been decided in advance.
He stopped in the doorway with his coat torn and his hand on the rip and the hum under his sternum thrummed once, a single note, a receipt.
The receipt said: the pain has been eased.
The receipt said: your coat is torn at exactly the moment you needed to look right walking into the diner.
He went to his booth.
Mrs.
Hennessey was not there.
Mrs.
Hennessey was at the doctor’s, someone had told him, a checkup, nothing serious, and the someone had been Mrs.
Beasley, and Mrs.
Beasley had looked at his torn coat and said nothing, and her silence was the particular silence of a woman who had noticed something and was filing it.
Mrs.
Beasley crossed the diner to his booth.
She moved slowly, the slow of a woman who had slept well for the first time in a month and was still getting used to the feeling of rest.
She sat across from him without asking.
“Your coat is torn,” she said.
“I know.” “That’s the coat you were wearing yesterday.
The one with the missing button.” She looked at the rip along the lapel, and her eyes were the eyes of a woman who had been watching the world closely for a long time and had learned to notice when things didn’t add up.
“That rip didn’t come from a door handle.
Door handles don’t leave tears that clean.
My husband worked in a tailor shop before the mines.
I know what door-handle tears look like.” Daniel said nothing.
He looked at his coffee.
The coffee surface was still, a dark mirror, and in the dark mirror the reflection of the diner ceiling was the same as always, the water stain in the shape of the same nameless country.
“You did something,” Mrs.
Beasley said.
“Yesterday.
On my porch.
With the chalk.
The fog didn’t come last night.
The fog has come every night for a month and last night it didn’t come.
I slept.
I dreamed about my son and when I woke up I remembered his face.” Her voice caught on the last word, the particular catch of a mother who had been afraid she was losing the image of her child.
“What did you do?” “I don’t know what I did,” Daniel said.
It was a lie.
He knew exactly what he had done.
He had drawn a protection ward and sacrificed a button from his Brooklyn coat and the ward had held and the button was gone forever.
But he could not tell her that.
He couldn’t tell her that he had made a deal with something he didn’t understand to protect her from a fog she couldn’t explain, because the telling would break something, and the something was the fragile arrangement by which cursed people survived the curse: not knowing.
Mrs.
Beasley looked at him for a long moment.
Then she reached across the table and touched the torn lapel of his coat.
“This happened because of what you did for me,” she said.
It was not a question.
“I don’t know how I know that.
I know it.” “Maybe,” Daniel said.
“Then I’m sorry.” She withdrew her hand.
“Whatever it cost you.
I’m sorry.
And I’m grateful.
And I don’t know which of those is worse for you, but I think it might be the gratitude.” She stood up and went back to her own booth, and Daniel sat with his cold coffee and the torn coat and the weight of a woman’s gratitude, and the weight was heavier than the coat had ever been.
He sat with his cold coffee and tried to remember a song.
It was a song his mother had sung to him when he was small, a lullaby, a song about a bird and a tree and a moon that was made of something soft.
He could remember that the song existed.
He could remember that it was the song his mother had sung.
He could not remember the tune.
He could not remember the words.
He sat with his cold coffee and tried to hum the first bar and the first bar wouldn’t come, and the hum under his sternum was quiet, the particular quiet of a counterparty that had already received payment.
The coat was torn.
The song was gone.
The neighbor’s arthritis was eased.
The price was two things, and the two things were thematically linked, and the thematic link was the neatness.
That was the word that kept coming back to him.
Neatness.
The shoelace had been neat — a broken lace for held rain, a small inconvenience for a small working.
The torn coat and the lost lullaby were neat in a different way, a storybook way, the particular neatness of a fairy tale where the price comes in threes and the third price is always the worst.
He sat with his cold coffee and looked at the torn lapel and thought: the prices aren’t random.
The prices are chosen.
The prices are chosen by a mind, or a logic, or a system that has been doing this for a long time and has developed a sense of irony.
The irony was the neatness.
The neatness was the signature.
The signature was the proof that the kit wasn’t a machine.
The kit was an author.
The kit was writing him into a story, and the story had a shape, and the shape was: prices that fit the wish like a coat was supposed to fit, prices that made a kind of horrible sense, prices that a reader would nod at and think, of course, that was always what it was going to cost.
He did not name the pattern yet.
He was not ready to name the pattern.
Naming the pattern would make the pattern true, and the pattern was already true, and the difference between unnamed-true and named-true was the difference between a suspicion and a diagnosis, and he wasn’t ready for the diagnosis.
He walked home in the torn coat.
The coat was still his coat.
The rip was clean.
He would need to sew it, and he didn’t know how to sew, and the laundromat probably had a sewing kit, and the sewing kit would be a cursed sewing kit, and the thread would break at exactly the wrong moment because the kit had already priced it.
He wrote on the inside of the coat: “Calloway.
Arthritis eased.
Price = coat torn at door + her song.” He underlined “her song” twice.
The pen was dry.
The coat was getting full.
The ledger was growing, and the third price was coming, and the third price was going to be worse.
⟦ THE LEDGER HE CANNOT READ ⟧ STRUCK — a neighbor’s hands.
The arthritis, quieted.
TAKEN — the coat, torn at the door.
And a lullaby about a bird and a moon.
STILL OWED, nothing.
Two entries closed.
The neatness of the pairing wasn’t an accident and was not a courtesy.
⟦ THE LEDGER CLOSES ⟧