Two Cups on the Table

I found my mother’s flat key in the lining of my coat. We had until Monday to empty her kitchen. From the bench, the arch over the road framed a street where nobody knew her, and for a minute that seemed like a good place to go.

Nell turned the key over in my hand. A blue thread was still caught in its teeth. Mum used to tie it to her apron with whatever thread was left in the machine. We let one tram leave without us.

I put the claw of the hammer under the shelf. Nell heard the wood complain and fetched the small screwdriver from the tin by the stove. Under a coat of paint there were two brass screws. They came out clean.

On the underside someone had written the height of a child in pencil. It was my height at eight. We laid the shelf across the two chairs, writing side up, and ate our bread off it.

At the bend an old woman was shaking crumbs from a red tea towel. She heard my mother’s cups knock together in the bag. ‘Did you keep the one with the chip?’ She had bought it after breaking its fellow twenty years ago.

She put a paper twist of caraway seeds into my pocket. My mother, she said, had liked them in warm potatoes. I had lived with her for eighteen years and hadn’t known that.

By morning I had drawn up a list of things we needed for the flat. New chairs. White paint. A bigger window, perhaps. Nell put my pencil down beside the two circles left by last night’s cups.

The train to the furniture warehouse ran once an hour. We could hear it from the kitchen. By the time it left, I had taught Nell the card game my mother played with me on wet Sundays. She was beating me.

I bought fine paper to wrap the print for my sister. The ribbon loosened on the tram and the frame slid out in her lap before I could make a speech. She ran a finger along the water.

‘She used to tell you that story too?’ I asked. My sister nodded. For the rest of the ride she held the picture on her knees where we could both see it.

My sister wanted a photograph before the kitchen was cleared. I kept angling the little mirror to hide the pale line on my cheek. Nell stepped into the frame with a smudge of blue paint across her nose.

When the picture came out, we were both looking at the smudge. My sister ordered three prints. She wanted the one in which I had forgotten to turn my head.

From the hall I heard Nell pull out a chair. The drag of wood, then the little scrape as she set it straight, told me who was there before I had even turned my key.

She had brought the chipped cup back from our flat. It was on the table in the last of the light. I took my coat off and hung it on the peg I had meant to unscrew.

In the drawer was a letter from my father with a sketch of my mother’s braid down one margin. Halfway through the letter the braid turned silver. Halfway through the drawing his pen had run out and he had borrowed a pencil.

My sister and I read it sitting on the floor. When we reached the end, she took out her own pencil and wrote the date on the envelope. I was glad one of us had thought of it.

My sister brought her daughter to choose something to keep. The child picked up the chipped cup. She tested it left-handed, frowned, then turned it a little until the handle fell against her fingers.

‘For pencils,’ she decided. On the paper tablecloth she drew the river from the picture and carried the line right across the fold. We packed the cup with the pencils already inside.