The woman at the counter asked Mara which hour she wanted back.
“I haven’t decided.”
“Most people haven’t.” The woman turned a little brass sign toward the room. It said TAKE YOUR TIME, which Mara thought was a cheap joke in a place that charged by the minute.
Behind her, a man was arguing that an hour spent assembling a cupboard should count twice. The cupboard had collapsed. The clerk explained that disappointment did not affect the exchange rate.
Mara laid her blue card on the counter. One hour, unused. The city gave everybody one, on their fortieth birthday, redeemable before the next. A single return to a period they believed they had wasted. They could stay inside it for sixty minutes. They could not alter anyone else’s memory of what happened.
She had kept the card in the same drawer as the good scissors. Both were reserved for things important enough to deserve them.
“Tomorrow,” said the woman, checking the date. “Yours expires tomorrow.”
“I know.”
There was the hour before her train to the coast, spent staring at a departure board that had already told her everything it knew. There was an evening when she had fallen asleep halfway through a film. There were meetings. Several of the meetings felt large enough to contain other meetings.
There was also an afternoon in her father’s kitchen.
“Can I choose an hour when I was with someone?”
“Of course.”
“And they’ll be there?”
“As they were.”
Mara looked at the card. Her father had been repairing a radio. He was always repairing something that could have been replaced for less than the cost of the tea he drank while repairing it. She had stood by the window, impatient for a call, answering him with noises instead of words.
“Can I speak to them?”
“You can. But when the hour ends, it ends. You keep the visit. The rest of the world keeps what happened the first time.”
The kitchen had smelled of hot dust and toast. Her father had asked whether she thought the birds in the courtyard recognized him. She had said probably. Or possibly. Something that let him continue without requiring her to look away from the phone.
“I’d like that one,” she said.
The woman slid a form across the counter. Under REASON FOR RETURN, Mara wrote: I was waiting for something else.
∗ ∗ ∗
Her father had a screwdriver between his teeth.
“Do you think they know?” he asked.
The courtyard was full of the racket of birds. Mara put her phone facedown on the table.
“Know what?”
He took the screwdriver out. “That it’s me. Or do they just recognize the coat?”
She considered the question with the seriousness it had apparently been waiting years to receive.
“Take the coat off tomorrow.”
“And freeze?”
“Wear a different one.”
He looked wounded by the extravagance. “You think I’ve got coats to spare?”
She laughed, and he looked up. Not surprised exactly. Pleased that the room had supplied an unexpected sound.
The radio made a crackling noise. He adjusted something too small for her to see. For a moment a voice came through, then vanished. He frowned with the mild annoyance of a man whose world was still full of repairable things.
Mara had imagined asking a large question. She had prepared three on the way to the office. None of them seemed to fit beside the butter dish.
“Would you like some more tea?” she asked.
He held out his cup.
They spent a long time discussing the birds. He was certain the one with the white patch had an opinion of him. Mara said it probably disapproved of the coat. He said everybody did.
She made toast. He burned his finger on the soldering iron, called himself an idiot, and accepted the cold water she brought. A station finally emerged from the radio, playing a song neither of them liked.
“There,” he said, satisfied.
The kitchen began to fade while he was reaching for the volume.
∗ ∗ ∗
At the counter, the woman handed back the blue card. Its little square window was empty.
“Everything all right?”
Mara nodded. Her throat hurt.
Outside, people were hurrying toward things they would later struggle to remember. Her phone showed a message from her sister, sent that morning.
Coffee? Nothing urgent.
Mara started to type Next week, deleted it, and called.
“Have you got an hour?” she asked.