Half a Life

Saffi came up the cliff stair on the first windless morning after the mid-hot, which was the only kind of morning on which anybody sensible climbed it with a full pack, and she arrived at the shop door with salt dried white along the seams of her boots and the look of a woman who had counted every one of the six hundred and some steps and would have liked to say something about them.

"Eight hundred," said Tobin, who was mending a sail on the bench outside and had watched her come all the way up.

"Six hundred and forty-one," said Saffi. "I counted them twice, because the first time I thought I must have made a mistake. Is this the reading shop?"

Senna was inside at the long bench with a strip under the window lens and a slate of half-finished numbers beside her, and she heard the question before she saw the woman who had asked it. She looked up. In the doorway stood somebody a little older than Linn, broad in the shoulder and brown in the face, with her gray hair cropped as close as a fisher's and a heavy coat of oiled wool that was much too warm for the season. There was no strip at her collar. Senna noticed that first, the way she noticed most things first now, and was ashamed of it a moment later, because the woman had seen her notice and was smiling about it.

"No coat brand," Saffi said, pulling the collar open to show the plain stitched seam beneath. "Nobody on the Sound wears one. We'd rather be cold honestly. You'll be the reader, then. You're younger than they said."