Everything Goes on the Scales
Delphine backed her truck to the gate at eight, the way she did every Thursday. Ignatius weighed the load and gave her a price before she’d shut the door.
“Copper’s up. Forty for the lot,” he said.
“Fine.” She counted the money, then nodded at the back of the yard, past the wood and the flat sheets of metal. “And that.”
“Not for sale.”
“You said that in June.”
“It was true in June.”
It was a small square mirror in a metal frame, the size of a book, standing against a bucket. She’d offered thirty, then fifty. He’d never once lifted it onto the scales, and Ignatius weighed everything — one Tuesday, a whole roof.
“Sixty,” she said. “It’s tin, Ignatius. It isn’t gold.”
“Then you don’t want it.”
“I want to know why you don’t.”
He lifted the mirror, carried it into the office, and set it on the shelf above his desk, in a clean square in the dust where it had stood for years, beside a photograph of a boy in a paper hat.
Delphine looked at the shelf for a while, then started the truck.
“Same time Thursday,” she called. “I won’t ask again.”
And she didn’t.