When the potter went down the coast for the autumn fair, she left her house with Marit, who lived two doors up and had keys to half the lane.
"Water the fig," the potter said. "Feed Tobb. Don’t fire anything. I’ll be back when the fair’s done." She said the last part the way people say it when they don’t know which day that will be.
Marit was good at houses. By the second morning she had found everything that needed finding, except for three things.
The fuse box had one switch with no label, and she didn’t know whether it should be up or down. The pear tree by the kiln shed had a split limb hanging over the path, and she didn’t know whether the potter would want it cut or saved. A letter had come with a seal from the guild, and she didn’t know whether it was the kind you send on or the kind that can wait.
She wrote the three questions on a card and put it in her apron.
On the third morning she took the card out, read it, and copied it onto a fresh card, because the first one had gotten damp from the fig. Under the questions she wrote: still not asked.
On the fourth morning she did the same. The card wasn’t damp. She copied it anyway, and wrote: still not asked, and under that, in smaller letters, fair runs through the week.
Tobb, the potter’s dog, watched her do this from his place on the mat by the front door. He was old and yellow and slept with his chin on the threshold, and he did not get up when she came in, and he did not get up when she left.
By the end of the week there were seven cards in the apron. Each one had the same three questions. Each one had a slightly longer note at the bottom, about the fair, the weather on the coast road, whether the fuse switch had done anything yet (it hadn’t), whether the pear limb had split further (a little).
On the eighth morning Marit sat down at the potter’s table with the new blank card in front of her, and found she couldn’t remember why she was copying them.
The questions hadn’t changed. Nobody was going to read the cards until the potter came home, and when she did, one card would do. The copying didn’t move the potter any closer. It didn’t make the questions more askable. As far as Marit could tell, it did one thing. It gave her hands somewhere to be at the start of each day, in a house where there was almost nothing to do.
She looked at Tobb. Tobb had not checked on anything all week. He hadn’t paced. He wasn’t waiting, exactly, the way she had been waiting. He was just lying where the potter would come in, which, if you thought about it, was the only place the waiting could do any good.
Marit took the seven cards out of her apron, kept the cleanest one, and pinned it to the inside of the front door at the height of a person’s eyes. Then she watered the fig and went home.
The next few mornings were stranger than she expected. She came in, saw the card on the door, and felt the old pull to take it down and do something with it. She didn’t. She fed Tobb. She left. The house stayed a house without her tending the questions, and the questions stayed questions without her tending them.
The potter came home on a Tuesday, sunburned, with a crate of unsold bowls and a ribbon for the one that sold. She stepped over Tobb, who thumped his tail twice, and saw the card.
"The fuse," she said. "Down. Always down. If that one’s up the kiln will trip the whole lane." She frowned at it. "Good thing nobody touched it."
"The pear limb?"
The potter went out and looked. The limb had come down on its own in the night wind on Sunday, onto the path, harmlessly. "Well," she said. "That one answered itself."
The guild letter was a notice about dues. It could have waited a month.
So of the three questions, one had mattered a great deal, one had dissolved, and one had never been urgent at all. Marit couldn’t have told which was which in advance. The copying hadn’t told her either.
Later, walking home, she thought she might be making too much of it. Maybe the copying had kept the questions alive in her. If she’d written them once and forgotten them, perhaps she’d have flipped the fuse on some bored afternoon just to see. She couldn’t rule that out. It’s hard to know what a habit is protecting you from when the thing it protects against never happens.
But she noticed it was the one pinned card that had done the asking. It hung where the potter would walk in. The other six had only been for her.
The next autumn, when the potter went down the coast again, Marit wrote her questions on the second morning and pinned them to the door before she left. Then she sat for a while on the step with Tobb, not doing anything, which turned out to take more practice than the houses ever had.
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