There is room
for another story.

The table came down the hill on a handcart with one wheel smaller than the other. Every seventh turn, its legs knocked against the railings.

Jun had been told to take it to the ferry waiting room. At the bottom of the hill she found the waiting room had been dismantled. Four pale rectangles remained on the quay where its walls had protected the stone from weather.

She checked the delivery label. It was a good label, tied on with proper string. Someone had drawn a small arrow to show which way up a table should travel.

Across the road, a man stood in the doorway of a clock shop eating a pear with a knife.

“Where did they move the waiting room?” she asked.

“They didn't.”

“Then where do people wait?”

He considered this. “Mostly upstairs.”

His name was Orren. His shop contained nine clocks visible from the street, and Jun could not find two that agreed. One had a blue face and no minute hand. Another was keeping excellent time, although for somewhere else.

“Could I leave it with you?”

“You could. But then I'd have a table, and you'd still have a delivery.”

Jun disliked him briefly. She was paid by the delivery. The last tram uphill left at six; its driver did not recognise the other eight times in Orren's window.

Between the shop and the landing stood a glass roof on iron posts. Three of its panes were amber, two were clear, and one was the ribbed glass usually found in bathroom doors. A woman on a stepladder was fitting a seventh pane into place.

“Put it here,” the woman said. “Under the dry bit.”

Jun moved the cart. Rain had begun to freckle the table's wrapping.

The woman came down. Her name was Mara, and the ladder belonged to her brother, who would want it back before learning what she had done to its top step. Together they lifted the table off the cart. It had one short leg. Mara folded the delivery label twice and put it underneath.

“I need that,” Jun said.

Mara took it out again. The table rocked.

For a while they stood with one hand each on the table, holding it level.

Orren crossed the road with a sliver of pear wood. He knelt, fitted it beneath the short leg, and rose with difficulty. Jun pretended not to notice the second attempt.

Under the wrapping, the tabletop was pale at the centre and dark around the edges. There were little burns in the grain. At one end somebody had carved a diagram of a boat. Beneath it, in smaller letters, was an instruction: THIS END TOWARD THE WATER.

They turned the table.

Mara went home and returned with a chair. Orren brought two stools, one with a cushion that had once been red. Jun sat on the handcart.

The rain strengthened. Water ran through the missing pane and fell in a straight line beside the table. Mara watched it with the expression of a person revising an estimate.

“The waiting room used to have a stove,” she said.

“This isn't the waiting room,” said Orren.

“I know. I miss the stove.”

At a quarter to six, by the clock Jun had decided to believe, a station porter came down the hill carrying a canvas sack. He asked whether anyone had seen a room to let. His sister was arriving with her daughter; the three of them would not fit above his shop.

Mara knew a room. The roof leaked. She had hoped to mend it before mentioning it to anyone.

“How much does it leak?” the porter asked.

She looked at the narrow waterfall beside the table.

“Less than this.”

He sat down. His name was Ilan. From the sack he produced a loaf, a jar of something green, and an envelope whose address he had been trying to make sense of all afternoon.

TO THE PERSON WHO OPENS THE ROOM ABOVE THE RAIN. MORROW QUAY.

“Might be yours,” he said to Mara.

“Might be a joke.”

They left it unopened, beneath the jar.

Jun should have gone. Instead she took the knife Orren offered and cut the loaf into four unequal pieces. She gave herself the smallest, then exchanged it for a larger one when nobody was looking. Mara was looking, but made no comment.

Beyond the landing, the river was the colour of the underside of a spoon. The ferry had stopped coming in the spring. Its timetable was still nailed to a post, furred at the edges, with the final departure washed into a grey thumbprint.

Ilan's sister would come by train. He explained this twice, although nobody had asked.

Then a bell sounded from the water.

It was a small sound, easily mistaken for a spoon against a glass. Orren put his pear knife down. Mara turned toward the landing. Ilan stood so quickly that the red cushion fell into the rain.

They waited for a second bell. None came.

Up the hill the tram driver rang his own bell, considerably louder.

“I'll miss it,” Jun said.

“Yes,” said Mara.

Nobody told her to stay. That made leaving harder, in a way she would have resented if she had had time to think about it.

She tied the empty cart to the iron post and ran.

At the corner she looked back. Ilan had rescued the cushion. Orren was reading the envelope without touching it. Mara had cut the remaining heel of bread in half and set one piece at the empty place.

Jun still had the delivery label. On the tram, with a pencil borrowed from the driver, she crossed out WAITING ROOM and wrote GLASS ROOF, BESIDE THE LANDING.

In the box marked RECEIVED BY, she wrote three names.

The driver wanted his pencil back. She gave it to him before the next stop.