Commons warehouse · June 23, 2230 · Afternoon
The blanket came back folded around a loaf of bread. The loaf was old enough to be a weight rather than a meal, and the blanket was wet through one corner. A market porter set the bundle on the Commons counter with both hands.
“Bakery had it,” he said. “They found the paper tucked in the hem.”
The clerk lifted the paper by its dry edge. BLANKET 17. RETURN TO: COMMONS BLANKET DESK. The inventory tag, stitched to the blanket itself, agreed. That was more than he had expected to learn from a piece of paper without anybody's name on it.
“Who left it at the bakery?”
“I don't know. The baker says it was over his flour sacks when he opened.”
The clerk asked which bakery and wrote it beside seventeen on the receiving sheet. He had spent the morning answering requests while the shelf looked emptier than his book said it should. A thing with a known number was a welcome fact.
Carla came in carrying two mugs and saw the bundle.
“Seventeen found the way home,” she said.
“The slip did.” The clerk showed her the damp corner. “If I put it back in stock, somebody gets a wet bed. If I don't, the count stays wrong.”
“Write returned. Then write wet.”
“That's two columns where I had one.”
“Then the book gets another column.” She handed him a mug. “It can bear the weight.”
He accepted the tea but not the answer. He opened the receiving sheet and showed her three pencil marks against blankets he had expected back and two requests awaiting whatever came next. His finger rested on the space where a borrower's name would once have been useful.
“I could go ask after these,” he said. “If I knew whom to ask.”
“You can ask whether a blanket has come in,” Carla said. “The baker answered that without a bed number.”
“And the other three?”
“We don't know.”
He looked at the two requests. “That's a hard answer to give someone cold.”
Carla did not tell him it wasn't.
Sada arrived before the tea cooled, a coat turned inside out over one arm. She came to ask whether there was another dry blanket for her daughter tonight. The one on their cot had been put under a leaking windowsill while they moved the bed. The wall was not going to be repaired before supper.
The clerk glanced at seventeen. Sada followed his eyes and set her coat down, away from the wet patch on the counter.
“That one?” she asked.
“Just back,” he said. “It has to dry.”
Sada pressed the corner between finger and thumb. “It also has to be washed. Flour isn't what made that mark.”
The clerk pulled it toward him and inspected the hem. She was right. He had wanted one arrival to answer one request; instead the arrival had given him two new jobs.
“Can you mend the edge?” he asked.
“When it's clean. I can tell you what it needs. I cannot sew the water out of it.”
Carla went to the shelf with Sada. They counted what was there, not what the book had hoped would be there. One dry blanket belonged with a cot being made up for an arrival expected after dark. Another was thin but sound. The clerk had kept it behind the heavier pile because he thought someone might complain at being offered it.
Sada unfolded it across her forearms. It was two lengths stitched together, with one stripe running sideways.
“My daughter can sleep under this,” she said. “She won't thank me for the stripe. That isn't your problem.”
“You can have the thicker one if the cot doesn't come,” the clerk said.
Carla looked up from the shelf. “The cot has a person attached to the promise.”
“I said if.”
“Then keep the if until we know.”
He took a breath through his nose. “I am trying to give her something better.”
“You have,” Sada said, holding the thin blanket. “And you're telling me what it is. That helps.” She touched a loose stitch. “I'll bring this edge back straight. Not tonight.”
At the counter, the clerk ruled a narrow line across his sheet. He entered 17 — returned; wash and dry before issue. Beneath it he wrote one dry, thin blanket issued, then stopped with his pencil above the space where he had once put a sleeping place.
“How do I get this one back?” he asked.
“The same way as seventeen,” Carla said. She took a blank return slip and wrote the new blanket's number and the desk's address. “Give the route to the blanket. Ask Sada what else she needs without printing it on the thing she carries.”
Sada read the slip before she let him pin it inside the fold. She asked how late the desk would be open if she came after a work shift. The clerk gave her the hour he could promise, not the hour he wished somebody would cover. He wrote that hour on a separate scrap for her. She kept the scrap in her pocket and the return slip with the blanket.
When she left, the porter took the empty bread cloth back toward the market. Seventeen still lay wet on the counter; the clerk moved it to a marked washing basket. Three expected blankets had not appeared. One request was still waiting. None of those facts improved because the route on a slip had worked once.
The clerk drew a second column, just wide enough for condition. Carla held the ruler while he did it. By the time they finished, the book said less about the people who had slept beneath the blankets and more about which blankets could be slept beneath tonight.
That was not the whole answer to the cold. It was an answer the desk could use.