The chair arrived upside down in a bread cart, its feet pointing over the loaves.
Trey said it was a donation. The baker said it was a deposit. The man carrying it said the baker had told him donation, which was why he had agreed to carry it downhill.
Olga put it beside the kitchen wall. Harlan sat down before anyone could improve the offer.
“Comfortable?” she asked.
“Compared with this conversation.”
Under the seat, six labels overlapped. The uppermost read PROPERTY OF THE CIVIC SEATING INITIATIVE. Beneath it was a chapel inventory number, a boarding-house rate, a shipping address, and something advertising a winter music program. The sixth was a child's name written directly on the wood.
Carla brought the labels to the afternoon meeting by bringing the chair. Harlan declined to leave it. They compromised by bringing Harlan.
The west-ward delegate wanted to know whether accepting the chair would expose the Commons to a claim.
“Only if somebody stands up,” Harlan said.
Jilly-Quill asked the baker what the deposit had secured.
“Bread for the boarding house.”
“Did they pay?”
“Eventually.”
“Then why did you keep it?”
“Nobody fetched it.”
Carla sent a runner. The boarding-house keeper arrived with a beautifully preserved receipt for eighteen chairs and explained that this could be any of them. He had lost fourteen. He was prepared to accept this one as a start.
Sada knelt beside Harlan and examined the torn seat. She had come to measure it for a cushion, not to watch furniture acquire a legal defense.
“The weaving's new,” she said.
“My chairs were well maintained,” said the keeper.
“It's packing cord from the mill. Last month's red thread.”
The man who had carried it raised a hand. He had rewoven the seat. Also replaced a leg. He pointed out which one, and everybody leaned down as though the leg might testify.
“While it was at the bakery?” Carla asked.
“Yes.”
“Did somebody pay you?”
The baker became interested in a notice across the yard.
Sada touched the loose joint where the repaired leg met the frame. Harlan shifted his weight onto the other three.
Abegale came to collect a delivery signature and was given the chair problem instead. She read the boarding-house receipt, then the bakery account.
“You sold the bread debt,” she told the baker.
“I sold several.”
“This one went with its security.”
The boarding-house keeper looked pleased until she explained that payment on his receipt covered the room account, not the kitchen account, which had been transferred separately. The chair apparently belonged to someone whose last forwarding address was a prayer pavilion that had become a shoe stall.
“What does the child get?” Harlan asked.
Everyone looked under the seat again.
No one knew the name. It might have been an owner, a maker, a person marking where to sit. It had been pressed into the wood with enough effort to survive five organizations and a baker.
Jilly-Quill began proposing a temporary holding arrangement. Halfway through, he heard how much it sounded like the people who had kept Sada's bundle. He stopped.
“I'm not lending it to the committee,” Harlan said. “I'm sitting in it. There can be a difference.”
They moved him out of the doorway so supper could begin. Sada finished taking the measurement. The repairer tightened the joint while Harlan held his bowl. Olga paid the repairer in a meal and put the amount beside the chair in the day's purchases. The baker objected that this might complicate the account.
“It was going so well,” she said.
Carla hung a new card from the back: HERE NOW. ASK BEFORE MOVING. She left space beneath it for the child's name and for anyone who could say who that child had been.
Harlan read the card over his shoulder.
“Put the notice lower.”
“Why?”
“It's scratching my neck.”
Object location: kitchen wall. Chair occupied intermittently. Claims heard after lunch.