The old man came just before rain.
The maker knew this because the swallows had gone low over the square, and because the Green Sea had turned its silver side toward the town. The grass did that sometimes when weather was thinking about itself.
The old man stood in the workshop doorway with his hat in both hands.
“I brought the song,” he said.
The maker looked up from a small brass hinge he had been trying to understand. “The one with the missing last line?”
The old man nodded.
He had brought it once before, early in the summer. Back then he had only described it: a song his mother used to sing while she shelled peas by the window. He could remember the beginning. The long middle, too. But at the end, where the song was meant to come gently to rest, there was only a space. He had been trying to find the line for years.
“I thought perhaps it would return if I sang it somewhere different,” he said.
“Did it?”
“No.”
The maker waited.
“But something else happened.” The old man looked down at his hat. “I began to hear the space more clearly.”
Outside, a drop of rain tapped the blue roof. Then another.
“Would you sing it for me?” the maker asked.
The old man gave a small, uncertain laugh. “Here?”
“Here is as good a place as any.”
So the old man stood beside the worktable, rain moving softly over the windows, and began.
His voice was not large. It had the worn, warm sound of a cupboard door that had been opened in the same house for many years. The song was simple: a little tune about summer beans and crooked rows in a garden, about a blue bowl on a sill. It made room for pauses. It did not hurry itself.
The maker listened.
When the old man reached the end, he stopped.
The last note waited in the workshop between them.
Not vanished. Not broken. Waiting.
The maker had been expecting a blank. But this was not blank at all. It was full of things: the sound of rain on the roof, the brass hinge cooling on the table, the low scrape of the girl’s stool as she pulled it closer to the window.
Neither man had noticed her come in.
She had her black book under one arm and the yellow notebook in her hand. She sat down without speaking, as she usually did on Tuesdays. Then she looked at the old man.
“Maybe it isn't a last line,” she said.
The old man blinked. “What else would it be?”
She thought for a moment.
“A place to put the weather.”
The maker looked at her.
The old man looked toward the window, where rain had begun to make bright little paths down the glass.
“My mother never sang it in the rain,” he said. “She sang it in the kitchen.”
“Then perhaps the rain did not know where to go,” said the girl.
This seemed, to the maker, like a very good thought. But the old man was quiet for so long that he began to worry he had said the wrong thing.
At last the old man smiled. Not broadly. More as if he had found something in a pocket he had forgotten was there.
“Would you mind,” he said, “if I tried again?”
The maker moved the brass hinge aside.
The old man sang the song once more.
This time, when he reached the end, he did not wait for a line to arrive. He let the note rest where it wanted to. The rain filled the space. The workshop held it. The girl, who had been writing something in her yellow notebook, closed it carefully.
For a while, nobody said anything.
Then the old man put on his hat.
“I don't think I found it,” he said.
“No,” said the maker.
The old man nodded. “But I think perhaps it found a place to be.”
The maker walked him to the door.
By then the rain had passed. Beyond the town, the Green Sea was darker where the clouds had touched it, but gold was beginning to gather again at the far edge. The old man stepped into the street and hummed the beginning of the song as he went.
He did not hum the end.
The maker watched until he turned the corner.
Behind him, the girl opened her yellow notebook and wrote one more thing. He did not ask what it was.
Outside, the grass moved in a breeze that had not been there a moment before.