November 1, 2007
I sent Leah the final proofs on Thursday morning. By lunch she had called about the birds.
“Why does that one say Ruth?”
I opened the file. Under the small unsigned design I had written: Attributed to Ruth Bell, probably late nineteen-eighties.
“It looks like her work,” I said.
There was a silence in which I heard my own voice from the other side of several conversations.
“Did she say it was hers?” Leah asked.
“No.”
“Then who attributed it?”
I rubbed my forehead. “I did.”
After all the trouble I had taken, I had made another confident-looking label from a feeling. I wanted Ruth to have something else in the display. I wanted the uncertain pile to become smaller. I wanted a balanced arrangement: Dad, Leah, Ruth, me, everyone finally in the right place.
The paper had not promised me a balanced arrangement.
“I'll change it.”
“You don't have to take the picture out. Just say what you know.”
“Found among the shop papers. Designer unidentified.”
“That's what you know?”
“Yes.”
“Then that's enough.”
I deleted the guessed date too. The design might have been older than I remembered, or something a customer had brought in. Without a job record, I could not even be sure it had been printed at our shop. We could say where we had found it and no more.
For a minute I wondered whether that made the whole display unreliable. If one attractive label had slipped through after all my care, what else had I polished into certainty?
I went through the file again, this time with the inventory beside it. Leah's drawing had her confirmation and her original. Ruth had identified the border and approved the wording. The photograph showed the room Peter had photographed last week. The corrected introduction described what we had done, not what we wished everyone would think of it.
Different pieces rested on different kinds of knowledge. I did not have to pretend they were all equally certain, or throw them all away because one was not.
That afternoon Peter came to my apartment carrying the final equipment list. He stood in the doorway, surprised by how neatly the boxes were arranged.
“I thought you were going to drown in them.”
“There's still time.”
He sat at the folded-down sewing table and read the introduction. I had changed the heading to Work We Made Here.
“Dad founded the shop,” he said.
“It's in the first line.”
“I see that.”
He read to the end, then started again. I could tell he was looking for the version of our father he feared I had removed: the man who came back after supper to finish a customer's job, who lent tools and remembered anniversaries, who sometimes did lovely work of his own.
“We can keep the photograph of him at the press,” I said. “It tells the truth.”
Peter nodded.
“The old heading didn't.”
“I know,” he said, quietly enough that I did not ask him to repeat it.
We checked every name together. Peter caught a transposed digit in the equipment collection time. I corrected it before he could apologize for being fussy. Leah's loan conditions were written at the bottom of the schedule: collect November eighth, display November tenth through sixteenth, return November seventeenth.
Peter signed beside his tasks. I signed beside mine. Then I sent the revised birds label to Leah and Ruth, telling them exactly what I had changed.
The printer received the final file that evening. There was no grand feeling of certainty when I pressed send. There was a list of things checked, a few things honestly unknown, and two people who knew they were allowed to tell me I had made a mistake.
It seemed a better foundation than confidence.