Sect Year 6 · fourth month · night of day 2 · the fifty-ninth life: the river port, her seventh year, and then her seventieth
Nim kept the paper face in a salt tin under her bed, folded once and wrapped in a rag so the river damp would not curl it. The painted cheeks were red. The eyebrows ran long toward the hairline, and when she lifted the lid at night the painted mouth seemed about to ask her something. She never answered it. She counted the coins in the tin instead, twice, as her mother had taught her, and put the lid down again.
The troupe left on the morning tide. Nim stood on the landing with her apron pocket full of copper and watched the painted barge slide out past the reed beds. The mummer in the patched blue coat stood at the stern with his back to the town. He had given her the face to hold, and then he hadn’t asked for it back. That was the whole of the goodbye.
“Where have they gone?” she asked that evening, on the step above the fish lane. Meanwhile, the gulls fought over the cleaning tubs.
“Downriver. Or up. It doesn’t matter.” Her mother was mending a net with a bone needle, pulling each knot tight with her teeth. “A troupe takes a new name at every landing. They don’t carry the old one. It gets too heavy.”
