During the afternoon lesson, a new apprentice came to the bench with a cracked kettle.
She came through the paid-repair gate, not the green door, which meant she had come to have something fixed and not to learn. A young woman, perhaps sixteen, in a shelter kitchen’s apron. She carried the kettle in both arms. A big one: an iron kettle the size of a bucket, the kind the shelter kitchens used for boiling water for forty people at once, black with soot, with a heavy lid on a hinge.
She set it on the common bench in front of Mara.
It landed heavily. Its lid rattled on the broken hinge. The two students at the bench’s far end looked up from their gauges, and Irit, who was teaching them, looked up too and then, deliberately, looked back down and went on.
“Can it be fixed?” the young woman said.
Mara turned the kettle toward the light.
The crack ran down the kettle’s side from the rim to just above its base. Hairline, mostly. Wider near the top, where the lid’s hinge was riveted on. The hinge itself was bent. The lid did not sit straight.
The apprentice was watching her. Her hands were on the bench’s edge, either side of the kettle, very steady. Her voice, when she spoke again, was not.
