Chapter 4

The afternoon moved like slow water. Priya rebuilt her station piece by piece — the vendor with the calloused hands helped her straighten the wooden frame, Kieran found a roll of duct tape in the booth's storage bin and wrapped the split corners, and someone from the threading booth brought over a spare stool with a crooked leg that he'd been planning to throw out. By three o'clock the station looked almost the way it had that morning, except for the fresh layer of dust and the faint smell of varnish from the newly taped joints.

Priya tested the counter with her palm. It held.

She had just finished arranging the tins in a neat row — Brasso, saddle soap, black polish, neutral polish, a small tin of leather conditioner she'd bought from a supplier in Tucson — when the first vendor came by with a pair of boots.

It was the grey-bearded saddle-maker. He set his boots on the counter without being asked, and Priya looked up at him with the wary stillness of someone who had learned not to trust kindness without a price.

"I was going to get these polished anyway," he said. "I was just waiting for the circus to clear out."

Priya looked at the boots. They were good boots, scuffed and worn in a way that said they'd seen real use, and she took them down to the floor, set them on the footstand, and reached for a fresh cloth from her kit.

The first polish Tin she touched brought a faint memory of the morning: the booth client, a stocky man in a denim jacket who hadn't said much, who had sat on the stool and let her work his boots until they gleamed under the same rigging light. He'd paid her in cash and left a two-dollar tip, and she'd used the new cloth — the special order her father had brought from the supplier — to finish the shine.

She hadn't thought about it then. Now she did.

The saddle-maker's boots took her twenty minutes. When she finished, she sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her apron, and he picked up one boot and held it into the light without saying anything. The gleam was so deep it looked wet.