Who notices the people whose job is to notice everyone else?
The Woman Who Bought Postcards
Ioana bought a postcard every Sunday. She had done it since September, always the same one, the view of Speranza’s clock tower in the snow, though it had not yet snowed and probably would not until January. She paid, said “Mulțumesc” and then “Grazie” quickly, as though the first word had escaped by accident, and left.
Moira Hopes had noticed three things about her. That she was perhaps forty-five, with strong hands and a dark plait wound tightly at the back of her head. That she always came at exactly two o’clock on a Sunday, which was her afternoon off. And that she never wrote anything on the postcards before she left the shop, and never, as far as Moira could tell, posted them.
On the first Sunday of December, it was raining hard, and Ioana came in at two o’clock and stood by the postcard rack and did not choose one. She simply stood there, dripping, looking at the clock tower in the snow.
Toe, the slender grey cat with the immaculate white paws, slid down from the windowsill, crossed the floor without a sound, and sat on Ioana’s left foot.
Ioana looked down. “Oh,” she said, in Romanian, and then, in Italian, “she is sitting on me.”
“She does that to people she has decided about,” said Moira. “Would you like a cup of tea? It’s terrible weather for postcards.”
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