Counting Forks for Thursday

For the record, one fork was gone. The heavy dinner fork from the Bracken Hall service tray, the one with the ridge at the neck that made it easy to count by touch when the linen room was full and Felix was talking about donor goodwill as if it lived in a spreadsheet. The tray gave a small ugly click where the slot stayed empty, and that sound slid straight under Imogen's ribs and stayed there like a tenant who had no intention of paying. She set the tray down, lifted the forks one by one, and made the row look tidy from the door. From the hall side, tidy meant safe. Inside the linen room, it meant someone would ask questions later. The silver gave off lemon polish and old pennies, and the linen edge scratched her thumb when she smoothed it flat, but she did not stop. She kept the count moving as if it were a prayer she had already learned by heart.

There were three forks on the towel in front of her, and they did not belong together. One dinner fork, one salad fork with a bent tine, one dessert fork that had been polished until it had the temper of a church spoon. Mismatched things always turned up at Bracken Hall as if the building had a private joke with the cutlery drawer. Imogen straightened the towel edge with the side of her hand, then slid the dessert fork into the place set for the missing dinner fork. Better to be wrong in a neat way than wrong in a visible way. Felix, if he came in now, would ask why she had not sorted the problem sooner. Felix asked that sort of thing with the calm of a man dropping plates and blaming gravity.

Her left shoulder had begun its slow climb. Good. A sign of work. She rolled it once, then went back to the count, because numbers behaved better when they were handled early and in silence. Twenty-four place settings. Twenty-four chairs. Twenty-four menus with the navy ribbon corner that Jace called absurd and she called professional. Twenty-four, and one extra dessert fork sitting at the top of the stack as if it had turned up by mistake and refused to leave.

Felix appeared in the doorway with his budget face on, one eyelid lower than the other as if the room had filed a complaint. 'Numbers,' he said. 'I need numbers, not drama.' He had a tie the colour of wet onion skin and a pen clipped to it, because some men trusted fabric more than pockets. Imogen gave him the room count, the table count, the chair count, and left out the fork that had vanished. He nodded as if the omission had been a gift.

'We have twenty-four covers,' she said. 'Twenty-four and a spare fork nobody has claimed.'
'At the moment.'
He made a note. That tiny scratch of his pen on paper carried more threat than a shout.

Jace came in pushing the service cart with one boot, because his right wrist had taken a hard knock three summers back and still clicked when crates got too heavy. The cart's wheel sang over the tile. Sticky wheels. Great. Another romance subplot for the maintenance budget. He set two stacks of napkins on the counter and grinned at Imogen with the grin he used when he intended to make trouble look like help.

'You have that face,' he said.
'What face?'
'The one that says somebody will die for a missing spoon.'

'Fork,' she said.
'Of course. More elegant.'
Felix pinched the bridge of his nose. 'Could we save the family theatre for after the donors sit down?'

Imogen took a fresh place card off the stack and corrected the angle of the inked H before it had a chance to tilt. Jace, who had the bad habit of draping napkins as if he were dressing a saddle, reached for the linen fold on Table Six. 'No,' she said, before he could touch it. 'That fold sits the other way.'
He held up both hands. 'Right. The hall's fragile ecosystem.'
'Try again,' she said.
He did not move, which made the correction public and therefore useful only in the sense that a bruise is useful to a boxer.