Short story · 3 min read · Set in Garrick Street ·
The Change I Count Forward
A counter hand at a Garrick Street draper's builds tomorrow's change the night before, and the day arrives to meet it to the coin.
The cashiers at the draper's on Garrick Street count backward. You take the float at nine, you hand out of it all day, and at half past five you count what is left and wonder where the day went. I did that for my first fortnight and was always behind, ten of my fifty gone where nothing had been signed for it. Then I began counting forward, and the day began meeting me halfway, and after that not one coin in that shop was ever missing or found.
Miss Ottery the supervisor called it wasteful, counting money I hadn't earned. I called it earlier. Every night before the lamps went down I built the next day's stacks in the saucers under the till: copper in ones and twos, silver in tens, notes folded to their numbers. I built them out of what the counter receipts were doing, and by the middle of my first month I was building them for days I hadn't seen yet, and both kinds came out exact.
Not near enough. Exact. The ten-pences I rolled on the Tuesday were rolled back to me on the Wednesday. The copper I stacked was spent in exactly those coins, at the prices on the cards, to the last odd penny. Once I built a stack for a woman buying buttons, six of them, four odd, because odd buttons make odd money, and she came in at twenty to five, was short in her hand, was made even by the till, and was out of the shop in under a minute, never knowing a saucer had stood ready for her with her own change in it since the night before.
I timed the thing, because I wanted to be sure I was not merely good at my job. Stacks done at a quarter past six. The matches arrived at eleven the next morning. Nothing rang before the stacks were touched. It was as if the day had been given its money and would not begin to spend until then.
Then came the Thursday in the stocktaking weeks when one stack was a penny over. One penny. I checked it against the price board and against my own figures twice, and I left the penny in, out of some feeling I will not give a name to. That evening a man bought bootlaces at a price I had not yet written, and the price, when I chalked the card that night, was the penny up, exactly where my saucer had stood ready for him all day.
After that I kept the stacks the way you keep a place at a table, and nothing over happened again. Last Friday the opening float was short by thirty-seven pence, and under the counter, done the night before, were my stacks, thirty-seven pence to the penny of it, for a day that had not yet begun to spend. The other girls come out even at night too, catching up all day. Only mine is even before it happens, and theirs is even after, and even is even.
I have built tonight's stacks and locked them in the safe, and I have written down what they contain, which is the whole of the small change in that shop. If tomorrow opens already answered, who is it I have been making change for since I started?