Lipstick tube and red script on finger

Rain on the Saturday market again, the sort that finds the gap between your collar and your neck and stays there. Mr Okafor's awning has a hole over the bric-a-brac, so I've dragged my trestle under the fishmonger's canopy, which smells of brine and is, I'm told, the price of a kind neighbour. I sold four lipsticks before ten, all plums and one cherry that nobody wanted until a girl from the cheap jewellery stall asked what it was called. I said Tuesday Red, because that's what Gran wrote on the shoebox lid when she gave me the tubes. The girl laughed and said it sounded like a bus route.

At eleven a man came up the aisle with a wet spaniel and stopped dead at the box. He picked out the cherry tube with its chipped black cap, turned it over twice, and asked whose it was. I told him it was ours, which is true enough. He said his mother used that exact red on the parish notices, that she'd write the Sunday hymn numbers in it on the kitchen calendar, and that she'd died in March with the shade still on her mouth at the undertaker's. He didn't cry. He just stood there with the rain running off his hood and the dog shaking itself against my table.

I gave him the tube for nothing. He tried to pay me in coppers and I wouldn't take them, which I suspect is the first sensible thing I've done this year. He held it up to the grey light, twisted the bottom up a notch, and drew one neat line along the back of his hand, like a man signing for a parcel.

The awning stopped dripping around one. I'm writing this on the back of an invoice while the spaniel sleeps across my feet. Come up on the train next Saturday if the weather behaves. I'll keep the shoebox out.

Love, Pip