Hers to Decide

The girl had left her book open on the table, and Nyra saw it while passing with the watering can. One line near the foot of the page named the wrong day for the first frost. Nyra knew the true day, for she had written it in her own pages that same cold morning. The girl had set it down from memory, and memory had slipped.

Her hand went to the pen before she thought. It would take only a moment to strike the wrong day and set the right one beside it. But she stopped. The book was not hers. It was the book the girl kept, in the hand the girl was still learning, and a keeper learns nothing from a line mended while she sleeps.

So Nyra did a smaller thing. In the outer edge beside the line, she set the plain sign the two of them used for look again, a short stroke and a dot. It said nothing about what was wrong. It only pointed, the way a finger points at a shape in the field and leaves the naming to the one who looks.

She closed the covers and laid the book back exactly where it had lain, square to the edge of the table, so the girl would not guess that any eye had passed over it. The sign would wait. When the girl next read her own record, she would meet the small mark and go looking, and the finding would be hers.

Nyra thought of it later, drying the pen. Her own pages she could mend as she pleased, cross a line, carry a fact forward, weigh one season against the next. But the book the girl kept asked for a lighter touch. There she could point, and wait, and trust the young hand to do the rest. A record grows truest when the one who keeps it is the one who sets it right.