Ejercicios de comprensión lectora: el último día en la tienda

By the time I returned to Wren Street, the word REPAIRS had faded from my father's shop window, leaving WATCHES to make a promise the empty shelves could no longer keep. My sister had asked me to bring boxes. I brought three, all too large, and a packet of biscuits neither of us opened. Through the glass I could see her wrapping the brass desk lamp in yesterday's newspaper with the efficient tenderness she reserved for objects that might break.

"The agent comes at four," she said when I entered. She did not ask about the journey. I did not mention that I had walked past the shop twice before finding the courage to turn the handle. We had become accomplished at leaving each other convenient spaces in which nothing needed to be explained. On the counter lay our father's brown notebook, swollen with slips of paper. My sister moved it aside to make room for a box.

The clocks had stopped at different hours. One offered twenty past six with complete confidence; another held its hands at twelve, as if waiting for instructions. When we were children, I had believed their disagreement was something my father would eventually resolve. Later, I understood that a repair shop was a place where broken time waited its turn. Now, without the overlapping ticks, I could hear a delivery van reversing in the street and water travelling down the pipe behind the wall.

My sister handed me a small wooden clock with a pale crescent on its face. "No collection slip," she said. "Do you know whose it is?" I recognised the crescent before I recognised the clock. As a boy, I had left it on the garden wall during a storm and tried to polish away the stain before my father noticed. He had said only that some marks became worse through being rubbed. I had remembered the sentence for years, usually at moments when remembering it was of little practical use.

"It was ours," I said. The word felt presumptuous. My sister had spent the last winter bringing meals to the flat above the shop while I sent messages asking whether anything was needed. She turned the clock over, examining its loose back. "Then you can take it." There was no sharpness in her voice, which made it impossible to defend myself against anything she had actually said. I put the clock down beside the unopened biscuits.

Inside the notebook, most entries were brief: a surname, a fault, a sum. Beside one recent date, however, my father had written, "Window clock. Still losing. Leave for now." I had expected the notebook to contain a final instruction, although I would have denied expecting anything so theatrical. Instead, it offered permission for an unfinished task. My sister watched me read. "He stopped winding that one in February," she said. "He liked being able to hear the rain."

At ten minutes to four, we had filled two boxes and achieved almost nothing that could have appeared on my sister's list. I asked if she wanted me to stay for the agent. She glanced at my coat, still buttoned, and then at the chair behind the counter. "You could make some tea." It was an instruction small enough to obey. In the kitchen upstairs, I found two cups drying beside the sink and a third turned upside down on the shelf. I took down only two.

When I returned, my sister had put the wooden clock into my smallest box, cushioning it with a folded cloth. She was trying to open the biscuits without tearing the paper. I unbuttoned my coat and sat behind the counter while the kettle's noise faded through the ceiling. Nothing in the shop began to tick. Outside, the rain had started so lightly that, for a while, it could have been mistaken for someone brushing dust from the window.