My father kept two books. The first was the ledger in which he recorded every coin that passed through the shop: the price of flour, the cost of the new awning, the debts that customers swore they would settle by Friday. He wrote in it every evening, in a small, upright hand, and he never let anyone else touch it.
The second book I did not discover until after he died. It was a cheap school exercise book, its cover soft with handling, hidden at the back of the shed behind the seed trays. Inside, in the same upright hand, he had recorded something quite different: the date the first snowdrop appeared each year; the night a fox had dug up the tulips; the morning, in 1987, when "M. laughed at the robin on the spade and said it was the bravest bird in England." M. was my mother. I had never heard my father mention her laugh.
For forty years, it seemed, he had been keeping accounts of another kind – of small, unprofitable things that added up to a life. The shop ledger balanced to the penny. The garden book did not balance at all. There were gaps of months, sometimes years. In 1993, the year my mother died, there is only one entry: "Rain."
I used to think my father was a man who cared only for what could be counted. I sat in that cold shed until the light went, reading his small, careful sentences, and understood that I had been reading the wrong book.
