On July 6, the trouble was a phrase short enough to fit across two ruled lines. I had heard it during an authorized session and believed I understood it. When I looked down to write, however, two possible versions presented themselves with equal confidence. One seemed to promise something; the other seemed to make that promise conditional. They could not both go on the page.
The room was quiet except for the ordinary handling of papers. I had my glasses low on my nose and a pencil sharpened to a point fit for marking fabric. I wrote the words before the doubtful portion, then stopped. The blank looked like a failure waiting for someone to discover it.
In upholstery, I could sometimes tell from the line of old tack holes how a missing section had been made. Experience supplied what time had taken away. I reached for that habit now and felt its danger. A sentence was not a chair back. What sounded right to me was not necessarily what another person had said.
I put a light bracket around the space. Then I erased the bracket because it looked like punctuation belonging to the call. My eraser left a gray smear. I became absurdly aware of how old my hand looked against the clean paper.
Amos was working nearby on his own assigned material. At the break he saw me flexing my fingers and asked whether I was stuck.
"A little," I said.
"Was it the part about—"
"Don't tell me." My voice came out sharper than I intended. He drew back. "I'm sorry. I haven't explained. I can't remember a phrase well enough. If you give me yours, I won't know whether I heard it or borrowed it."
He put his cup down. "I wasn't trying to do your work."
"I know. I was about to ask you to."
That earned a reluctant smile. We stood with the small awkwardness between us until the break ended. I wanted to repair it by talking about something easy, but the supervisor was available and I knew delay would let me talk myself into a guess. I carried the page over with the blank plainly visible.
"I need this portion checked against the recording," I said. "I can give you the words I'm sure of. I can't stand behind what belongs here."
The supervisor asked me to identify the place and explain the uncertainty. I did so without supplying either version as though it were the answer. Then I asked the foolish question I had been trying not to ask.
"Does that make the whole item useless?"
"An uncertainty we can see can be checked," the supervisor said. "A guess written as certainty is a different problem."
I nodded too quickly, as though I had known that all along. The supervisor gave me direction for leaving the portion unfilled pending a check. There was no ceremony, no assurance that my honesty would lead to an arrest, no invitation to regard this one page as a turning point. I returned to my seat with a small task still incomplete.
The temptation did not vanish. As I worked on the remaining portion, one version of the phrase began to sound familiar again. I made myself leave it alone. Familiarity could come from repetition in my own head. I knew that much from the old prize promises, whose language had grown more convincing each time I rehearsed it while waiting for the mail.
At the end of the session, I handed over only what I had been authorized to prepare. I did not copy the page into my own notebook or keep a phrase as a souvenir. My contribution was that limited item, including its visible limit. The rest belonged with the people responsible for checking it.
Amos waited near the exit. "I suppose we both want to be good at this," he said.
"I wanted to be good before anybody had to teach me."
"That sounds tiring."
I laughed then, because it was. We walked out without discussing the call. He told me about a cupboard door he could not get square, and I said old hinges could fool a person. Advice about a cupboard was safe enough to offer.
At home I found a torn cuff in my mending basket. I threaded a needle and examined it before making the first stitch. Nobody was watching. Nobody would know if I hurried. I still took the time to see where sound fabric began. The blank space from that afternoon remained uncomfortable, but it no longer looked to me like proof that I should never have come.