Three hundred. On the third take she made it sound like less.
The engineer played it through the small speaker above the door. The voice fitted the room better than she did. She had taken off her shoes. One stocking had a hole under the heel.
"That's the one."
Two words, paid on acceptance. She had brought the contract in an envelope that also held her father's retention slips. Two hundred and thirty-nine, at the last asking. Her mother had sat at the bank for nine years to get him there.
The new board would require sixty more than the old. The resolution was already printed. If she went home now, another woman would read it. Or they would put it together from words she had recorded last spring.
"Can you put the fee against his account?"
The engineer looked at the slips. "For another hearing?"
"For the words."
"I can pay you for these two."
She put the slips back. The money would buy her mother a month without borrowing from the grocery tin. It would not take her father across.
Outside the booth, a cart passed with a loose wheel. The engineer waited for it. Then he asked her to read again, with a little more warmth on hundred.
She had once read books in this room. At the end of a chapter she used to hold her breath while her mother turned the page on the other side of the glass. Her mother had followed with one finger, although she knew the stories. Afterward they bought a pastry to share on the stairs.
The engineer opened a row of breaths on the screen. Each little strip had a number. One from before a song. One from a speech. One so close it made her put a hand to her collar.
"For the joins," he said.
He played the announcement with a breath she had not taken. The number came out kindly, as if somebody had found her a chair.
"Use mine."
"Yours catches."
"I know."
He returned to the first take. She heard the air fail between three and hundred. She had been thinking of her mother putting another dawn in the flask.
The engineer cut the breath out. Without it, she sounded as though she owed nothing.
"Put it back."
He did. A small dark shape between two larger ones.
He gave her headphones. She listened once more. The catch was there. She signed for the two accepted words. Beneath them, a line covering the material recorded during the session. She read that too. Signed it. Asked for the first take.
The copy cost half her fee. He showed her the tariff, not apologetically. She paid. He offered to send the whole session for the same charge.
"Just that one."
She listened to it on the bus. The fare, then the catch, then her asking to begin again. No. She moved it back. The catch came before hundred. She had already begun remembering it wrong.
On the year’s first morning she went down to the bank. Her mother had brought both stools. She held the flask between her knees. Across the water her father stood where he stood every morning, learning what he had once used without thinking.
The loudspeaker clicked.
She heard her two words. Then her breath.
The engineer had moved it to the end. Now it sounded like relief.
Her mother looked up. The new figure shone on the board. She laid the laminated list across her knees and put a finger beside the next word.
"Was that you?"
She took out the phone. She had paid for the first take. She could let her mother hear where the breath belonged.
Across the channel the dead were waiting for the living to begin.
She put the phone face down on the stool. There was still enough in her envelope for the bread. She put that in her mother's coat pocket.
Her mother kept her finger on the word.
She drew breath. It caught without any help. Then she leaned toward the water and said it.