The Night Market Umbrella

The umbrella was green, with one bent rib, and it had been leaning in the corner of my grandmother’s hallway for as long as I could remember.

“It isn’t ours,” she said whenever anyone reached for it. “It belongs to the man who sells roasted chestnuts.”

The chestnut man had not sold chestnuts for decades. But when she died, I found a note tied to the handle with an address on it, and so one rainy Thursday I carried it across the city to a small flat above a bicycle shop.

He opened the door, looked at the umbrella, and laughed until he had to sit down. “She said she’d bring it back next week,” he told me. “That was 1986.”

He made tea. I stayed until the rain stopped. When I left, he pressed the umbrella back into my hands.

“Next week,” he said.