Grandma had a rule about the hens, and she never bent it. Whoever collected the eggs carried the basket, and whoever carried the basket walked at the pace of the eggs. Leo had heard that rule from the kitchen doorway for years, watching Grandma set off down the garden path alone.
Tonight the basket slid across the table instead. It was small and wicker, worn pale at the handle, lined with a soft nest of straw. "Eight, I should think. Maybe nine," Grandma said, buttoning her cardigan. "Take your time. I'll get the kettle going." She did not say you're old enough now, but it was in the way she let go of the handle, and Leo held the basket very carefully, the way you hold something you have been waiting to be handed.
The evening was that soft blue that comes before the lights go on. Leo went down the path past the old water butt beside the gooseberry bush, with its lid of dark rainwater and one leaf turning slowly on the top like the hand of a clock with nowhere to be. Past the runner beans. Through the coop gate with its loop of blue string.
Inside the henhouse it was warm and dim and smelled of straw and dust and feathers. The hens were going up to roost, shuffling along their perch, making those low burbling sounds that mean nearly asleep. And there in the nesting boxes were the eggs: brown, freckled, one nearly white, each one still holding the heat of the hen that left it.
Leo reached in fast, because it was thrilling, because the basket was already there and the job was already going well. One egg. Two. On the third, his fingers were quicker than his care, and the shell met the rim of the basket with a small dry sound. Tick. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a thin crack curving across the freckled brown like a line on a map, and a bead of clear white beginning to seep.
Leo stood completely still. The hens burbled on. In his head was Grandma's face at the kitchen window — not cross, which would have been easier, but a little disappointed, which was worse. There was straw everywhere. It would be so easy to push one cracked egg under it and say eight instead of nine.
Instead Leo set the cracked egg down in the corner of the straw, on its own, and wiped one sticky finger on his jeans, and started again — properly this time. Both hands. Cup, don't grab. Slide the fingers underneath, thumb resting on top so lightly it was barely resting at all, then lower it into the straw and let go without dropping. Nobody was watching. That was the strange part. Nobody would ever have known which eggs had been rushed. Leo did them slowly anyway, because an egg cannot get out of the way of a careless hand, and there was nothing between it and the world except the person carrying it.
The last one was under a speckled hen who did not want to move. Leo slipped a hand beneath her warm feathers, felt the smooth curve, and drew it out while she grumbled like an old kettle. Eight whole eggs, nested in a ring. One cracked one, held separately in his palm.
The walk back was much slower than the walk out. Leo carried the basket in both arms, and every step said pace of the eggs, pace of the eggs. Past the runner beans. Past the water butt, where the leaf had drifted right across to the other side, still going nowhere in particular. The kitchen window was gold now, and the door was open, and Grandma was there with two mugs and no questions.
"I cracked one," Leo said, holding it up. "At the start. Before I worked out how."
Grandma looked at the eight in the straw, and then at the way the basket was being held. "That'll be pancakes tomorrow," she said, taking the cracked one. "Waste of nothing. And these came home whole because of you."
So the basket went by the stove, where the wicker went honey-coloured in the heat and the straw smelled faintly of summer. Leo curled in the armchair beside it with a mug going cool and eyelids going heavy, and outside the last hen finished her grumbling, and the coop went quiet, and the garden went quiet, and so, at last, did Leo.