I understand now, and the understanding is a cold thing to carry.

The chip was a mark.

It was how he knew which plate was which — which one to set in front of me, which flaw to keep track of in the small theater he had built — and turning it away from me was not fussiness at all but the opposite, a man making certain the right plate had gone to the right person.

A chip on a cheap blue plate had become, in my own kitchen, a piece of a plan, and I had thanked him, more or less, for choosing it.